The following is provided by the Warsaw+Winona Ride+Walk Advisory Committee as a reminder to both bicycles and motor vehicles to share the roads:

Remember as a kid riding your bike to the ice cream stand with your friends  Or riding down to the lake to take a dip? Or riding to the grocery for your mom to get bread? Or riding over to your friend’s house to hang out? Or just riding around with your friends?
Guess what? You still can!

Almost everyone either owns a bike or has access to one. If you don’t have access to one, check out a garage sale or two, or Craigslist.

Need more encouragement? Here are a couple interesting facts:

• 40 percent of car trips in urban areas are less than 2 miles from where the traveler lives.
• In Indiana in 1985 10 percent to 14 percent of the population was considered obese (Body Mass Index > 30). By 1993 the number was 15 percent to 19 percent. In 1997, it was over 20 percent. In 2003 it was over 25 percent, and that was 10 years ago.

We are working hard in our community to make bicycling more accessible for everyone and safer for everyone. Evidence of this is our recent award of Bicycle Friendly Community status by the League of American Bicyclists.

So we probably all agree that it’s fun.

Biking is more fit than driving short trips in your car and is almost as fast. It’s certainly fair to assume you would burn a few more calories on your bike, unless the trip is downhill both ways. But you don’t need to be Lance Armstrong and work up a huge sweat to get the fitness effect.

If you make five under 4 mile round trips on your bike every week for half the year you will save $140 in gasoline alone.

Is biking greener? Absolutely! Building a bike uses less energy and resources than building a car. Bikes have much less impact on the roadway, so road maintenance is lower and costs less tax money.

A bike produces even fewer emissions than your electric car, not to mention the hybrid.Bikes are modes of transportation that benefit us all—whether we ride or not. They are clean and add no wear to streets— that means cleaner communities and lower road maintenance costs. That makes sharing the road smart.