Bicycling in America

Two interesting articles about transportational bicycling in America from Slate:

From Andy Bowers:

A few months ago, I decided to try the absurd: I would start commuting the four miles to my office on a bike. In Los Angeles! I'd like to say it was environmental awareness or the high price of gas or even the desperate need to get more exercise that coaxed me onto Raymond Chandler's mean streets without my protective steel cocoon. I suppose each of those played a small role. But what really pushed me over the line and onto the bike was an August dispatch from Amsterdam written by my Slate colleague Seth Stevenson.

Seth described watching a crowd of Dutch theatergoers in their 50s and 60s leaving a play, hopping onto their bikes, and riding off into the night. I couldn't help picturing that lovely scene through an Angeleno's eyes: Wow, I thought, an event without valet parking! Seth went on to quote a friend: "There's something about riding a bike that makes you feel like you're 5 years old." Since that's a feeling I wouldn't mind more of in my life, I decided to get out of my Honda and onto the bike.

And Bill Gifford:

It seemed easy enough. I'm what the newspapers call an "avid" cyclist—rhymes with "rabid." I own four bikes, which I rarely use for actual transportation. Like most of the 90 million Americans who swung a leg over a bicycle last year, including our president, I rode for fitness and recreation only.

Then, last month, I went to Amsterdam for a friend's birthday party. I was amazed: Everyone rode bikes, everywhere. I saw 80-year-olds pedaling along beside young mothers with two and even three small children perched on various parts of their bikes, and dads trundling off to work in business suits and nice Italian shoes. The Dutch, I later learned, conduct 30 percent of all their trips—to work, for errands, socially—by bike. In America, that figure is less than 1 percent. We drive 84 percent of the time, even though most of our trips are less than 2 miles long. More than three-quarters of us commute alone by car, compared with just half a million (way less than 1 percent) who do so by bike, according to the 2000 Census. As a "committed" cyclist—another loaded adjective—I'd always tut-tutted these kinds of statistics.

In late October, I took a vow of automotive abstinence. I'd go everywhere by bike: daily errands, social events, even the "office" (a Wi-Fi cafe where I often work—4 miles away, over a decent-sized hill). I don't commute to an actual job, but I would go somewhere every day, rain or shine.

My own comment about making transportational bicycling work is this: most of us do a lot better if we do NOT make an all-or-nothing proposition.

If it is too cold, too hot, too far, too rainy, too snowy, or too-whatever-else-makes-you-miserable-riding-a-bike, then my advice is, just skip it and use some alternative transportation.

You're a lot better off doing 10%, 30%, 40%, or 60% of your trips by foot or pedal power and being happy about it than doing 100% and being miserable.

Because if you are miserable, you won't be doing 100% of your trips by bike for long . . . it will probably be more like 0%.