A View From the Road: my life on a bike

For about two months, in an effort to reduce my carbon footprint and to make a meaningful contribution to society, I biked to work. My intentions weren't entirely altruistic. In an effort to save money in this glorious economy I have been car-less for the past year and counting. . .

Irregardless of my motives, almost everyone I talked to thought that I was crazy for attempting such an idea. I am pleased to report that I survived each trip without incident. (God protects saints and fools.) But it did give me a new-found respect for bikers and also a look at the road from a new angle, not of a pedestrian nor a driver, but a biker.

I'd always been rather dismissive of bikers. Like runners, they never look very happy. If anything, they appear rather grim. This could be said of all participants in any form of exercise, except, maybe Jazzercise, but this is especially true of bikers. Even before I started biking to work I wondered why these crazy people would risk literal life and limb to embark on such an activity. Sometimes I still do.

In any case, being on a bike past the age of twelve is a strange and ultimately invigorating adventure. I gained a much better sense of space, as one would never be able to achieve in a car. I was able to take in more architectural details of homes, landscaping, etc., and felt more physically engaged with my surroundings.

I also noted drivers' reaction time to me, i.e. whether they gave me space by driving closer to the dividing line than usual, or if they nearly ran me over due to their not even be cognisant that bikers DO exist, not just in the Tour de France.

I also learned a lot about the need for a bike light at night, breathable clothing, not putting your keys in your front pocket, the joys of Gatorade, and a good backpack that was capable of both carrying my work stuff and able to handle the inevitable amount of sweat I worked up while biking. I highly recommend vinyl/plastic backpacks circa 1992 or Columbia brand backpacks, which have built in cushions in the back and will help wick away moisture build-up. A back-of-the-bike little rack works for some people, but no matter how I tried to bungee cord my backpack to that thing the sucker wouldn't stay. I partially attribute that to operator error. But I digress.

I always wore a helmet, a skateboarder's style, not a true bicycle helmet, which ironically, Tom Vanderbilt, in his book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), says may be a disadvantage to me, at least statistically. [Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, Tornoto, 2008] To paraphrase his findings from page 38 (of the 2008, first edition) it was noted in studies that cyclists who wore helmets were more "serious, sensible and predictable road users" and thus, drivers did not give the helmet-wearing cyclists as much room on the road as they would a non-helmet wearing cyclist as it was presumed that the helmet wearing cyclist would be less prone to erratic swerving, etc., Great.

I pride myself on always being a "good" driver, this is a relative term, as discussed in Mr. Vanderbilt's aforementioned book in Chapter Two and will also be examined later in this blog. But I like to think that I am mindful of cyclists, pedestrians, small children, squirrels and other creatures with whom I share the road. However, now when I see a cyclist I know what exactly what his or her P.O.V. is. Don't think I ever want to tackle the perspective of the jogging mom with the stroller though.