Jett Marks

Jett set aside his training wheels in Savannah, GA and soon after was racing to baseball practice, piloting his swept-wing bike on reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines, and during occasional lapses of imagination, riding just to be riding.

While earning an engineering degree at Georgia Tech, he toured the state on overnight trips to the mountains, lakes, and forests by bike, learning the independence afforded by carrying everything you needed on a bike.

After getting out of Tech, the bike-commute to Calculus XXVI turned into the bike-commute to the office, although some of those offices were in Alpharetta and Duluth. (Those were dark times when it took >1.5 hours one-way by bike and 45 minutes by car.) Since 2004 however, Jett's commute has been car-free and he's proud to say “I've never felt better (about my commute).”

In the late 1980's, Jett and his wife Beth revived Virginia-Highland's newsletter and soon were elected board members of the VH Civic Association. This led to work with other community organizations including forming a non-profit that pursued transportation funding for improvements along Ponce de Leon. When kids came on the scene in the early 90s, Jett's community involvement turned into 10 years of soccer coaching. Now that his kids show him how the game is played, he is spending more time piloting a pair of touring bikes: a beater for commuting/errands and a swept-wing model for long weekend rides. The bike has led him to ABC.

And what might the future hold?

Jett has been leading rides, learning and sharing the places and routes that cyclists enjoy, while seeking the right balance between the tried-and-true and the adventurous. He puts it in this pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps sort of way, “I want to build the motorists' expectation of finding cyclists on certain routes, reinforcing those routes currently in use, but also encouraging cycling where there would be more cyclists, if only there were more cyclists.”

This past year, as leader of the Atlanta Bike Geeks, Jett has been running point-guard for ABC's website. The Atlanta Bike Geek's mission is to make cycling better for Atlantans, through technology. Look for more features, more maps, more tools, and more useful information from ABC as the Bike Geeks spin the propellers on their beanie caps.

In a community as broad and diverse as Atlanta, there is no shortage of opportunity for volunteers to express their talent. ABC was formed, nurtured, and continues to grow out of the strength of its volunteers. Jett wishes to make volunteering for ABC easy, to gain the best of volunteer's talents, and to add their voice to ABC's voice, singing perhaps different parts, but from the same sheet of music.

Some cyclists “take up” cycling, adding it to their lives as if it were a separate component that could be plugged into an otherwise complete life. For others, cycling is their life, dominating their identity and serving as the center from which all other parts of their life emanate. For Jett, cycling is neither an add-on or a hub, but instead, the happy intersection of the pursuit of other goals: raising physical activity and lowering mental stress, improving the community's quality of life, enjoying the outdoors, and all the while treading softly and raising spirits. For Jett, cycling's only meaning comes from the bicycle's capacity to help him reach these other meaningful goals – unless of course, he is at 42,000 feet, on a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines.