A new group for all things bicycling has sprouted up in Riverside.
Ride Riverside got its start in April, when founders Valerie Kramer and Matt Schalles hosted the group’s first monthly slow roll bicycle ride. At 6 p.m. on the second Friday of the month, Kramer, Schalles and any interested riders meet up at the Riverside train station to take the scenic route together through the village.
Kramer said that while the group’s first outing drew fewer than 40 people, its May ride Friday evening drew 85 people — in part due to some bike-powered live music in honor of National Bike Month. For about half an hour before the slow roll, Schalles and local musicians Jon Dombro and Wally Pochron played music like normal, but their amplifiers only worked as long as volunteers from the crowd pedaled on a stationary bike generator owned by Schalles.
“I was pleasantly surprised to learn that one rider could power enough to be heard over the trains,” Schalles said in an interview Monday. “I was half-expecting the train to come by, it’s going to sound like a drum solo.”
Humble beginnings
The group, which is looking for volunteers to join its ranks, got its start when Kramer and Schalles met as members of Riverside’s Cross-Community Climate Collaborative Team and realized their shared interest in biking. In January, they both went to the annual meeting of Cycle Brookfield, a nonprofit advocacy group in Brookfield working to promote more and safer biking.
“I was so inspired. At the end of the meeting, I talked to Chris Valadez, who’s the leader, and I said, ‘Is there any way that you could somehow incorporate Riverside into your group?’” Kramer said. “And he said, ‘Well, I can help you start your own group.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, well, I guess no one else is doing this.’”
When she reached out to the village to make sure Ride Riverside could host monthly rides, Kramer said Riverside staff initially thought she and Schalles were proposing a race that would close down village streets.
“I think they didn’t initially understand that it wasn’t a bike race. It was a community get-together,” she said. “That makes me think that there’s probably no one that, if it ever did exist, I don’t think there’s anyone who remembers a bike ride like this existing. Nobody’s told me that. So, I’m thinking it was just such a new idea that they were like, ‘What? You’re just going to get a bunch of people to ride around?’”
The benefits of biking
Part of Ride Riverside’s goal, Kramer said, is to show people that riding bikes can be fun while providing benefits.
“This is a really nerdy way of me to think about it, but optimizing my time, I think about, I’m doing something social, which is good for health, good for all the things. I’m making connections with other people in my town, strengthening our town. I’m exercising, and I’m enjoying nature,” she said. “It’s like all those things, with our bike rides, at once. So, I think you couldn’t come up with a healthier, better activity for a community.”
Kramer emphasized that the benefits of group slow rides like Ride Riverside’s come at little cost to the communities that embrace them.
“We’re not adding to the traffic. These are people in, mostly, Riverside and Brookfield who are coming by bike to ride. It’s not like everyone’s driving in with their bikes,” she said. “We’re also adding to the commerce without the traffic. You get the benefit of people perhaps staying after the ride, going out to eat, being a part of the business.”
Not just a social club
Outside of the group’s social and recreational aspects, Kramer and Schalles said Ride Riverside is also an advocacy group working to promote safer biking and greater biking connectivity in Riverside so more residents feel encouraged to cycle — not just for fun, but as a means of transportation.
Kramer said she had a “lightbulb” moment about the importance of connecting bike routes across communities during a C4 Team meeting, when she and other members were reading through the results of a survey of residents on biking.
“There were free-form responses, and one resident said, ‘I would bike, but there’s nothing to bike to,’” Kramer said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a problem.’ You know, because we only have so many places in Riverside, because it’s actually pretty bikeable here, but even just to get to Costco [in North Riverside], crossing those streets is pretty scary for the majority of people.”
Schalles said increased connectivity in the greater area is part of the benefit of having a group like Ride Riverside in a village where winding, low-visibility streets act as “a natural deterrent from people speeding like crazy.”
“My interest was more, how do you make West Cook County into having a better bicycle network? Because I feel safe riding within Riverside, but what if I want to bike to the zoo? What if I want to bike to Target or Aldi?” he said. “Suddenly, once you cross the border, like First Ave. or Harlem [Avenue], they’re not great, safe options. What if kids want to ride — not even necessarily kids, adolescents — to [Riverside-Brookfield] High School, that should be an easy thing for them to be able to do.”
“Part of what Chris [Valadez] explained to me is that, by having a group in Riverside to work with the village, we can kind of work in collaboration with Brookfield for some of these greater connectivity issues,” Schalles added. “Because getting a good crossing to RB, that’s going to be a problem that transcends a single village.”
