Two Wheels Good
April 29, 2008 - Michael Davis
For Rebecca Serna (M.S. ’07), what was a convenient way to get around her college town has become a part of her everyday life — and her career.
Serna was hired as executive director of the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign in September and has since turned her focus on transportation and transit alternatives toward cycling and making the city of Atlanta a more cycle-friendly place. And yes, she rides her bike every day from her West End home to the ABC headquarters downtown, and back.
“It’s a commitment, but you know what, I look forward to my commute and I don’t think many people can say that,” says Serna, who began biking regularly while in college. “You know, I can’t really ask other people to do something I’m not willing to do myself. But it isn’t the chore that I thought it would be. It’s just fun.”
Serna’s civic and professional focus has long been in transportation. She can count herself as one of the founding members of Citizens for Progressive Transit, an Atlanta-based volunteer group focused on commute alternatives. And during her time in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies’ urban policy master’s program, she interned at the Georgia Department of Transportation, working in the Bicycle and Pedestrian Office reviewing crash data.
“I read a lot of police reports,” she says. “Overnight, you know, from starting that project, I became a much safer cyclist. It was really eye-opening.”
Before her five-month stint at GDOT, Serna completed a Fulbright scholarship in Bogotá, Colombia, studying a new transportation budgeting process that sought to include more input from citizens.
“I wanted to study public participation in transportation planning, but it turns out the way that they did transportation planning, there was not a whole lot of public involvement,” she says. “So I ended up instead following the participatory budgeting process that they had just started. It was really interesting.”
As part of her work with the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign, Serna is overseeing the group’s effort to raise its profile as an advocate in the planning process, ensuring planners and city engineers consider bike facilities when planning new road projects and upgrades. She says the group will continue to improve its availability as a resource for people interested in cycling, either as a commute alternative or for recreation.
Reciting the organization’s mantra, she says: “Our mission is to get more people biking, over more routes, more safely, to more destinations in a more bicycle-friendly community. We call them the ‘mores.’”