Cities Putting Bike Fleets on Their Streets to Save Energy, Time : Transportation: Hundreds of police departments have followed Seattle’s lead in putting officers on bicycles. Other agencies are now finding them useful.

As long as energy analyst Robbin Smith doesn’t have to carry a ladder to climb into someone’s attic, she likes to ride her city-owned bicycle on official business around town.

“It feels good, and it’s good for me,” she says.

The Planning Department in this city of 16,310 people likes it too. With a parking space as hard to find as a free ticket to the popular Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the three bicycles the department owns not only save money, they save time.

“It’s allowed us to get by with three cars instead of five,” says Planning Director John Fregonese. “In the summer, when it’s congested, our inspectors with bikes can beat their times with a car within three-quarters of a mile of the office.”

When Building Inspector Mike Broomfield pedals up to a house under construction with his helmet on and a cellular phone strapped on the back of his bike, he doesn’t get any ribbing from the builders.

“They see it as saving them money,” he says.

Adopted by hundreds of police departments since Seattle led the way three years ago, city bikes--mountain bikes with slimmer tires--are now showing up in other government vehicle fleets.

“It’s a slow start,” says Andy Clarke, project manager for the Bicycle Institute of America in Washington, D.C. “But just as it happened with police departments, I expect this kind of thing to take off as other people realize it is just common sense to have people use something other than cars for every trip.”

It’s part of a general increase in people riding bikes. The institute reports that 93 million Americans rode bikes in 1990, with 3.5 million of them using bikes to commute to work. It projects an increase of 15% this year, with a 20% increase in commuters.

Mountain bikes are fast increasing in popularity. With 21 indexed gears, fat tires and a more upright riding position, city and mountain bikes are more stable, more comfortable and require less exertion to ride than the racing 10-speeds that many of today’s adults grew up on.

“When you’re biking more for transportation than for exercise, you don’t want to arrive in a sweat,” Fregonese said.

With Seattle rated the best city in America for cycling by Bicycling magazine, it’s not surprising that King County, Wash., would have 22 bicycles being used regularly by road inspectors, visiting nurses, building inspectors, couriers, fairgrounds staff and sometimes even managers. The program started last April.

“We’d like to say it’s environmental consciousness and appreciation for the economics of cycling,” says Phil Miller, coordinator for King County’s RoadShare program. “But we know that’s all nonsense. People do it because it fits in, it’s fun, and allows some fitness time in a day where there is increasingly less time for fitness.”

Miller says he needs only two or three bikes for people to check out for trips around downtown. The rest are assigned to regular jobs where they work better than cars. For example, a half-dozen road inspectors ride together in a van, then are dropped off to fan out on their bikes. It saves on gas, and bikes don’t get in the way of other traffic the way a half-ton pickup does. So far, there haven’t been any injuries.

“All 22 bikes were paid for with the savings from buying one less automobile,” Miller said. “And it’s fitting into our lifestyle here. There is a legitimacy here to using a bike for a real trip, as opposed to just recreation.”

After reading about King County’s bikes, Roy Holmberg wanted some for Santa Cruz County in California.

As director of general services, he’s assembling a fleet from stolen bikes no one has claimed from the Sheriff’s Department and will offer them for official transportation instead of cars.

“My intent is to make it high-profile,” Holmberg says. “There’s going to be a kiosk, with a graphic sign on it, ‘County Employee Bicycle Pool.’ The whole idea is to get other people in the community and other organizations to follow suit.”

Cities are also promoting bicycle commuting.

Since 1978, Palo Alto has required a range of bicycle facilities at new industrial, office and residential developments. Some even provide lockers for the bikes and showers for the riders.

“It is something that has caught on,” says Gayle Likens, a senior city planner. Los Angeles is considering a similar ordinance.

Ellen Fletcher, who at 62 rides her bike so much she fills her car with gas only three times a year, persuaded the city of Palo Alto to pay mileage to city employees using their bikes on official business when she was on the City Council during the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s. It’s now up to 7 cents a mile.

“We wouldn’t be in the mess we are--the greenhouse effect, acid rain, going to war for oil and all the congestion--we wouldn’t have any of that if people used cars discriminately instead of automatically,” she says.

City employees in Glendale, Ariz., can earn a free bike if they ride it to work three days a week for a year. The bikes help meet state clean-air goals by getting people out of cars, said city ride-share coordinator Diane Adams.

“It’s my most popular program,” Adams said.

In Seattle’s Engineering Department, Michael Dornfeld’s job is to be sure bikes have a secure place in the city’s transportation future.

“We have more cars on the road than we can handle,” Dornfeld said. “If people can’t use bicycles on them now, they certainly will not be able to use bicycles on them in the next 20 or 30 years, when projections are that car use will double again.”