Education is the Best Advocacy:
Focus on the Texas SuperCyclist Project

By Rebecca Johnson page 1         Instructors look on while schoolchildren in Texas maneuver through the SuperCyclist course.     "You can make a kid safer by teaching him or her how to ride a bike," maintains Preston Tyree, education director for the Texas Bicycle Coalition and the Texas SuperCyclist Project. The message and aims of this group are plainly put, but the mission they've undertaken is one of the most ambitious in the country. Texas SuperCyclist Project is a statewide program to certify elementary health and physical education teachers to teach 4th and 5th grade students the basics of traffic safety, with emphasis on bicycle riders as vehicle operators. The safety lessons this program teaches have far greater implications than the bike lane. Not only will the Texas SuperCyclist students learn how to properly ride and maintain a bicycle and make safe traffic decisions as a bicyclist, their greater awareness of bicyclists and pedestrians will serve these 4th and 5th graders well when they get their driver's licenses and become motorists several years later. Looking 25 years ahead...all cyclists and motorists in Texas will have had the same safety education through the SuperCyclist Project. By starting early and concentrating only on kids in the 4th and 5th grades—an age when kids are not yet consumed with the prospect of driving a vehicle, and are more likely to use a bicycle for transportational and recreational purposes—the Texas SuperCyclist Project is planning for the future of its cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists. Looking 25 years ahead, the coalition postulates, all cyclists and motorists in Texas will have had the same safety education through the SuperCyclist Project, thus making Texas roads safer for everyone traveling them, cyclists and motorists alike.