The route for a large weekend bike ride highlighting climate change was in jeopardy after recent storms flooded the connection between the Rillito and Santa Cruz River paths.
This week, however, crews have cleared the debris and repaved the path under the train tracks and Interstate 10. Check out the photos below to see what it looks like.
Connect 2 Tucson ride organizers had planned an alternate route if the path wasn’t reopened prior to the event on Saturday morning.
The main ride starts at 7 a.m. and consists of a 22-mile loop starting and ending at Drachman Plaza on the campus of the University of Arizona. Check out the event for all the details.
Additionally, organizers have created a shorter 6-mile option that leaves at 7:45 from Drachman Plaza. A friend and I are organizing a Tucson Cargo Bike group ride to participate in the shorter option. We are hoping to get as many cargo bikes together as possible.
Hopefully we’ll be able to stick around at the plaza for awhile to show off our cargo bikes, answer questions and let people get a sense about what cargo bikes can do.
Here are a few more photos from the newly paved connection.
Nice job on removing the debris, but what about that #$%&-ing graffiti? It’s still there.
IMHO, the people who do this stuff should have the book thrown at them. This town is way too soft on taggers, vandals, and litter-tossers. And, as a result, Tucson looks like a pigpen.
Mike, Brian inspected my trike and pronounced in his most authorative voice that it meets the definitin of a cargo bike! With that said, I’d love to ride with you guys Saturday but I don’t want to do the sissy route, I’m going all the way. Plus I’ll have my wife on her trike trained together as well. Of course, Emma (the wonder dog) will be along too. I hope you have your new bakfiets running by then. Have fun.
I humbly disagree with you on the graffiti. I personally like it, especially when its a cool piece. I would rather have some mediocre graffiti than a plane white wall, especially when its not a ‘nice’ wall. Tagging on the other hand is pretty lame, and many times I cant even read it. Although to get good at graffiti you need to start somewhere, generally tagging. Gang tagging is the worst though, never looks good. Littering and vandalism could use a crackdown, I HATE litter.
I contend that the two walls shown in the above photos are not examples of cool pieces. And I stand by my previous statement about the perps having the book thrown at them.
Law enforcement agencies (TPD, PCSO) are afraid of these areas in the dead of night. That’s the game, the whole point.
I’m with both sides on the graffiti thing. If it’s just typography or scribble it should go. Do that on your school notebook, but if it’s cool and artsy it can stay.
Frank, I have to say that I like some grafitti too. What bugs me is that “good” grafitti gets tagged and ruined. Also, the artists aren’t always very accomplished as you pointed out. In a perfect world all grafitti artists would put up great work and no taggers would ever touch it. I’d go for that. Hey, are you going on the ride Saturday?
The connection under I-10 to the Rillito was completed last week. The pavement was perfect last Sunday. There was a bunch of sand on the Santa Cruz section Nice to know that’s been cleaned up.
Graffiti is a property crime. People who tag aren’t tagging their own walls. All you have to do is walk own any street in Tucson to see the heavily defaced recycling bins and trash cans to know that. Spray paint is toxic. It might well be art and there was a terrific light blue piece on the railroad trestle at the junction of the 2 paths but it’s not the tagger’s trestle and the line that gets drawn does not keep tags on railroad trestles only. It’s all fun and games until somebody tags something you cared about.
Yeah, the alternate route is short and sweet—not fancy, but family friendly and it goes to the welcome station at Casa de los Niños Thrift Store, where you can thank Maureen for hosting, hang out for a bit, and maybe bring more riders back to the rally. If anyone wants to deck out those cargo bikes with 350 logos, check out moving-planet.org for graphics and ideas. Yes, I’m one of the Connect 2 Tucson organizers. I’d like to have devised a more elaborate short route, but our team has had its hands full planning the post-ride events; I hope folks will stick around for the fun and let the politicos in attendance know that we are using our bikey infrastructure and we need more and better! Anyone care to hazard a guess at how many riders will be out there on Saturday?
600 is my guess.
Here’s a different approach to graffiti (no bikey content) http://jschaferdesigns.com/infodesign/project2.html