Artists Support Bicycling by Painting Switch Boxes

If you’ve been in Union Square lately, you might have noticed a new pop of color on the sidewalk adjacent to vibrantly decorated storefront. Steps from the bicycle lane on Somerville Avenue stands a switch box covered in pastel and black-and-white bicycles, with the message: “Bike more, drive less.”

Somerville artist Doug Moore painted the switch box under the aegis of the Somerville Arts Council, who launched the Switchbox Project in 1997 to encourage local artists to take their talent to the streets by painting the rectangular, gray boxes on the city’s sidewalks that contain electrical switches.    

And Ken Richardson, a photographer who lives in the neighborhood and has been commuting by bicycle since the 1990s, painted a few years ago the red silhouette of a cyclist on the switchbox across the street, in front of Citizens Bank.

“I thought that since this box was so close to the road,” Richardson said in an e-mail, “it would look cool like a shadow of a cyclist was right next to the cars, reminding them to share the road.  

Rachel Strutt, who manages the council’s programs, said in an e-mail that the two switch boxes speak to “the strong and growing bike culture in the area.”

For some time, Moore, who works for Outside the Lines, a studio that rents space at Creative Union Gallery, was looking for artists to work with on a “street art” project with an “attention-grabbing and thought-provoking design,” he said in an e-mail. When the search proved fruitless, the bicycle enthusiast created and submitted a design to the Somerville Arts Council’s Switchbox Project.

Moore, 28, has encouraged Somerville residents to bicycle because he’s “baffled by how people can be hell-bent on driving so much in a city so walkable and bike-able” and by the amount of money drivers pay for gas, insurance, maintenance and parking.

If more people rode bicycles, at least some of the time, he said, bicycling in the city would become easier; drivers who occasionally biked would be more considerate to cyclists, and there would be fewer cars on the road, and therefore fewer hazards to face.

While Moore said he already “take[s] credit, in my mind, when I see what I perceive to be more people on bicycles than I saw yesterday, the real effect will be a slow one.” He said the city would have to add and improve bike lanes, and motorists would have to become more tolerant of cyclists, before a wave of people chose to travel by bicycle more often that not.