By Hutton Marshall

The San Diego County Bicycle Coalition, the region’s largest advocacy nonprofit on all things bicycling, recently named Michelle Luellen as its new Education Program manager, where she’ll oversee outreach, classes and events helping communities throughout the region learn how to safely bike in an urban environment.

Luellen, a Wisconsin native, comes to the Bike Coalition after serving with Circulate San Diego and the City Heights Community Development Council. She was previously a schoolteacher in Chicago. Recently, San Diego Uptown News spoke with Luellen to learn more about her new role, her thoughts on biking in San Diego, and what can be done to get more people pedaling.

Uptown News (UTN): To start, can you tell me a bit about your new role and what you hope to accomplish in it?

Michelle Luellen (ML): The education department of the Bike Coalition is a pretty amazing place to be because I get to work with our education committee, which is a group of people who have been bike educators probably for as long as I’ve been alive … so it’s been really great having this encyclopedia of bike knowledge that I get to work with.

So the San Diego County Bike Coalition did a strategic plan a couple years ago, and one of the goals was to reach 50 percent of San Diego County with bike education efforts. So where I come in—we’re really working on expanding to the people who actually make up the majority of cyclists, but who are not historically outreached to in bike advocacy organizations. We’re interested really in outreaching to immigrants and low-income bike riders this year.

UTN: And it sounds like you had a similar role to this with Circulate SD, right?

ML: That’s right, I worked with Circulate for just over a year. I was a coordinator for the different programs at the organization but I have been working in low-income neighborhoods for my entire adult career, in San Diego and also Chicago, and I’m a bilingual Spanish speaker.

UTN: What would you say the biggest thing stopping San Diegans from riding a bike regularly or maybe even commuting on a bike?

ML: People are really scared. There are a lot of infrastructure issues. It’s been well documented. Especially with moms and children, they’re very scared of getting on a bike and letting their children be on a bicycle.

So we work very slowly and incrementally. We do community bike rides. In our education programs, we do bike rodeos, teaching kids how to handle their bikes, so they don’t fall down when they’re out on the road, or they don’t speed up when they get to an intersection and just run through it. And then we do community bike rides, so the kids and the parents can ride together and the parents can learn how to ride safely with their kids and feel comfortable doing that.

We also teach people the safest routes around their neighborhood so they’re not scared of riding, so they’ll think, “Oh I’ve ridden this before with my kids and they didn’t get hit, and now we know how to ride and prevent accidents.”

So it’s really about communicating with people on a one-on-one basis and learning how to help build community, because if people can ride together as neighbors, and whole families can ride together, then people are a lot more likely to get on a bike.

UTN: Obviously the Bike Coalition does a lot of advocacy on the state and local levels. Is there an aspect of that in your position as well, or is your position mostly working within the confines of the current situation?

ML: We definitely work within the confines of the current situation, but we also help people understand that if they would like to know how to advocate, we can answer their specific questions on how to do that, and how to direct them in the direction that they want to go.

UTN: So you commute to work by bike now though I understand. Where do you commute from?

ML: I commute now from Logan Heights.

UTN: Oh, I hear that’s supposed to be the hip new neighborhood these days.

ML: Don’t say that. Don’t say that.

UTN: Am I jinxing it so it becomes the next North Park now?

ML: Don’t say that. Don’t say that.

UTN: The Bike Coalition’s offices are Downtown, right?

ML: Yeah, it’s about a 2-mile commute, so it’s nice.

UTN: So what kind of bike do you ride?

ML: Well, I don’t really think people should talk about what kind of bikes they have, because I think the important thing is that if people have a bike then they should just ride it. So it doesn’t really matter what type of bike you have.

I rode a really bad mountain bike for many, many years and my friends felt really bad for me, so one of them gave me a road bike, so my friend gave me a specialized road bike that’s really nice.

But the important thing is that if you have a bike, you should ride it. It doesn’t matter if it’s really fancy. And if you have a fancy bike that’s fine too.

UTN: So there’s been kind of a natural transition in your career from education to working more broadly with low-income students and getting them involved in active transportation. But what first drew you to work specifically with biking and active transportation?

ML: I didn’t learn how to drive until I was 30. I’ve always ridden a bicycle. I like to ride the bus; I like to talk to people. I feel like cars are a very good tool but they’re very isolating, so it’s very important to me to build communities, work within communities so I can work with people and talk with people and see where they’re at and see what situations they’re going through.

And to be able to live on this planet, we’re going to have to start thinking about alternative ways of living. We’re going to have to carpool more and ride more public transportation and walk and ride bikes. It’s what we have to do.

So I feel like as a mom, I have a responsibility to my son and his generation, as well as the one that’s going to come after him.

UTN: I don’t know how familiar you are with San Diego’s [proposed] Climate Action Plan but it lays out some goals about getting people out of their cars and onto bikes and public transit. Are you optimistic about that happening?

ML: I’ve spent a lot of time in cities like Portland and San Francisco, and those cities actually have a very small mode share [proportion of bike riders to drivers], but even the mode share they have is higher than [San Diego], so it feels like there are bikes everywhere.

So for us to reach the level of San Francisco or Portland, we have to look at bike education, bike advocacy, better infrastructure–we have to look at this as a multi-pronged approach to begin to change the way people are commuting to work. So there’s many different spokes on the wheel, if that’s how you want to say it, and my piece is education and helping people feel less scared and meeting people where they’re at.

We always say we’re not interested in getting rid of cars, we’re interested in helping more people get on bikes. So we feel we don’t always have to have a dichotomy of cars over bikes. Cars are a tool. We need them for many things but we don’t need to have them for everything. We can have all the different pieces working together in the same puzzle.

UTN: My last question I had was about what you mentioned earlier about targeting recent immigrants or low-income San Diegans — people who typically don’t bike as much but are good targets for bicycling. Do you think they face the same hindrances from bicycling that the majority of San Diegans face — safety and infrastructure — or do you think their are more unique factors that keep them from biking regularly?

ML: The majority of people who ride bikes in the United States are actually recent immigrants, so a lot of people in that demographic are biking for necessity, so it’s a different demographic. And what happens is that once people get a little bit of money saved up, they buy a car. So for us, the most important thing is how we can improve public infrastructure, how we can improve roads, how we can make things so that people already riding bikes will not want to give them up when they get the opportunity to drive in a car.

UTN: Is there anything else about this new position, what you hope to accomplish with it, that I didn’t ask about that you think is important for people to understand?

ML: I’m just really excited that I finally get to work at my dream job, and that I get to work with such an amazing group of people: educators and activists and advocates and families and communities and children—it’s really fun.

And I think that one thing that a lot of people still have a misconception about with people on bikes is that bikes are a sort of toy that should be put away at Christmas time and that people should get in their car. So what’s most important for me is that next year to really prove the impact we’re having, since we touch thousands of people each year. So my goal is to pull together some very concrete numbers for people so they can see how many people we impact and exactly how we do it.

So that’s my goal as well: to keep spreading the love of bikes to everyone.

To find out more about the educational programs, events and training seminars organized by the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition, visit sdbikecoalition.org.

—Contact Hutton Marshall at [email protected].