‘A problem worth fixing’
youth, cycling around Baltimore during his college years at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and eventually to a 20-mile, round-trip commute over the past nine years.
After volunteering for 10 years at the Minneapolis location of FB4K, Cochran retired in April from Honeywell and moved back to Howard County with his wife to be near family.
The Columbia site on Little Patuxent Parkway, to which he commutes by bike, is the eighth location of the Minneapolisbased organization, which was founded by Terry Esau in 2008.
Georgia, Michigan, Washington state and Wisconsin each have an FB4K site; Oregon has two.
Esau — who, like Cochran, likes to inject a little humor into his website — said his bike is worth more than his car, “though that says more about my car than my bike.”
The former television music producer and composer owns a Trek model with a carbon frame and electronic shifting that cost $12,000, but drives a 2008 Saturn, he joked.
Since refurbished bikes are given away each December, Esau also tweaked Clement Clarke Moore’s famous last line about goodwill toward men from the poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” to coin the website slogan: “Good wheel to all, and to all a good bike.”
“Yeah, that was me,” he confessed with a laugh.
Esau, who is scheduled to visit the Maryland operation soon, said he has set his sights on adding four or five more locations in cities across the country and also in London in 2020.
As with the Minneapolis organization, local social service agencies in Howard County will determine who’s eligible to receive free bikes. The agencies will also work to match kids they’ve identified to the sizes of donated bikes that are available.
Not every identified child will get a bike this time around, as the nonprofit continues to get the word out about its mission.
“It’s first-come, first-served, so there’s bound to be some disappointments this first year,” Cochran said of distributing the bikes, which volunteers work hard to make look and ride like new.
While Howard County has a bicycle master plan called BikeHoward that was adopted in April 2016, Cochran estimates that Maryland is 10 to 20 years behind Minneapolis in developing a bike culture.
Cochran lived in Minnesota when it was going through “a bicycling renaissance,” he said, creating a bikeway in a sunken railroad bed and connecting bike paths to create a network, among other components.
It helped that Minneapolis is a compact city and its residents are “hardy, outdoorsy folk,” he said.
As FB4K Maryland works to get more kids on bikes, Cochran stressed that distracted driving is a problem that must be solved.
It’s a never-ending cycle that must be broken, he said: The fewer bikes on roadways, the less patient drivers are about sharing the road. The less patient drivers are, the fewer number of bike riders willing to travel county roads.
“The more kids and adults there are biking on roadways, the more drivers will get used to them. When drivers get caught behind bikers, they need to pause and realize it’s just 20 seconds” of inconvenience, he said. “Drivers can make roads unsafe for bikers.”
After volunteering for 10 years at the Minneapolis location of FB4K, Cochran retired in April from Honeywell and moved back to Howard County with his wife to be near family.
The Columbia site on Little Patuxent Parkway, to which he commutes by bike, is the eighth location of the Minneapolisbased organization, which was founded by Terry Esau in 2008.
Georgia, Michigan, Washington state and Wisconsin each have an FB4K site; Oregon has two.
Esau — who, like Cochran, likes to inject a little humor into his website — said his bike is worth more than his car, “though that says more about my car than my bike.”
The former television music producer and composer owns a Trek model with a carbon frame and electronic shifting that cost $12,000, but drives a 2008 Saturn, he joked.
Since refurbished bikes are given away each December, Esau also tweaked Clement Clarke Moore’s famous last line about goodwill toward men from the poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” to coin the website slogan: “Good wheel to all, and to all a good bike.”
“Yeah, that was me,” he confessed with a laugh.
Esau, who is scheduled to visit the Maryland operation soon, said he has set his sights on adding four or five more locations in cities across the country and also in London in 2020.
As with the Minneapolis organization, local social service agencies in Howard County will determine who’s eligible to receive free bikes. The agencies will also work to match kids they’ve identified to the sizes of donated bikes that are available.
Not every identified child will get a bike this time around, as the nonprofit continues to get the word out about its mission.
“It’s first-come, first-served, so there’s bound to be some disappointments this first year,” Cochran said of distributing the bikes, which volunteers work hard to make look and ride like new.
While Howard County has a bicycle master plan called BikeHoward that was adopted in April 2016, Cochran estimates that Maryland is 10 to 20 years behind Minneapolis in developing a bike culture.
Cochran lived in Minnesota when it was going through “a bicycling renaissance,” he said, creating a bikeway in a sunken railroad bed and connecting bike paths to create a network, among other components.
It helped that Minneapolis is a compact city and its residents are “hardy, outdoorsy folk,” he said.
As FB4K Maryland works to get more kids on bikes, Cochran stressed that distracted driving is a problem that must be solved.
It’s a never-ending cycle that must be broken, he said: The fewer bikes on roadways, the less patient drivers are about sharing the road. The less patient drivers are, the fewer number of bike riders willing to travel county roads.
“The more kids and adults there are biking on roadways, the more drivers will get used to them. When drivers get caught behind bikers, they need to pause and realize it’s just 20 seconds” of inconvenience, he said. “Drivers can make roads unsafe for bikers.”
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