“Bike month isn’t just about celebrating different ways of getting around, but it’s about celebrating and protecting the environment and what we’re all moving around in.”
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The Town of Chapel Hill in collaboration with 97.9 The Hill WCHL & Chapelboro.com present “Our Town: Stories of Chapel Hill.” Each month you’ll hear from the people at the heart of your local government who are learning, serving, and working together to build a community where people thrive. This month, Alyson West from the Office of Mobility and Greenways and Brennan Bouma from Chapel Hill’s Sustainability team, tell the story of Bike Month in Chapel Hill.
Brennan Bouma: In Chapel Hill. There’s been decades of work going into making the bicycle, not just a fun way to recreate, to get your heart rate up, but also a functional transportation option.
Alyson West: We’re always looking to build out the transportation network for people who don’t want to use a car for every trip. Everybody should be able to get around, get where they need to go, get to work, get to school, get to their friend’s house, without having to get in a car. And those options should be safe, they should be convenient, they should be reliable. And if you think about it, there’s a large portion of the population who do not own a car, are not legally able to drive, if you’re under the age of 16, others who simply do not have that option. And we need to provide for those people.
Bouma: When you choose to ride a bike instead of taking your car, that is a zero emissions activity. And those emissions, they’re happening here, they’re happening at the tailpipe. And so for anybody walking around town, the neighborhoods you’re driving through, you can avoid emitting those fumes right around where everyone lives.
West: And Chapel Hill is not very big. One side of town to the other is less than 10 miles, so it’s not unreasonable to try to make some trips on a bicycle when you can.
Bouma: Bike month isn’t just about celebrating different ways of getting around, but it’s about celebrating and protecting the environment and what we’re all moving around in.
West: In Chapel Hill, we have an Office of Mobility and Greenways, which I don’t know that many other towns have. In case you haven’t heard of us, we like to go by “OMG” and we work to help people get where they need to go.
Bouma: In bike month we’re talking a lot about bikes but really thinking about all of the different ways that mobility of all kinds is supported in this town. Bikes are a big part of that, but improvements that we’ve been making in accessibility and visibility for bikes are really helping lots of people no matter how they get around. If you’re in a wheelchair or if you’re a pedestrian, if you prefer to ride a scooter instead of riding a bike, these are all good ways of getting around our town and they work together.
West: In Chapel Hill, we are a biking community. We have all kinds of people riding bikes around town. We also have fair free transit, and that can get you pretty much anywhere you need to go. And if you are a little bit away from a transit stop, you can ride your bike to the bus stop and you can put your bike on the bus. There are bike racks on every bus. In some cases they hold three bikes, I believe. It’s really easy to put your bike on that bike rack. It might seem intimidating when there’s a bus full of people standing there, but it’s really, really easy.
Bouma: I saw recently there’s even a place where you can practice it, over on Franklin Street, there’s one of those bus bike racks just there on the sidewalk. You can give it a shot.
Bus bike rack practice station on E. Franklin St. at Carolina Coffee Shop
Bouma: E-bikes are a new technology and for a bike they can be pretty expensive. But we’ve seen how transformative they can be for, for mobility and just how fun, you’re still getting your heart rate up. But I’ve found that I use my bike a lot more often, or I choose not to use my car more often, because I have an e-bike, it just gives me that extra boost to get around town. We’ve really worked to try to give people an opportunity to try it out and that’s where the public e-bike lending library comes in. We received two different grants to help support this program, and we have 25 bikes across both of our bike shops in town. (Trek Chapel Hill and The Bicycle Chain.)
West: And I’m excited that we now have a staff e-bike program. So when we have to go out into the community as a staff member, we don’t have to take a town car.
Bouma: Right. Practice what we preach.
West: As the Safe Routes to School coordinator for the Town of Chapel Hill. I get out and work with people in the school community, if they want to get more biking and walking happening at their school. There are a lot of different ways to do this. People can start bike-buses, they can start walking-school-buses. And we recognize that everyone may not have access to a bike for their students. So we were lucky enough to win first prize in a competition last year, which allowed us to buy a fleet of bicycles and a trailer. And we are calling the trailer the WOW trailer, that stands for Wheels of Wellness, to reach kids across all demographics. We basically are hoping to level the playing field. We like creating community connections around getting to school because we need more people to think about how that’s a priority in our town.
Wheels of Wellness bicycles at the Roll & Stroll 2025 at Scroggs Elementary School
Bouma: There’s a lot of good examples going on at schools across the district, but not every school is doing everything.
West: And there are a lot of different things you can do any time of year.
Bouma: I get to work on a lot of different innovative things, but one of the main ones right now is bikes and e-bikes and making them more accessible to people in the town, Chapel Hill. And that has a direct benefit to them and to our local environment.
West: I got into this work because I started riding a bike more seriously just for myself, for my own purposes. And I feel like now I get to work on things that make biking better every single day. And I couldn’t ask for more than that.
Bouma: I love working in sustainability for the town of Chapel Hill because every day I get to go into the office and work creatively, work collaboratively, with people, like Alyson, to leave the world a better place for my kids and for all our kids.
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