Local biker sees more commuters on the road

Every day, rain or shine, 52-year-old Carleen Carboni rides a bicycle from her North Chattanooga home to her Pilates studio on McCallie Avenue.

She just doesn’t stop there. She also rides her bike to shop at Greenlife Grocery and to work out at the downtown YMCA. She said 90 percent of her travel time is on a bike.

“I promised myself once the kids were grown I was going to get out of the car,” said Ms. Carboni, owner of Pilates of Chattanooga.

As traffic continues to increase across Chattanooga, Ms. Carboni has found one way to beat it — pedaling her bicycle through and around it. She said she started using her bike almost nine years ago as her primary method of travel.

Ms. Carboni bikes so much, the city once put an “abandoned” sticker on her car because it sat unattended for so long, she said. When it’s cold outside, she bundles up and rides her bike, she said, and she has rain gear for when it’s wet.

She was among a select group when she first became a bike commuter, she said, but the group is getting larger.

“When I started eight or nine years ago, there were few of us,” Ms. Carboni said. “Every year, more people take it up.”

If she drove from her house, it would take about 20 minutes to get to work, she said. On a bike, it takes her half an hour, but that means another 10 minutes of working out, she said.

Riding her bike does require more planning, she said. She must plan routes because the transportation system is “set up for cars,” she said. The quickest route for cars isn’t always the safest for bike riders, she explained.

But in the end, there’s something special about riding a bike, she said. She talks to people along her routes and gets to hear and smell the environment around her, she said.

“It’s fun,” she said. “It’s a sense of freedom.”

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