Memphis was in trouble.

In the early 2000s, the city was at or near the top of every major negative index of urban living: obesity, violent crime, poverty, and poor education. All those negatives meant that it was nearly impossible to recruit employees and businesses to the city. And to top it off, this magazine named Memphis one of the country’s worst cities for cycling in 2008 and 2010.

City and county leaders knew they needed to do something to turn the city’s fates around—but what? They needed so much: to improve public health, to fix blighted neighborhoods, to assist lower-income residents with basic needs.

When a group of citizens first floated the idea of building a 10.7-mile bike path called the Greenline in 2001, it was put down in a nearly unanimous vote. Local government considered it a frivolous use of taxpayer money.

But with that vote, a spark was lit. A C Wharton revived the push to build the Greenline when he became mayor of Memphis’s surrounding Shelby County in 2002. He saw the Greenline and all bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure as a means to combat Memphis’s status as one of the unhealthiest and fattest cities in the U.S. “Some of my supporters said, ‘That’s been tried before. You’re going to get your butt kicked.’ I said, ‘We gotta do this. But my approach is going to be different,’ ” he says.

The Big River Crossing Andrea Morales

For Wharton, building the Greenline was a balancing act. To get support for the project,

he needed to present it as a benefit to the majority low-income, African-American city, not simply a gift to affluent whites. So he touted the project as a place for children to play, free of charge, where they could get out and run around. “At that time, a large number of our children suffered from [lung disease] COPD and asthma,” he says. “You can do something about that without taking a pill every day.” Finally, the county commissioner agreed: They’d try it. The measure passed, and the Greenline opened in 2010.

While cyclists applauded the opening of the Greenline, its success was a surprise to many. “People thought it was going to be a disaster,” Nicholas Oyler, the city’s bikeway and pedestrian program manager, says. Citizens worried it would bring crime to their doorsteps, or be a waste of the county’s limited resources.

A Pedaltown bike shop window Andrea Morales

But it drew people out of their homes and into the community. On any given day, you could find a wide swath of the population on the path: dedicated cyclists spinning to group rides; commuters pedaling to work; moms pushing strollers; schoolchildren riding scooters.

Initially, the path was just 6.7 miles long, but with subsequent additions, it has grown by four miles; it now reaches one of the biggest parks in Memphis and provides an escape from the sprawling suburbs.



The Ripple Effect

While the Greenline would be a boon to residents, getting it built wasn’t the only hurdle in turning Memphis bike-friendly. About four months before it opened, plans to further improve the cycling infrastructure were nearly derailed. The city had applied for federal funds to add 55 miles of bike lanes. But one day, a city engineer let slip to a coworker that he wasn’t planning to actually use any of the money. His excuse was that the city didn’t have a bicycle and pedestrian coordinator to draw the lines, so he planned to skip it.

When word got out that those funds were being wasted, politically aware cyclists in Memphis mobilized. Cycling advocate Anthony Siracusa and the director of Revolutions Bike Co-Op Kyle Wagenschutz contacted area retailers, and asked as many cyclists as they could to join them for a ride to city hall, followed by a demonstration.

The bike share program in use. Andrea Morales

The timing wasn’t dynamite. It was mid-July, and the day was devastatingly hot and humid. But the city’s cycling community delivered: Nearly 125 riders showed up. They pedaled five miles, dripping with sweat. And when they arrived, they got a reception they didn’t expect.

Mayor Wharton wanted to talk. While his staff brought out coolers of ice-cold bottled water, he promised the assembled cyclists that he would begin striping for bicycle lanes immediately. And he kept his word—the next day, workers were on the roads, putting in the first new bike lanes. A week later, the engineer who had planned to not use those funds resigned.

The Greenline and completed bike lanes solidified the city’s commitment to bikes. People began buying homes because of their proximity to the Greenline, raising property values. It even spurred upgrades to lower-income neighborhoods along the path, like an apartment building at the path’s west end called Tillman Crossing. When the Greenline opened, the building was boarded up and smashed glass filled the parking lot. The apartments have since been renovated, the sign fixed, and the walls freshly painted.

Even with Memphis’s first wave of new lanes, cyclists still struggled to fan out across the community. Sarah Newstok, the program manager of community development council Livable Memphis (now BLDG Memphis), knew where to go next: Broad Avenue. The street was a few blocks north of the path’s west end. A lane could give cyclists a safe route to the city’s Overton Park, while providing a boost to the neighborhood’s struggling businesses.

Livable Memphis was determined to make it happen. The organization recruited Pat Brown, co-owner of local art gallery T. Clifton Art, to help with the project, dubbed “A New Face for an Old Broad.” Brown was ready to help. She had moved her gallery to the neighborhood in 2008 for more space, only to realize walk-in business at the location was minimal.

In November of 2010, with the help of Livable Memphis, Brown and others from the neighborhood cleaned out debris from shuttered stores, painted, ran electrical wiring, and found business owners to open pop-up stores and restaurants. They painted murals on storefronts too dilapidated to use. And then, the night before the weekend festival was to take place, volunteers painted a bike lane on each side of Broad. A city engineer even dropped by with a tape measure to confirm the width was correct. “We wanted to demonstrate how we could calm the street, slow traffic, and really promote bicycle ridership,” Brown says. And it worked: In the following months, the gallery experienced a bump in walk-in traffic. “We started having people stop and ask how long we’d been there. They had never noticed the businesses along the street because they were driving so fast.”

Painted pavement and racks on Broad Ave. Andrea Morales

Today, that homemade bike lane is still there. And what’s more, every storefront is open. There’s an award-winning craft brewery, and a $50 million, 400-unit apartment building has been proposed.

That success didn’t go unnoticed. In 2012, the city formalized Broad Avenue’s model in a program called MEMFix, which uses weekend festivals with music, food, and pop-up stores buoyed by temporary bike lanes to draw people to neglected neighborhoods all over the city.

What’s Next

For Hal Mabray, the owner of the Peddler Bike Shop near the University of Memphis, the change in the city’s attitude toward bikes over the past few years has been stark.

“The year the Greenline opened, my business doubled,” says Mabray. His shop’s location is less than a mile from the path, and the biggest gains have been in hybrids and e-bikes.

Expanding the Greenline, and access to it, is an ongoing project. Currently, an addition to the east end of the path is increasing the length to 12.5 miles and bringing it deeper into the suburb of Cordova, with 61,000 new people.

But the improvements haven’t stopped at bike lanes. In 2016, the mile-long Big River Crossing opened as the nation’s longest active bike bridge, where riders and pedestrians can cross the Mississippi River to West Memphis, Arkansas.

The city also launched a bike share this year called Explore. Its 50 stations are concentrated in the heart of the city—midtown and downtown—in less-affluent areas, making transportation more accessible to low-income residents.

For politicians, bike lanes are a means to a broader end. But by investing in cycling, Memphis has transformed, becoming a city more welcoming to everyone. That change now undergirds a host of development in the city: new housing, shopping, and jobs. Memphis is no longer a city in decline. It’s a town that, one lane at a time, is being saved by bikes.