20 People to Watch - Becky Katz

On a chilly Wednesday night just before Thanksgiving, Becky Katz unintentionally proved why her job as chief bicycle officer is necessary.

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As Katz and I coasted down Trinity Avenue in front of City Hall on our bikes, an impatient motorist behind us swerved into the other lane, floored it as he passed, and then proceeded to zip through a red light.

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The New York City native chuckled before we stopped, waited for the light to turn green, and began pedaling the slow incline toward Castleberry Hill. This is the first leg of a nightly journey Katz takes from City Hall through the West End, and finally to the Adair Park home she shares with her partner. Sometimes she switches up routes to get a better understanding of Atlanta’s approximately 1,600 miles of streets.

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Learning what works and what doesn’t in Atlanta for people pedaling on two wheels — and how to fix those problems — is how Katz spends her days at City Hall. Since starting the job in mid-October, she’s pored over desk-size printouts of the city’s myriad transportation plans, met with officials and neighborhood groups, taken staffers on bike rides around Downtown, and done interviews while biking.

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Her aim is to accomplish Mayor Kasim Reed’s goal of making Atlanta, still in the relatively early stages of a long effort to fix decades of building roads just for cars, a top 10 city for bicycling. As the city’s first chief bicycle officer — the job is funded by the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition — Katz is City Hall’s in-house source for making sure bicyclists can use Atlanta streets safely.

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“We need to move to a place where we build streets that people want to be on but also are safe to move through,” says Katz, who was struck by a motorist while biking in February. “That’s what we’re trying to achieve here. A bicycle network that people can choose to bike around our city to get to the destinations they want to go to safely, comfortably, enjoyably.”

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One way to do so is to make sure that street repaving and restriping funded by the infrastructure bond include bike lanes where they make sense. It also involves educating motorists, such as the one that zipped past us after work, that bicyclists are allowed to — and actually supposed to — ride in traffic. Finally, she wants to get more people on bikes, say, with a bike-share program.

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The bike-share program is supposed to launch this summer and Katz will oversee its roll out. It’s important, Katz says, that the initiative is available to all people. Prior to joining the city, the Cornell University graduate who fell in love with bicycling as a graduate student at a closed-off campus in Saudi Arabia, worked as a project manager at Park Pride, one of the city’s most active greenspace advocacy groups. She earned applause for the way she engaged communities that were traditionally overlooked, and where bicycling is not just a means of exercise or recreation, but transportation.

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“We’ve got to make believers out of people, engage them, and collect data,” she says, before we part ways to pedal to our different neighborhoods. “Because the only way to get there is to do it.”