Jam Room Music Festival's Bicycle Events

Jay is celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Jam Room Recording Studio.  In honor of those years of working with bands to create great music in Columbia, Jay hosted a music festival on Main Street on October 13, 2012. He had a great team of people who helped make it a phenomenal event, with a bicycle ride and valet bicycle parking. In the planning stages, one of the things we wanted to do was make the festival bicycle friendly. We had bicycled to other festivals and found it a challenge to park our bicycles. Plus we knew that a number of festivals have 5Ks associated with them. What could be better than a morning bicycle ride to get people ready for beer and live music.

I got in touch with Natalie Britt, the director of the City's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC). They were super excited about the festival and the bicycle possibilities. At the same time, in conjunction with the Palmetto Conservation Foundation (PCF), the were starting the Handlebar Happy Hour series. The events are family friendly gatherings meant to foster open discussion about topics the bicycling and pedestrian community faces on a local and statewide level. The Happy Hours, held on the second Wednesday of each month, include organized bicycle rides to the Publick House. We decided it would be fun to kick-off the festival bicycle events with a Jam Room Music Festival themed Happy Hour. Tunes from the Jam Room 300-song compilation and the 25th Anniversary LP set the mood. We gave away some T-shirts and other swag, and a representative from Citizens for a Greater Midlands discussed the Penny referendum and benefits this would bring to cyclists and pedestrians. It was a fun evening of beer and bicycles.

On October 4 at First Thursday, we kicked off the festival with a screening of the documentary, 25 Years and Counting, produced by Wade Sellers of Coal Powered Filmworks. It was also a night of celebrating the opening of the new Nickelodeon Theater on Main Street. To celebrate, the Nickelodeon hosted a parade down Main Street. We decorated our bicycles and pedaled down the street promoting the Festival. It was a blast!    

On the day of the festival, bicyclists converged in the Vista at River Runner. Thirty or more cyclists joined Jay and I as we pedaled around Columbia in the early morning. We rode through USC, passed 701 Whaley, went up Heyward to the Holly Hill neighborhood, down Rosewood Drive, passed the Jam Room, and through Shandon. We continued down Devine Street through Five Points and campus, passed the Historic Columbia Foundation sites such as Mann Simons. We ended the ride traveling down Main Street to check out the new market, Soda City and then pedaled through the Vista Greenway tunnel back to our start location in the Vista. A map of the route can be found here.  The overall consensus was that Columbia needed more rides like this! 

Later in the afternoon, we organized a number of rides from different neighborhoods to the festival. The idea was that bicyclists would start riding from West Columbia, Earlewood, Rosewood, and Shandon to converge at the festival around 2 PM when it started. These rides were largely unsuccessful, but thank you to everyone who worked to make this happen.

What was successful was our bicycle valet! The BPAC and the PCF coordinated free and safe bicycle parking in Boyd Plaza in front of the Columbia Museum of Art. Bicycles were parked on barricades and watched by great volunteers, including the Regulators Derby Team. Bicycles were out in force. Over 100 bicycles parked at the valet and there were bicycles parked all around the festival on parking meters and light poles.

Thank you Columbia for making the Jam Room Music Festival a great music event AND a fun bicycle friendly celebration of 25 years of the Jam Room! I'm looking forward to more! So get your bicycle tuned up and put air in your tire. You don't want to miss the next one.