Bike mag Momentum does a spot on why Detroit's a great city for cycling

Detroit's own bicycle blogger Todd Scott has a piece in the bicycle magazine Momentum. There's a little history and a lot of why Detroit is a great place for a bicycle. You can pick up hard copies, by the way, at the Wheelhouse on the Riverfront.

Excerpt from Momentum:

Detroit has the basic ingredients for bike-friendliness. The terrain is flat and the streets are in well-formed grids. From here, though, Detroit's path to bike-friendliness doesn't follow the commonly accepted route.

This is a city with a road network built for nearly two million residents. It later invested heavily in a well-connected urban expressway system that pulled vehicles from the main arterials. Then a million residents left the city to sprawl across the suburbs.

Unlike most other cities where traffic engineers struggle to carve separated biking areas from busy roads, Detroit's streets have excess travel lanes. Motown cyclists may not always have their own four-foot bike lane, but they often have their own 10-foot vehicle lane – or two. With the same amount of car traffic, a five-lane road in many cities is a seven- or nine-lane road in Detroit.

Read the entire article here.