Bike lanes have opened up across greater Kalamazoo. For some, the lanes are a god-send. For others, an annoyance. Yet biking has become an ever more popular mode of transportation, with benefits from health and wellness, to improving the environment, to building community.
Amelia Katanski, a professor at Kalamazoo College, teaches a seminar about bikes. Her teacher’s assistant, a Kalamazoo College senior, is Theo Neimann. They are part of the More Than a Cyclist Kalamazoo program.
“For me, cycling has always been an important part of my life,” Katanski says. “For leisure, for pleasure—I spent maybe a decade as a triathlete and have always really loved spending time on my bike in whatever way possible. Lately, that has included becoming more and more of a bike commuter.”
Katanski learned about the More Than a Cyclist program while spending time in Australia as a Fullbright Scholar. She appreciated their mission of humanizing people who ride bikes and decided to bring that mission to Kalamazoo. She learned that Kalamazoo County had the highest number of bike-car collisions in 2024, per the Michigan State Police 2024 Statewide Traffic Crash Data Year-End Report.
“Any cyclist you talk to, anybody who rides a bike in Kalamazoo, probably has a story of a close call where somebody passes way too close,” Katanski says. “People are driving way too fast. Speed is a really challenging issue in this community.”
A mathematics major, Theo Niemann is a teacher’s assistant for Katanski’s first year seminar, called Wheels of Change. The class rides together every other Friday.
“The Wheels of Change first-year seminar was really impactful for me as an introduction to college but also to the Kalamazoo area,” Niemann says. “I know Kalamazoo best by bike based on the hills and elevation more so than by Google Maps in my car. A big draw for many in the class was the finale of a trip to Copenhagen where we did some investigative research into one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world.”
Katanski adds that the goals of the class and their research is to help not only to introduce people to the many benefits of riding bikes, but to also increase safety for bike riders, to help those in vehicles have a better understanding of the challenges of bike riders sharing the road, and to reduce the potential for collisions.
Learn more about the program at More Than a Cyclist Kalamazoo.
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