You’ve heard of the tooth-fairy and the sugar-plum fairy, but have you ever heard of a bike-fairy? If you opt for two wheels instead of four, you may have one watching over you on the streets of Carrboro.

 

Sitting on a bench in downtown Carrboro, bike-fairy Eric Allman has begun his watch over the morning commute.

“We’re sitting on the corner of Roberson and Weaver Street and looking for some folks who might be doing some good behaviors on their bikes,” Allman says.

His partner is Heidi Perry, who arrives helmet-clad and wearing a bike-shaped pin on her shirt.

Perry and Allman are both founding members of the Carrboro Bicycle Coalition. They started the bike-fairy program this summer with a grant from Carolina Tarwheels, a bicycle-advocacy group. The bike-fairies stay on the lookout for cyclists following the rules of the road: stopping at stoplights and stop-signs, not passing on the right, and signaling before a turn. They find and reward safe cyclists like Katelyn Murphy, who Allman waves down after she’s safely turned right onto Roberson Street.

“Excuse me! Would you like a free gift certificate for stopping at that light?” Allman calls after her.

“Sure!” says Murphy, and Allman offers her a selection of $5 gift certificates to “bike-friendly” businesses in town.

Perry says they started the bike-fairy program to show that most cyclists are following most traffic laws, even if they have a bad reputation with drivers.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase, ‘you cyclists.’ And I’m like do you know how many cyclists there are? I am one,” Perry says.

For Perry, reinforcing a positive image of cyclists isn’t just about easing tensions with motorists, it’s also about increasing public support for bike-friendly legislation.

“There’s House Bill 44, which is a law that has to do with infrastructure,” she explains.

The bill would put new restrictions on municipalities’ ability to create bike lanes on existing roads. Perry worries this kind of legislation comes from people who have had a few negative encounters with cyclists.

“There a lot of people who would be very happy, who are very anti-cyclist,” she says. “Because of these few people [unsafe cyclists], they would like to see a lot of our rights taken away. So I think it’s very important to show that it’s not all of us.”

But more important than showing cyclists’ good sides, the bike-fairies say their program is about making the streets safer in Carrboro and Chapel Hill. Between 2013 and 2014 the two towns had at least 60 accidents involving cyclists or pedestrians. Three of those accidents resulted in the death of a cyclist.

Perry and Allman stop and reward their second safe biker of the morning commute, Daniel Matute, who unlike a few other cyclists that morning, waited through an entire red light. Matute seems surprised to receive acknowledgement for following the law, but grateful nonetheless.

Matute rides off down Roberson, and Allman smiles as Matute signals before his left turn onto the bike-path.

“I feel like maybe he wouldn’t have signaled that time. Not only did he see us by now it’s in his brain,” Allman says. “If you reinforce it, it makes that person who did it 50 percent of the time, now do it 70 percent of the time, or maybe 100 percent of the time.”

After an hour on the street, Perry and Allman pack up for the morning, hop on their bikes and head to their day-jobs, all the while on the lookout for more safe, deserving cyclists.