Steve Breeser: Hi, Henry! Thanks for taking time to chat about your adventures in transportation advocacy over the past few decades. So you co-founded the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign back in 1991, and the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign evolved over the years and eventually merged with PEDS and became what we know today as Propel ATL. Going back to 1991, or maybe even just a couple years before that, what was on your mind prior to co-founding ABC, and what was the spark that led you all to found the organization?
Henry Slack: Great questions. What was on our minds was probably that as cyclists we had no respect for motorists much of the time. We knew of things that had been done to help cyclists in other places. Seattle, at that point, was considered a great city for biking. They had the Burke-Gilman Trail. Atlanta didn't have anything like that at the time. At the same time, there was some dissatisfaction with the existing bike clubs that were doing some little bit of advocacy, relatively speaking. And we wanted them to do more, but they weren't eager to do more. So it's like, well, let's start another group to do this.
Steve: You were already heavily involved in biking and biking organizations, but you all realized, hey, we need some independence to really advocate the way we want to.
Henry: Yeah. And the other precipitating event was that two guys, Jeff Tiller and Greg—whose name will come to me, he's still around as an architect—but they called a meeting to be held in Candler Park. And I showed up with a baby. We wanted to do something, but what could we do? How could we do it? And Jeff and Greg got less involved, and Dennis Hoffarth and I got more involved. One thing to realize at the time is that I was living with a wife and kids. Dennis was alone in his house. All we had were landline phones. I would call Dennis at 10 PM after the kids were asleep, and we would talk bike advocacy for an hour. And I wouldn't be disturbing anyone, and it didn't take me away from my family.
Steve: Right. So it was something that you could fit into your life. And so you were advocating mostly for safe commuting options for bikes, and, as I think you had mentioned in another context, just recognition that bikes exist and are on the roads with the cars, right?
Henry: Yeah. So I'm on a street, and I'm taking up the spot of a lane, legally. And motorists aren't happy about it. But why would they honk at me? They're encouraging me to get off my bicycle and drive a car instead. But then it will be even harder for them to pass me if I’m in a car. It is not so hard to safely pass someone on a bike. So it struck me as, you know, I'm helping them. Why don't they recognize it?
Steve: Right, that's interesting. It's interesting to me, because I came to the organization just as an interested supporter much later, but I came to it from that perspective of safety. Pedestrian safety. And some of the safety problems were due to the infrastructure – it wasn't built for people, wasn't built for bikes. But then it did also seem like sometimes it was just motorists that had bad behavior, because they were like, “What are you doing on the street? With me? I'm a car. Get out of my way.”
Henry: Yeah, roads were made for cars.
And yet what we know, actually, is that roads are made for travelers.
Steve: Right, right.
Henry: One of the big things that happened to me otherwise was finding the Effective Cycling program, which a guy named John Forrester in California wrote a book about, which has become the “League of American Bicyclists’ Safe Cycling for Cities.” They've used a couple other titles and acronyms over time, but it is the book used by league-certified instructors to teach, and I started that in Georgia in the 80’s and helped other people become league-certified as instructors. And it was very satisfying to help people understand, you know, gee, maybe you took tennis lessons because you wanted to be better. Why don't you have bicycle lessons to be able to be a little better?
Steve: To be a better cyclist, and to be a safer cyclist, right?
Henry: It was something nobody ever thought much about at the time. They thought, “Oh, I know how to ride a bike.” It's like me saying, “Well, yeah, I know how to swim.” But I'm not going to be competing in the Olympics. But I could be a much better swimmer if I took some lessons.
Steve: I believe I read on the Propel website that you all got former Mayor Maynard Jackson to bike to work one day. What were some of the other big wins that you had in that first 5 or 10 years?
Henry: The biggest single thing was that we campaigned for MARTA to allow bicycle access on rail cars at all times. MARTA started off saying, no, you can't bring a bicycle on board, and some more extreme cyclists would occasionally remove their front wheel and argue with the MARTA train people, “This isn't a bicycle, these are just bicycle parts.” You know, that's not illegal. And we were aware that in other cities, people would bring mattresses on board, ironing boards, you know, some very large and bulky things to point out the foolishness of not allowing bicycles on the trains.
Steve: Right.
Henry: We got far enough that MARTA said, “Okay, let's do a one-year trial. After that one-year trial we will take comments from the public.” And so Dennis would be out with a table in Piedmont Park or somewhere. And somebody would come by and express an opinion, and Dennis would say, “Well, do you want to send that to MARTA? We will mail the envelope. You address it, and we'll get it in the mail.” And so by the end of their year test period, they had, as I remember, over 40 letters saying, yeah, this is a good idea. And only three negative comments. So we were able to get that solidified for us.
Another great thing we did was we had bike parking lots during the 1996 Olympics. They had problems, had issues, but nonetheless, some of the bike racks from those bike parking lots are still around Atlanta letting people park their bikes.
Steve: Right, and that was a precursor in a way of the bike valets that you see at the farmers markets around Atlanta.
Henry: Yes, we did start bike valets.
Steve: Yeah. I remember the first time I saw a bike valet. It was out in California, out in LA at a farmers market, and there was this huge bike valet, and I was, like, “Well, this is a great idea, right? This certainly is going to encourage people to bike to the farmers market. Of course. Why don't we all do this? This is a great idea.”
What are some of the other things that you all did to raise awareness and to get publicity? I think you were mentioning a race, a bike vs. car commute race, or something like that?
Henry: The Great Commuter Race. I'm not sure what name we used for it at the time, but we had a bicycle race a car. You had to have two stops: one for a cup of coffee, one to buy a stamp at the post office. Which, you know, yes, stamps and post offices were a thing then. We went down Howell Mill to City Hall. So not horribly far. I think we started near Collier and Howell Mill. And bicycles have a real advantage in being able to not have to park a distance away and then walk into the post office. So we did that two years in a row, and the bike won the first one, I think, and the second one was a tie.
Steve: I think that that's a great illustration of the difference of what it feels like to be on a bike, and the conveniences of being so nimble. You're just not as nimble in a car.
Henry: You're not nimble at all. If a road is shut down for some reason, you know, a guy on a bicycle can often get through where somebody with their 3,000-pound car cannot.
Steve: Right. And the same is true obviously for pedestrians.
Yeah, I think some people are annoyed when this happens to them, but I'm always happy when I'm stuck in traffic in a car, and I see pedestrians passing me or bicyclists passing me. I'm like, “Yeah, right on,” you know? “I wish I were not in this car. I wish I were on foot today. I wish I were on that bike.”
Henry: Another big emphasis in the early years was Bike to Work Day. Part of National Bicycle Month. And some years we would have a whole week, you know, bike to church, bike to this grocery, bike to work, bike to various things. And we had a celebration downtown in Central City Park as it was called then, Woodruff Park now, and got a hundred volunteers to help make it happen.
Steve: Wow. That makes me think, how did you all grow the organization and get the volunteers back in those early days?
Henry: Well, we took advantage of direct mail campaigns. Which, we saw mailing lists from the League of American Wheelmen, it was called then, League of American Bicyclists now, from Adventure Cycling, which was Bikecentennial then, from a couple of other national groups, as well as the Southern Bicycle League, which was local. And we said, hey, give us money, and we'll send you a free t-shirt. Which, of course, they were paying for. With most direct mail campaigns, they're happy if they get like a 1% return. On some of those lists, we got a 15% return, as I recall.
That helped us launch, definitely. And we reached a point where we could start chasing after grants, and when we had enough grant money coming in, we could hire an executive director, and then Dennis Hoffarth applied for that. I became the executive director after around 6 years.
Steve: And that base was the same base that you all got to volunteer for some of these events, right? To help coordinate things?
Henry: Right.
Steve: You started the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign in the 90s. It seems like that coincides with the start of Atlanta's explosive growth. Atlanta really started to take off in the 80s and 90s, and it has just kept on growing like crazy.
Henry: Yeah, that's fair to say.
Steve: How do you think that has changed and influenced the organization over three decades?
Henry: It's made it more difficult in some ways. And here's why. The old city had a network of streets. You know, if I didn't want to be on Memorial Drive, I could be on Woodward Avenue for a while, I could go up to Wiley Avenue. And so you had alternatives to these somewhat awful, very busy streets. Not always great alternatives, but alternatives. Whereas if you went out to Gwinnett County and such, the roads were all former farm roads. And everything was built subdivision by subdivision to feed into those same roads. There was no consideration for bicyclists, so either you had a subdivision road that might be 25 miles an hour or, you know, Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.
Steve: Right.
Henry: Theoretically 55 miles an hour, but often at higher speeds. And it's much easier in town because of the choice of roads, whereas going out to Gwinnett County, or Cobb County, or so on, there are fewer alternate ways to get around. Fewer quiet roads for bicyclists.
Steve: Yeah. It's funny, I remember that when I first moved to Atlanta, I was out in Norcross, and I'm like, oh, there's some nice, quiet roads. I had plotted my route, and I'm thinking, this is great, but now I need to get over there. Oh, I guess I'm getting on Peachtree Industrial for a couple miles. And then I was like, whoa, this is pretty intense!
Henry: Those are locations that are much more challenging. In the 90’s, the American Lung Association decided to hold an event they called Don't Drive Day. They encouraged people not to drive, and as I recall, a Georgia Power executive who worked downtown decided to leave his home at 3 AM and walk from Stone Mountain to work.
As a stunt, somebody kayaked across the Chattahoochee. But what we heard so often is, “Don't drive? What am I supposed to do, walk?” Because they literally could not conceive of another way that could be reasonable, could be effective, could get them anywhere. Public transit did not exist at that time in those far out counties.
Steve: Right. I feel like maybe that has changed over 30 years, that people know that there are other options. It's just that there are still challenges for those options. But they're not inconceivable.
Henry: Or not as inconceivable.
Steve: Yeah, maybe that's it, not as inconceivable.
Henry: In the 90s, we would do Grate Rides, G-R-A-T-E.
If you're an engineer and you want hydraulic efficiency, you get the best efficiency if you make the grates parallel with the roadway.
Steve: Right.
Henry: You also trap bicycle wheels.
Steve: Yeah.
Henry: And so what we knew at the time was if the city was informed of a hazard, they would fix that hazard. So we started having regular rides where people would fill in the card and say, “There's a hazardous grate at the corner of Howell Mill and Collier. That can trap my bicycle wheel. Please fix it.”
And on those cards, we could put down about half a dozen grates. And so we started doing these rides to identify these hazards. And eventually, the city of Atlanta said, “You can stop doing this. Our policy now is to change them all.”
Steve: Wow, nice.
Henry: So that was a very real success to make bicycling safer.
Steve: Yeah, that's huge. I think only every once in a while do you see a dangerous grate now, and maybe not in the City of Atlanta, maybe just elsewhere on some back roads.
Henry: Yeah, well, what else we knew is that Atlanta, even though it didn't even then have the majority of citizens in it, it was still the leader. So if we could get Atlanta to adopt a policy, it could spread to the surrounding cities and counties.
Steve: Right. That's really interesting. What are some other stories from those first decades?
Henry: Well, we started something called Project Bug. A BUG is a bicycle user group. And at one point, we had about 15 of these. One or two may have been related to a business. Some were county specific. So we had a Cobb County bug and a Gwinnett County bug. And the goal was to send out a message and say every now and then tell your county commissioners the bicyclists need this, the bicycles need that. It was never thousands of bicyclists in Cobb or Gwinnett. It was a much smaller, tighter group, but they could speak for the others and request some changes be made.
Steve: So essentially advocating for the community, but also helping organize the community to advocate for itself.
Steve: By the time I discovered the organization, the name had changed to the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition. And if I remember it correctly, it was one morning, and I saw a bunch of bicyclists at the Thumbs Up Diner on Edgewood. And I guess maybe a couple of y'all had t-shirts that said Atlanta Bicycle Coalition. And you all looked like you were earnestly discussing bicycle issues and whatnot, but also just having a lot of fun. I wasn't even an active cyclist at the time. But it was really intriguing, and I was really heartened to know that such an organization existed.
That was probably around 2005. How big was the organization at that point? How was it evolving? That was about 15 years on, right?
Henry: Yeah, it's real tough to say. Things come and go, so...
Steve: That's interesting, like, even the size of the organization kind of ebbed and flowed over time.
Henry: If you're really a bike commuter, as a rule, you're just saying, you know, I just want to go home. Relatively few of us are such strong advocates. So I see many people with their long bikes with kids on the back and such, and more power to them, and they're not feeling called to become part of Propel. They just want to get to school, or get to work, and then get home.
Steve: Right. You mentioned the new bikes. It feels like technology has certainly, over the last 10 years, changed the game a bit.
Henry: Well, Atlanta has always had heat, hills, and humidity. From May to September. And yes, it still has hills. No matter what, you know. Even, you know, when it's 40 degrees out, the hills are still there.
But the heat and humidity have discouraged many cyclists over time. And now, with e-bikes, presto. Hills aren't a big problem, heat isn't a big problem. Because you can maintain a steady speed. Humidity is much less of a problem.
Steve: Towing a kid or two isn't as much of a problem. Running your errand and picking up something heavy, not as much of a problem.
Henry: Right.
Steve: I think it creates demand in a way, right?
Henry: Yeah. Demand.
Steve: Demand for better options.
Henry: Yes, I ran into a woman at Trader Joe's several months ago who had gotten an e-bike under the city's e-bike program. And she said it had changed her life. That she had much more mobility on her own, instead of trying to call an Uber at times, or waiting on the bus, or all the other things people have to do when they don't have a vehicle of their own that can go very far.
Steve: I remember when scooters came out, and I remember seeing some middle school kid [on a scooter] clearly going to school. That's when the scooters had just first hit the streets, and I immediately thought, wow, this is amazing. This kid would have needed a ride from somebody. Maybe a parent would have had to be late for work, or who knows what. But it really just opened up brand new opportunities. And now, I mean, the schools around my neighborhood, there's always trains of kids, adults, scooters, bikes, you name it.
Henry: There was a CDC chief who I used to hear talk about transportation, and he would ask his audience, how many of you walked or bicycled to school as a kid?
You know, two-thirds, 90% of the audience. I mean, a huge group. And then, how many of you have kids or grandkids who have walked or biked to school? And there would be very few hands. Because we've failed to plan for that, and all we planned for was people to get around with their own car.
Steve: Buses and cars.
Henry: Yeah, but buses are still a challenge in Atlanta.
Steve: So let's see here. Just a little bit of my story. I started donating to Atlanta Bicycle Coalition back when... back after I discovered you all. Even though I wasn't really riding a bike. I was a supporter of PEDS. And I was a walker, right? And I started giving money to Atlanta Bicycle Coalition because I figured the outcomes that help cyclists tended to help pedestrians as well. And it was only a decade later that I started actually biking to work for several years. And of course, then, in the last couple years, those two organizations, Atlanta Bicycle Coalition and PEDS, have come together and merged to form Propel. Because I think we all realize that they have common concerns, right, and hopefully can achieve more together.
What is your view of the bigger... of how the priorities have changed over the years from just being a bike-centered group to seeing, like, oh wait, it's more than just bikes here?
Henry: Yeah, well, as, as you know, I've said before, I always thought ABC should be the new organization's title, Anything But Cars.
Steve: Right.
Henry: Because it's very hard to find a unifying principle. You see somebody on a bike, well, are they going to their doctor's office? Are they going to the grocery? Are they going to work? Are they just riding for fun? You don't know.
One of our complaints in the past was that the DOT had this very narrow view. If I take my kid by bicycle, you know, to go play t-ball at a sports field, well, then I'm riding for recreation. But if I drive to North Georgia to see the fall leaves, well, that's for... that's a trip for transportation. And their refusal to say, oh, no, you're taking your kid to an organized event, that's transportation. You're riding aimlessly through the mountains to look at leaves. That's recreation.
We are not so limited now in our DOT leadership, but still everybody's thinking, oh, it's got to be good for cars, oh, we've got to have parking. Somebody pointed out the rebuilt Krispy Kreme is a suburban Krispy Kreme. It's got a window. It's got parking between the buildings and the street. If you really wanted it to be street-friendly, you'd put the main door on the street and the parking lot on the side. And we, we...
Steve: Yeah, there's still advocacy to do. Atlanta's not going to become less car-centric overnight. There's definitely still advocacy to do.
Steve: The one thing I've always liked about walking and cycling – and other modes of transportation when you're not in a car – is that you're just interacting more with people. You have surprise encounters with your neighbors and your friends and even strangers. And you actually have an opportunity to talk to people. You can't do that in cars. And it just really contributes to a feeling of community.
Henry: One of my great beliefs is in what I'm going to call “personal power”: that we all are capable of doing more than we realize. And indeed, we're all capable of using, literally, our personal power to bicycle to work. Or to walk, or pedal our eBike. That we don't need to have 3,000 pounds of metal around us to be safe and to be effective.
And what we know also is that eyes on the street are a crime deterrent. And so having something where people can indeed be visible and be looking at things makes a huge difference for a community. So, in that sense, yes, biking, walking, people taking the bus do have community. And they are more likely to get to know each other just by virtue of being in the same place at the same time. There are certainly documented cases of romances that have occurred because, “Oh yeah, we met on the bus!”
Steve: [laughs] I like that: Documented cases!
I think that’s interesting. We think of Propel as being advocacy around transportation, right? But how you walk through space, how you walk through your community … it is also advocacy about how your community is built. It is advocacy for the community itself.
Henry: Yeah, well, and also advocacy for making sure it stays walkable.
Steve: Yeah, and for the people in that community.
Henry: Yeah. And that brings up the issue of the last mile. You know, a bus may be great for 5 or 10 miles, but if it cannot help you get that last mile to your home, to your door, then that's a big problem. And that's where bicycles and scooters and other things can make a difference.
