Chloé Speaks

Good morning, esteemed colleagues, guests, and neighbors! 

Thank you, Councilmembers Elo-Rivera and Whitburn, Director Townsend, and Captain Healy, for your astute remarks.

I’m Chloé Lauer, Executive Director of the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition. We represent over 10,000 community members who help us promote biking as a safe, mainstream, and enjoyable form of transportation and recreation for people of all ages and abilities. 

Today, I’m holding cycling shoes that belonged to a gentleman who lost his life to traffic violence just this week in Carmel Valley. We speak and advocate for those who no longer have a voice and those whose voices have been marginalized. Thank you, Councilmember Elo-Rivera, for leading us in that moment of silence.

While bicycling has many benefits—from improving public health to stemming climate change and increasing safety through traffic calming—two significant benefits that we rarely discuss are connected community and culture change.

Have you ever asked a kid to draw their route to school? Children who walk or bike to school draw parks, trees, friends, family, cafés, and beauty. Kids driven to school draw asphalt, concrete, stop signs, and parking lots.

One picture is colorful, vibrant, and filled with life; the other is a paved paradise in shades of grey.

It’s not that the kids who arrived by car didn’t also pass by some green space or even their neighbors. It’s that their mode of movement profoundly shaped their experience.

When we dream big and come together to accomplish a once-in-a-century project, like the Pershing Bikeway, we DO change culture and connect community. We invite people who weren’t comfortable biking to give it a try. And next thing you know, they’ve gathered their friends and started a weekly group ride. A decade or two later, they are the parents dropping their kids off at school on an e-cargo bike. The ripple effect is real.

So, we want to thank every individual and organization that played a part in today’s success. It’s taken collaboration and compromise from many agencies and jurisdictions to bring this project to life – from the initial vision and public outreach phases to planning, design, budgeting, contracting, and construction. There have been hurdles, including cost escalations, flooding impacts, and more. Yet here we are, at the ribbon cutting, celebrating a critical link in our regional bikeway network. A connection from many neighborhoods through our crown jewel - Balboa Park - to downtown, the bay, and beyond. 

Let’s bike together, a connected community catalyzing culture change.

I’ll now turn the program back to Councilmember Elo Rivera.