In the past six months, I’ve ridden in the world’s most bicycle-friendly city, on one of the top urban bike paths across the USA and in what I consider one of the scariest places to put two wheels on the road.
Guess which one Baton Rouge is.
With never-ending construction, traffic-inducing city sprawl and interstate congestion stressful enough to make you swallow your car keys, spending a little cash to make Baton Rouge a bicycle-friendly city seems a suitable pill for our transportation migraine.
Our city will never match Amsterdam’s count of cycling commuters. The Red Stick can forget about rivaling the American River Bike Trail in Sacramento, Calif., where I lived this summer. But with dedicated planning and funding, development in our capital city has potential to alleviate the current state of motorist madness.
There are multiple projects working to improve Baton Rouge’s bike-friendly community status, which has been given a Bronze level award since 2009 by The League of American Bicyclists. 
This recognition means Baton Rouge has low percentages of arterial streets with dedicated bicycle facilities, and low levels of bicycling education in elementary and middle schools. But Bronze communities are taking steps to improve. The league says
Bronze-level communities “do not necessarily feel bike friendly.”
Tell me about it.
But the effort is present, and education and development are growing. It’s a disappointing sign with encouraging undertones. 
Projects such as the Downtown Development District’s Downtown Greenway, BREC’s Capital Area Pathways Project and the sales tax-funded Green Light Plan have promised more community bike paths and more connections between parks and neighborhoods. 
These projects have been hovering in early phases for years, and while urban development has a reputation for agonizingly slow resolutions, we need these bike facilities now.
The feasibility study for the Downtown Greenway was released in 2010 and the DDD announced the plans for its first component last month. The BREC Commission approved the CAPP phase, one concept for a park trail along Wards Creek, in January 2008 and broke ground on that project in December 2012. 
Baton Rouge citizens approved the Green Light Plan in 2005 and have completed projects such as the expansion of Brightside Lane to include dedicated bicycle paths along both sides of the roadway. Construction for that project took almost two years to complete.
As a casual biker, I’m thrilled to see these initiatives kick off, even if cruising speed is slow for my liking. I’m not a competitive cyclist or a health nut, and I’ve never spent $1,000 on a road bike. Maybe I’m just too lazy to walk to class or jog to the drugstore, but I still deserve peace of mind that I can get where I’m going safely. So do bikers who are training for a race, who can’t afford a car or who want to avoid time-sucking traffic.
But that won’t happen without more motorist, pedestrian and cyclist education. 
I brazenly pedaled down University campus sidewalks for months before I learned it was illegal. I still get confused about the hand signals and I wish I had a quarter for every Baton Rouge bike without proper headlights and taillights.
And while I’ve seen research and articles praising the effects of sharrows — full lanes in slow speed limit areas that can be used by both cars and bicycles — I still believe painting a bicycle on a busy street does not make a safe path. Drivers just don’t know what to do with a cyclist in the street.
Baton Rouge will always be a car-centric city. According to a report by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, Louisiana is one of only four states that has increased the average number of driving miles per person since the end of the national driving boom around 2004. 
It’s difficult to fix this city’s mess of transportation problems and to re-educate a population on it’s vehicle values. But moving forward with bicycle-related
initiatives is necessary, and it can be as easy as riding a … well yeah, you get it.
Morgan Searles is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Baton Rouge studying abroad in Amsterdam.