A 95-year-old woman named Dolores Ring just went for a bike ride in Severna Park, Maryland, and she wasn’t the one pedaling. Volunteers with a nonprofit called Cycling Without Age strapped her into a trishaw, a three-wheeled bicycle with a passenger carriage up front, and pedaled her down a trail lined with flowers and greenery. “I just enjoyed the whole thing,” she said afterward, “I have never been in anything like this.”
The program now has around 3,500 chapters worldwide, and the concept is about as simple as it gets. Volunteer pilots pick riders up at their senior living communities and take them out for a slow cruise. Slow enough to chat, to make eye contact with neighbors, to stop and look around. Staff at the Severna Park community say passengers come back with a smile on their face, and that it uplifts their soul. The local chapter’s founder got involved while researching transit options for her own daughter, proof that these things often start with one person deciding to help.
If you’ve ever been on the Legacy Trail, or strolled the waterfront in Venice or Sarasota, it’s easy to picture this here. We have the paths, we have the bikes, and we have no shortage of retirees and snowbirds who’d welcome a morning outside. Starting a chapter takes a trishaw and a handful of willing volunteers. Want to see rides like this here on the Suncoast? Tell us in the comments who you’d take for a ride first.
