This is a short video of the busiest cycle path in the Netherlands.  The street is named Vredenburg.  There’s a marketplace nearby.   It’s in Utrecht, a mid-sized city of 330,000 that dates back to the 8th century.  Vrendenburg averages about 37,000 cyclists per day.  Try to look at the first 35 seconds of the video if not the whole thing.  It shows what the street used to look like before bicycles became the preferred method of moving around Dutch cities.

I often hear from people that this sort of thing would never work here in the United States.

“Of course it would.” I challenge them.

“No, Europe’s different.”  they claim.  “Their cities are older and more compact”

“Hmmm.  Older, yes.  More compact?  Not necessarily.”

The Chicago Loop is as compact as any European city.

Land is scarce in Utah, so cities here tend to be compact as well. But even in mostly compact Ogden, the waste is obvious. It’s almost always driven by a need to accommodate automobiles.

Salt Lake City. I’m on a train on the TRAX Green Line.Parking and gas pumps are not the “highest and best use.”

Downtown Indianapolis. This isn’t inevitable. This is a choice…a bad choice.

Vredenburg, Utrecht.  This is also a choice.  It didn’t just happen.

Some American cities are quite compact.  Others aren’t.  It’s mostly about available space.  That’s why Detroit sprawls while Pittsburgh mostly doesn’t.  Most of Europe doesn’t have the luxury of carving up virgin cornfields, so they look at land use a little differently than we do.   When land is scarce,  allocating it to automobiles make no sense.

That’s the crux of the matter right there.  The reason most of our cities are not as compact as European cities is because we’ve chosen to build them around automobiles and they’ve chosen differently.  The results of this choice are stark.   Their cities are mostly thriving.  Ours are mostly dying.  We could fix this.  Maybe we should.   You already know this.  You wouldn’t have made it this deep into the post if you didn’t mostly agree.  The people we need to reach are not here.   They’re our friends and neighbors who think that biking is a peculiar hobby and nothing more when in fact it is the answer to what ails us.  Please share this with them.  Help them understand that they hold the power to make their very own cities and towns more livable.  We can’t do it alone.  We need their help.  There is no other way.

Thank you.

I don’t travel much on business these days, but I had to hit the road this week.  We had a series of meetings at company headquarters in Indianapolis.   It was to be a fast and busy trip.  In on Thursday morning and out on Friday afternoon.    We had a team building event Thursday evening until 9:00 PM.   I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to cycle.  This is kind of a big deal to me since one of my goals for the year is to cycle five miles or more every day.  I don’t think I’m obsessive-compulsive about it, but we’re 194 days in and I haven’t missed yet so I wanted to keep the streak alive.

Good morning Indianapolis. Let’s roll.

They say that where there’s a will, there’s a way and I believe that.  I was able to get five-plus miles in each day while fulfilling the obligations to my company and co-workers.    Here’s how I did it.

First, I did a little pre-trip research before I left our home in Iowa.  I knew that Indy has B-cycle bike share and so I identified the closest station to my hotel.  It was right across the street.  I also reviewed the hours and discovered that I could rent a bike until midnight.   That meant I could ride late if I had to and I did.

I also downloaded the Zagster app to my phone.  Zagster is a private sector bike share company that works with hotels, universities and even individual companies.  I didn’t realize that they had a presence in Indy but they do.    The app automatically locks in on the closest bikes.   I also discovered that Zagster has bikes in Peoria Illinois and they’re available 7/24.  In a worst case, I could stop in Peoria and get my miles in on the way back home.

Heading into Fountain Square. You’ll get to know your destination better on a bike.

While doing my recon, I also discovered Spinlister.  This is a national service that allows you to rent a bike from a private party.  You can even specify the kind of bike  (mountain, road, fat, cruiser, fixxie, etc.) you’d like to rent and the number of days you need it for.   Spinlister might not be practical for a quick trip, but if you’re going to be in a place for 3 or more days and have the flexibility to store the bike, it is a great option.   I’ll use Spinlister if we fly to Arizona to visit my folks later this year.

Last, but not least, local bike shops are often an option if you need a bike for a day or two.  Be sure to check and see if your destination city has a bike cooperative.  Even if they can’t rent you a bike, they can often tell you where you can find the best deal.

Bottom line, you don’t have to stop riding when you hit the road for business or pleasure.  All it requires is a little planning.  The payoff is that you’ll often discover things about your destination that you never would in a car.  Best of all, you get to keep on rolling.

There’s something jarring about going back to a place where you used to live and discovering that “your” grocery store has been shuttered and abandoned.  There are a lot of retail stores closing these days, but grocery stores tend to be more personal than most.  We take them for granted until they’re gone and when they go they leave a big hole in the community.

It once was a grocery. Now it’s blight.

Red is dangerous, yellow means caution. The yellow lines would be green if motorists wouldn’t race up these access roads.

I was back in suburban Indianapolis last week and on the way out of town I met my daughter for dinner.  That gave me an opportunity to see “our” old grocery store.  It finally succumbed after years of bad management decisions and an inability or unwillingness to compete based on the new rules of retail.

The first thing that struck me as I drove up was the empty parking lot.  What an epic waste of space.  It’s bigger than the store.  Juxtaposed against the adjacent neighborhood, it looks like you could put 15-20 homes on that land.  I also noticed the lack of sidewalks.   Here in Iowa, sidewalks are everywhere.  No sidewalks and acres of parking make non-motorized access a challenge.  I guess that’s why I never noticed a bike here.

Even so, this is one of the better commercial developments in town.  There’s access from a lightly traveled street on the backside which makes it easier for cyclists and pedestrians, all things being equal.  It also wasn’t out along the highway on the edge of town.  If you think about it, local people are a grocery store’s bread and butter.  There’s absolutely no reason to build on the main road, but that’s where many suburban stores are these days.  That decision alone virtually forces people to come by car.

It is slowly occurring to me that the way commercial sites are developed discourages people from accessing them by any means other than a personal automobile.    I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be parking, but how much and where you put it matters a great deal.  Is it possible for pedestrians and bicyclists to safely access the development?    It wasn’t there.  The three access roads from the rear and right side were virtual racetracks.   Access from the front required one to navigate the parking lot.   None of these scenarios were ideal.

Intelligent design. The low speed limits on surrounding streets combined with entry points that allow cyclists and pedestrians to bypass most of the parking lot make this approach a winner.

That’s why I love the new Hy-Vee store in Jefferson.   At first glance, it appears that there’s almost as much parking here as there is at the Marsh store in Brownsburg but the positioning is completely different.  The speed limit on the surrounding streets is 25 mph.  The store is embedded in the town’s grid, so people are already traveling more slowly.  There are sidewalks on both sides of the store and no long access roads.    It’s just a few feet from the street to the three bike racks.  It’s safe and easy for cyclists and pedestrians.    Last time I was here, I saw an 80ish woman on a 3-wheeler.  That’s something you wouldn’t ever see in the burbs.  It’s also easy for motorists.  This design works for everyone, regardless of their mode of transit.

And so I’m glad that we’re starting to see more and more of this type of development, even in places like suburban Indy where speed and car convenience still rules the day.  Just down the road from the abandoned Marsh store, developers are building the town’s first mixed use, high density development.  Since the end of World War II, our built environment has been focused on the convenience of motorists at the expense of everyone else.   That’s starting to change.  The payoff is safer, more livable communities.  Who doesn’t want that?

It’s RAGBRAI week in Iowa and even though we’re only two days in, I’ve come to the unmistakable conclusion that RAGBRAI is worthy of all the praise that is heaped on it from points both near and far.  For the uninitiated, RAGBRAI is the (Des Moines) Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa.  It was the brainchild of two reporters who thought it was strictly a one and done kind of thing, but they’ve been doing it for 45 years now and it’s stronger than ever.  It’s the granddaddy of all state bicycle tours, and people come from all over the world to participate.

The idea behind RAGBRAI is pretty simple.  Start somewhere out by the Missouri River and finish on the Mississippi.  In fact, tradition demands that you dip your rear tire into Big Muddy before starting and your front tire in Old Man River to finish.   In between, you spend seven days and a little over 400 miles  on Iowa two lane.   At night you’ll get to sample seven different small towns where you are celebrated and treated like prodigal sons and daughters who have finally found their way home.  The route changes every year and it’s quite an honor to be chosen as an overnight town.  The competition is fierce and local communities like Orange City (this year’s night one town) pull out all the stops.

One thing that strikes me about RAGBRAI  is that it isn’t over-commercialized like so many similar events.  Take the official jersey.  It’s corporate logo free.  That’s pretty rare in this day and age.   RAGBRAI Is also focused on small towns instead of the big city.   The Tour of France finishes on the Champs Elysee.  This year’s RAGBRAI finishes in Lansing, Iowa, which is about as far from Paris (both geographically and ideologically) as one can possibly be.  Sure, we get the occasional big name.  Lance Armstrong showed up a while back and Counting Crows played one of the towns a few years ago, but it’s not about them…not even a little.

RAGBRAI is more Woodstock than Tour de France. Many participants are not everyday riders as evidenced by equipment like this improvised helmet.

And therein lies the magic.   RAGBRAI isn’t about the big shots.   It isn’t really even about bicycles.  The bike is just an excuse to set off on a week long barnstorming tour of small town middle America.   RAGBRAI is really about those small towns and eating on the lawn and listening to music and camping out with 8,500 of your closest pals between seven day long bike rides.  It’s about renewing old friendships and making new ones.  It’s about reconnecting with something that, deep down, we know we’ve either already lost or are at grave risk of losing.  There’s a hunger for this and it’s broad and deep.  It’s visceral.  It’s palpable.   This is the real thing.

And so people come to Iowa for a week every summer to seek out the simple that they have been denied in the rest of their lives.  They get on a bicycle and in the process they become children again.  They come for the magic without understanding that they are the magic and can make every day magic if they want to.  Some are undoubtedly changed.  So are we.   They make us all better as a result.

So welcome to RAGBRAI and welcome to Iowa.   We’re glad you’re here and we’re glad you brought your bikes.  Ride on.

“Bikes have a tremendous disruptive advantage over cars. Bikes will eat cars.” – Horace Dediu

There’s a lot going on in transportation and human mobility these days.  We’re  sitting at a strategic inflection point.  Think Internet, circa 2000.   Just like then, very few people understand how dramatic the changes that lie ahead will be.  Just like then, they will happen far more quickly than most of us can imagine.  The wheels have been set in motion.  There is no going back.

One of the unsung benefits of bicycling for transportation is reclaiming space lost to the automobile.

This is good for those of us who love bicycles.  I say this with absolute  confidence.  Moving around the country  has given me a certain perspective I wouldn’t otherwise have.  The world is getting more crowded.   It’s so obvious.  I saw it along Colorado’s Front Range in the 1980s and again in  the endless sprawl of Minnesota’s Twin Cities ten years later.  More recently, I lived it along the crowded IH35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio and again along Utah’s Wasatch Front as both of these metroplexes exploded with people.  In hindsight, our move to rural Iowa was as much about finding the last uncrowded place as it was anything else.

Open space is rapidly disappearing and as it does, more and more of us are beginning to question just how much of what’s left should be allocated to people as opposed to personal automobiles.    For the last 75 years or so, cars have ruled.  That’s starting to change.  We’re beginning to understand just how much we’ve had to give up to accommodate our cars.  The vitriol directed at things like self driving cars and bicycles suggests to me that many people understand that the ground is about to shift under their feet.  Change always freaks us out and this time is no different in that regard.  That said, change is inevitable.   Change is the only constant.

 Horace Dediu “gets” this.  He’s a technologist, so his realm is in leveraging tools to create solutions.  We ascribe a sort of magic to technology, but that’s misleading. Technology is  just about leveraging tools.  When it comes to moving humans with the smallest possible footprint and consumption of power, there is no tool quite like a bicycle.  Throw on a tiny electric motor and you eliminate virtually all of the objections to cycling as transportation.   You won’t labor.  You won’t sweat.   Going uphill is a breeze.  Yes, I know, sometimes it rains.   That’s what GoreTex is for.

And so I’m absolutely convinced that Horade Dediu is right.  He views bikes as similar to other transformational technologies, like Amazon, for example.  Amazon ate Borders for an appetizer.  Now it’s eating everything else in the retail space.

Bicycles are going to eat cars…not because I like bikes, but rather because bicycles are a sustainable solution in a world that is pushing up against unmovable limits. Cars aren’t sustainable…not even tiny electric ones.  Our world badly needs more sustainable solutions .   Bicycles solve the space problem.   They help mitigate the effects of climate change and reduce road building budgets.  Bicycles help us live closer and better.   They help make us healthier.   Folks can embrace the future or they can resist it, but either way that rumbling  sound you hear isn’t going away.  It’s the change  tsunami and it will engulf us whether we want it to or not.   I believe life is better on the front side of the wave.  I know for absolute certain that life is better on a bike.  That’s why I do this.  You, too, I hope.

Find your bike.  Saddle up.  Ride.

The following infographic was posted this past weekend on Twitter  by Brent Todarian, an urban planner and supporter of active transportation based  in Vancouver BC.   It’s from a grass roots movement to promote cycling in Scotland, and it does a great job of reflecting the societal disconnect between what we say and what we really believe.

If you read what I write here with any regularity, you already know this.  The problem is that other people don’t know it and there are a lot more of them than there are of us.  What’s worse, most of them don’t view cycling and walking as transportation solutions at all.  This is because they’ve constructed their lives in a manner that favors the use of a car.  They could construct their lives differently, but they don’t see any need to do so.   Preaching to these folks about the benefits of cycling is pretty much a lost cause.

Yet that’s what most cycling advocates do.  It feels to me like more of a money grab than anything real.  Hire a consultant, draft a bicycle master plan, build 2 blocks of protected bike lanes, throw down some green paint and then promote your city or town as bicycle friendly in an effort to attract tech workers.   Maybe your mayor cycles to work once or twice a year, too.  It has become a cliche, and not surprisingly, it changes nothing.

SRTS doesn’t have to be fancy. It just has to make it easier to get around on bike or foot.

So we need to rethink how we’re spending our human capital.  We need a new story to tell.   Mine starts with children.   Most parents want to talk about their children.  They love them and they want what’s best for them and there’s no doubt that bicycling is better than riding a bus or being dropped off at school in a car.   They intuitively understand this and like it.  Many of them may have ridden bicycles to school as children themselves.

So I have been thinking about this a lot.  Maybe Safe Routes to School is a way to leverage all that we know about cycling that is good.   I’ve known of SRTS for a long time but I didn’t know where it came from.  I assumed it was just some USDOT  government program.  I was wrong.  It turns out that the Safe Routes to School movement started in Denmark in the 1970s, about the same time Stop de Kindermoord was changing Dutch culture.  That’s interesting.  Two of the best cycling countries on the planet got there by focusing on the safety of children and later, after adults saw what could be done, they started cycling too.

I recently sat down with a couple of economic development people here in Iowa and Safe Routes to School came up.  I don’t think these folks really view bicycles as an economic driver, but they intuitively understand just how much sense it makes for children to cycle to school.    We talked about side paths and budgets, for sure, but we  also talked about ways we could make the streets safer for everyone and what benefits we’d gain as a community if we could.   We discussed the need for lower speed limits and a culture that supports multiple forms of transportation.  We discussed education and enforcement of existing laws, again, in the context of children.  These are things that cost pennies and return huge dividends.  They understood in a way I don’t think they would have if we were talking about  adults on bikes.

The ultimate goal of  cycling advocacy is to create cyclists.  We have to get better at it.  When we  swing the numbers our way it will be easy to flip the pyramid and get the money we need to build out infrastructure.   It’s going to take time.   Safe Routes to School is an established program that provides an opportunity to engage non-cyclists with a  compelling story and generate support.    It’s an opportunity to promote education and enforcement so that motorists don’t speed and get sloppy around crosswalks.  When this happens, everyone wins…even the motorists.

If you’re in one of the states on the map below and  interested in talking about this with an eye towards focusing local officials on bicycle friendliness, let me know.  We can start online, you can come to Iowa, or I can come to you.

Pedalfree’s service area.

One of the biggest complaints I have with bikeshare is that most existing systems have limited reach.  They’re typically placed in the downtown district and seem to be designed more with tourists than residents in mind.   I’ve ridden bikeshare across the country and the  only exceptions I can think of are in New York, Washington, Chicago and maybe Minneapolis.   Those are all huge systems with thousands of bicycles.  Most cities don’t have the bandwidth to do what they’ve done.  That’s why I think that the mobility hub concept recently introduced in Des Moines is worthy of consideration everywhere.

In Des Moines, bikeshare is now more than just a downtown thing.

By combining docking stations like this with transit stops, officials can increase the reach of both bikeshare and transit…a true win win!

So what’s a Mobility Hub?  The concept is really simple.  Bikeshare and transit officials work together to identify transit stations outside the core where there’s enough critical mass to justify a bikeshare station.   The station is placed adjacent to the transit stop so that people can easily hop off the bus and on to a bike to get to their destination.  This solves part of a long standing problem that discourages transit use and dramatically extends the reach and visibility of bikeshare.  It also repositions bikes in the mind of residents.  Instead of just a way to have some fun tooling around downtown, bikes become transportation vehicles.

In Des Moines, the first four transit hubs are located northwest of downtown on the campus of Drake University. This is good. College students are inclined to hop on bikes anyway, and Drake’s location between downtown and the vibrant Beaverdale neighborhood makes this placement  a natural bridge.  Students can buy an annual B-cycle pass and have bicycle access to just about everything they need in Des Moines.  Visitors can combine bus and bike and not have to worry about where to park…a constant challenge on most college campuses.

This is a fundamental shift that requires people to think about the trips they take.   Instead of mindlessly reaching for the keys as we’ve done in the past, challenges like increased costs, lack of parking, congestion and climate change are going to require  us to plan more and choose differently.  Many trips will consist of more than one vehicle, and when they do, bikes and transit are natural partners.  Kudos to central Iowa officials for collaborating and pushing bikeshare in this direction.  This is as it should be.

I left home for my lunch hour ride earlier today with the idea that I’d pay some bills before getting in a quick 15 miles.   Usually, I take my  mountain bike when cycling around town, but today I was on my road bike since I was planning on getting in those extra miles.  Technically, it’s more of a cross bike than a true road bike but it has drop bars and I usually ride it on pavement so I call it a road bike.  Anyhow, I had just dropped off the last payment at city hall and hopped back onto the saddle when it happened.  I was a little wobbly and went to pull my foot off the pedal not realizing I had already clipped in. When I pulled up, the pain that shot through my right calf was excruciating.  I  almost went down.   Now I can barely walk.  It’s  just a nasty pull, but still…

The “go fast” bike, complete with clipless pedals.

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened to me.   It seems like whenever I hurt myself on the bike it’s because of those ridiculous pedals and the cleated shoes that go along with them.  When I got home, I went online and did a little research and it confirmed what I suspected.  There’s absolutely no reason for a guy like me to have clipless pedals and cleats.   I’m getting rid of them.  Here’s why.

They’re expensive.  Clipless pedals aren’t cheap.  I figure I have $200 into mine and they’re far from top of the line. I can buy a lot of other important stuff (like cowbells) with $200.

They’re superfluous.  Once upon a time I  bought into that whole “you get more power” from clipless pedals argument.  Turns out it’s urban legend.  Scientific studies have disproven it  completely and without a shadow of a doubt.    You don’t get power from pulling up on the pedal.  You get power on the downstroke.  Clipless pedals add nothing on the downstroke,

They make me look silly.  I’m going to ride 10,000 miles this year.  A lot of those miles are going to be at 20 mph or faster.  I’m fairly serious about cycling and I’m a fairly strong cyclist.  I’m also pretty comfortable with who I am.  I don’t need to dress up like a domestique on Team Astana  every time I head out. When I walk into the local hardware store, I don’t want to look like a visitor from another planet.   That’s what happens when I try walking in cleats.

They’re dangerous.  Clipless pedals have done me wrong.  They’ve hurt me.   Meanwhile, the BMX platform pedals on my Surly Instigator have been my best friends.   Matt at Skyline Cycle in Ogden recommended them and he did me right.  I miss Matt.  My foot never slips off of them, even when doing some gnarly riding in the mountains above Ogden or the B road gravel of rural Iowa.

My Odyssey twisted pedals are made of hard plastic and virtually indestructible.  They’re also incredibly comfortable, even in Keen sandals.

There’s actually one more reason to skip the clip.  Have you ever dropped a clipped in cyclist in full kit while riding a bike with platform pedals?  If you haven’t, I’m not going to wreck it for you.  All I’m going to say is that it is an experience everyone should have….and soon!

If you love your clipless pedals, keep on keeping on.   This post is not an attempt to dissuade you from clipping in.  If, on the other hand, you’re relatively new to cycling and think you need to spend money here, maybe you don’t.  You might be better served putting that  $200 into a better bike or a professional fitting or something that will bring you more enjoyment and a little less pain, all things being equal.  Like cowbells.

One way to become wealthy is to make a lot of money and figure out how to keep most of it.  Just about everyone I’ve ever met understands the first part of that statement. Very few have figured out the second part and it doesn’t work unless you do both.  The good news is you don’t have to make a lot of money to become wealthy.  All you really have to do is learn how to keep most of whatever it is you do make.   That’s where your bicycle comes in.

I recently listened to a Ted talk by Anthony Desnick of NiceRideMN.  In it, Mr. Desnick talked about how a lot of people would like to move into town and walk instead of driving everywhere but didn’t feel they could do it because of the high cost of real estate in walkable and bicycle friendly communities.  Then he dropped his bombshell and stated that you know, you could afford $100,000 more mortgage if you ditched your car for a bicycle.

I already knew he was right, but I crunched the numbers anyway, just to be sure.  According to AAA, the annual cost of car ownership is somewhere around $9,000 per vehicle per year.   So what’s the annual cost of $100,000 of mortgage debt?   Quite a bit less than $9,000 as it turns out:

So you’re bike is worth $100K.  Who knew?   Maybe you can afford to live in that trendy bicycle friendly urban village after all.  It gets better.   Who says that housing in that new place needs to cost $100,000 more than it does in the old place?   What if it costs about the same…or less?  That’s what happened to us when we moved from the endless sprawl of suburban Indianapolis to Jefferson Iowa.  It may be conventional wisdom that bike friendly costs more, but it doesn’t have to.  We looked and kept looking until we found what we were after.

Back to the cost of cars.  Maybe $9,000 doesn’t seem like a lot of money but when you consider that it’s per car per year for every year you own a car, it becomes significant in a hurry.  If you buy your first car when you’re 20 and finally give up the habit when you’re 80, that’s 60 years at $9.000 a year.  That’s $540,000 on cars.  If you had two cars for most of those years, you blew a million dollars.  You could have been wealthy.  Now you know.  It’s all about choices.

This is a big part of the reason I choose to ride a bicycle. The cost of owning automobiles is ugly.  It keeps people down.  It kept me down for a long time but not any more.   If you want to become wealthy, the easiest way is to stop spending money you don’t absolutely need to spend.  If you don’t want to become wealthy but just want to live better without worrying about money all the time, well, the only realistic way to do that is to eliminate the biggest expenses…like cars.  Yeah, it requires a bit of an adjustment but it’s easier than you’ve been led to believe.   I know.  My bike is money in the bank.

There’s a monument etched into a boulder on the side of the Raccoon River Valley Trail not far from my home in Jefferson.  I must have passed it a hundred times or so before I finally slowed my bike and stopped for a look the other day.  Turns out that it’s a memorial to a fatal train crash that occurred on that site back in November of 1913…a little over 100 years ago.  I knew that trains once rolled where I now ride my bike, but I always figured they were freight trains.  As it turns out, a good number of them carried people.  In fact, at that time Jefferson had two train stations  with dozens of trains arriving and departing each day to places like Des Moines and  Chicago.  What is now the Raccoon River Valley Trail was once the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad.  My rail trail was once a transportation corridor.

Abandoned rail corridors surround Jefferson. The different colors represent when they were abandoned. You can clearly see the Raccoon River Valley Trail between Jeff and Des Moines.

There’s still a scale along what used to be the railroad at Cooper . The railroads walked away from all this  infrastructure when passengers stopped showing up.

Depots like this one in Dawson once served rail passengers. Now they’re a nice place for cyclists to get out of the weather.

There was once a locomotive roundhouse on this piece of land just down the street from our house.

I imagine it probably looked a lot like this Chicago & Northwestern Roundhouse in Chicago, circa 1942.

Today, it’s all about bikes.

Rail transportation was popular in the US through the end of World War II, but when peace and prosperity broke out, people bought cars.  As they did, local and interurban rail  passenger traffic died off until the railroads  abandoned the service.   What was an important sector of the American economy  just vanished.   Thousands of miles of line in Iowa alone were abandoned.  Infrastructure like stations and maintenance yards were left to rot or be torn down.  Now it’s pretty much all gone.

Things can change pretty quickly.  When I talk to non-cyclists about using a bike for transportation they often scoff.   Cars are as American as apple pie, they remind me and while that’s true now, it hasn’t always been so.   Yes, they say, but we have too much invested in automobiles and automobile infrastructure now to abandon them.  Really?  I don’t think so.   It’s not like this hasn’t happened before.

I think about this now when I’m out on the trail.  When I pass a depot that has been converted into a rest area for cyclists or a little cafe, I imagine what it must have been like 70 or 80 years ago when seven or eight coal fired passenger trains stopped at that very spot each and every day.  I wonder what those passengers would have said if you told them that someday the trains would be gone and that people would use bicycles to head on down the line.  I think I know what they’d say.   I’d like to introduce them to my all-car, all-the-time friends if only it was possible.

The automobile era is rapidly winding down.  Pundits will eventually realize it was a victim of its own success.  Tomorrow’s transportation vehicles are those that will make the most sense to people in an increasingly crowded and expensive world.  I think bikes will have an over-sized role.   Maybe not.  One thing I am absolutely sure of is that transportation in a few years will look nothing like it has for the past fifty, and the impossible will happen again. It always does.

Jan and I landed in Jefferson Iowa just over a month ago on July 7, 2017. We moved here to bike. I know, you can bike anywhere but some places are better than others. Before we moved here we moved from central Indiana to northern Utah to bike but that never felt right in spite of the state’s lofty bike-friendly rating from the League of American Bicyclists. This does.  This feels so right it makes me want to giggle.

I thought it would be fun to take one post each month to write about the trips we eliminated. I’ve set up a Google Sheet to track them. You can access it here. In July, it was 11 trips. So far in August, it’s 20 trips with just under a week yet to go. That means we started the car 62 times less than we could have since moving here.  That’s pretty cool, because it means less wear and tear, less pollution, more exercise, more smiles, and a lot of other really cool outcomes. Better still, Jan is cycling to work every day instead of driving.

The local Hy-Vee is one of our favorite destinations. This is an awesome small town grocery store.

We’ve hit the weekly farmer’s market on the courthouse lawn, too.

All gas stations look like this to me now.

We have ridden to the grocery store, hardware store, library, lumber yard, volunteer meetings, restaurants and more. It is now second nature. It is now easier to reach for the bike than it is the car.  It’s rare that we choose the car. Case in point…I just had to run up to Hy-Vee for some pasta. I didn’t even consider the car.  The biggest challenge was Kona or Surly… I chose the Kona.  It was faster than the car…no doubt. It was more fun, too…not even close that way.

I’ve gotten used to the stares.  These aren’t looks of disapproval but rather confusion.  Why is that old man riding a bike, Momma?  Can’t he afford a car.  Nobody has come out and said it yet.  If they do, I’ll try to guilt them into paying for our groceries.  I think I could pull it off and it would be yet another way bikes pay dividends.

It only took a few weeks for this to become normal. We’ve worked out the details like how to carry stuff and what to bring along. Sometimes we lock our bikes, but often we don’t. It’s not really necessary here. Then there are helmets…  Sometimes we wear them. Other times we go Dutch or Danish, which is another way of saying helmet-free. Whenever I write that I don’t always wear a helmet, I get lectured by people who care a little more than they should about my personal well being so I offer the following caveat.  Kids and young adults should always wear helmets.  If you live in perpetual fear, you should always wear one, too, and not just while cycling.  More motorists than cyclists suffer head injuries in crashes.  Cycling is not inherently dangerous…especially when motorists behave and they behave here.

Cyclists in Copenhagen. With the exception of the one guy right center (probably an American), nobody has told these folks how dangerous cycling is. I hope they make it.  Photo-VisitCopenhagen

When I add it all up, I’ve never lived in a place where it is as easy to cycle as Jefferson.  I am absolutely convinced that in spite of all the hype about bicycles and big cities, small towns are better places for those of us who want to do this.  This is the future, especially with more data centers and better connectivity.  Quality of life here?   It’s off the charts.  Don’t get me wrong…it’s not perfect nor are  all small towns created equal. Some are better than others.

In conclusion, I’m seriously stoked about how well this is working.  I know a lot of people think we’re crazy moving around like we have.  We’re not.  This is important.  Sure, it would have been nice to get it right the first time but in the end it’s enough that we got it right at all.  I’m proud of that…and also the fact that we didn’t give up on the dream.  In future posts, I’ll touch on the things that we looked for and how it’s working out. For now, it’s enough to know that it works…and it works really, really well.

If you want to change things in your life, your neighborhood, and your world, you have to learn to ask questions.  Answers always appear on the far side of questions.  The trick is to ask the right questions.  I can’t speak for you, but I can tell you that with me the right questions are never the first questions, so I’ve learned to ask early and often.

Heading into Adel on the bike. Most streets are mostly empty most of the time.

It’s not enough to just ask, though.  You have to learn to answer your own questions.  This is something that doesn’t come natural to me.  I had to teach myself to do it.  I prefer to ask and answer out loud, even though it sometimes makes people think I’m crazy.

But I digress.   What I’m trying to say is that I became a vehicular cyclist  only after learning how to answer my own questions.   Maybe you’re already familiar with that term, vehicular cyclist, but if you aren’t it means someone who chooses a bicycle as his or her primary means of transportation.  That’s me.  That’s who I am…now, anyway.

I wasn’t always.  Like a lot of people, I once was all car all the time.  I lived in the far suburbs and went everywhere by car.  Even now I still own a car because sometimes (not often) it’s more practical than a bike.  Besides, it blows the whole argument that some anti-bike people like to make about me being a freeloader and not paying my fair share of taxes.  As a matter of fact, I do own the road.  I just don’t pay as much for it as they do.  That’s my choice…theirs, too.

Back in the 1980s, Mrs. Sharpe and I lived in the Mission Viejo neighborhood in Aurora Colorado.  We were about thirteen miles from my office in downtown Denver.  The two things I remember about Mission Viejo are the street lights (they looked like bells) and the connectivity.  There  was this awesome bike path behind our home that connected to the one along Cherry Creek that ran to within a half mile of my office so when I worked on weekends I started cycling into Denver.  I could also cycle around the neighborhood and go to grocery stores and the library but  I never really thought of my bicycle as a vehicle back then.  It was just fun.  I wasn’t asking the right questions.

That all started to change in 1990.  I can tie it back to a single event.  I had taken a job in the Twin Cities and one cold, snowy December morning  as I parked and headed into the office, I happened to catch the sight of a guy riding a bicycle down University Avenue.   It was still dark and dangerously slick but he was moving at about the same pace as the cars around him.  That raised a few questions, let me tell you…

• What the heck was he thinking?  
• Why wasn’t he in a car?
• Couldn’t he afford one?
• Was he cold?
• How deep was the snow on the road?
• How did he keep from falling over?
• Isn’t that dangerous?
• How is it even possible?

Looking back, that was the catalyst that caused me to think differently.  Up until then I thought of cycling as strictly a summer pursuit.   If you could do it year around, well, why wouldn’t you?  That was the biggest question of all.  The answer was obvious.  You could.   He was doing it.

By asking a lot of questions, I’ve come to the realization that there’s a right vehicle for every trip we take.  Sometimes the right vehicle is a jet airliner.  Other times it’s a bus or a train. Often it is a car.  But it can also be a bike or our own two feet.  If we ask enough questions we will reach the completely logical conclusion that a bike is often absolutely, positively the best vehicle choice for the trip we’re about to take.   When it is, we should choose it.  I call this process “Rightsizing Transportation .”

The challenge is that most of us have been so conditioned to choose cars that we don’t really think about it at all.   We don’t ask the right questions.   That’s what we need to change if we’re going to move forward.   When we rightsize transportation, we recognize benefits for ourselves, our community our world.  There aren’t many things we can do that have this level of impact.

So let’s do it.  Together.  Please share this with your friends who don’t yet ride a bike.   They’re the ones we need to reach.   Let’s get them asking questions.  Let’s get them answering them.   If we do, they’ll end up out there with us, all saddled up.  More soon…

The Oregon state legislature is currently debating whether to tack on an additional tax on bicycles, ostensibly to fund bicycle infrastructure like off street bike lanes.  This is a really bad idea hatched by lawmakers who are probably convinced that we cyclists are getting a free ride at the expense of the motoring public.  Nothing could be further from the truth, but that’s beside the point.   This law, if it passes, will do little other than harm Oregon’s bicycle dealers, many of whom are already struggling to make ends meet in today’s  contracting retail world.

There’s a simple, real world reason that bicycles aren’t licensed and taxed.   Due to their relatively low economic value, the costs of administering such programs would typically far exceed the revenue brought in.  Besides, bicycles offer all sorts of economic benefits.  They are lightweight and don’t damage roads the way cars do.   They also don’t have tailpipes, so there are no expensive emissions to mitigate.

Laws  that raise the cost of cycling serve as a barrier to entry for people who can least afford it.  Lawmakers in this case acknowledge as much.  That’s why bicycles that cost less than $500 are exempt.  I wonder how many bicycles are sold in Oregon each year that cost more than $500.  The state’s population is just over four million people, which means that roughly 400,000 Oregonians bicycle regularly.  If 10% of those people buy a $1,000 bicycle next year, that would be 40,000 bicycles subject to the tax.  That seems high, but we’ll run with it.  Given a surtax of 5%, that means the tax will raise a measly two million dollars and I think I’m being way generous here.  It’s simply not worth it.  This law has nothing to do with raising money.  There’s no money here to raise.   It’s about something else.

Oregon claims to be bicycle friendly, but this law is about as far from bicycle friendly as you could possibly get.   Taxes like this are not only spiteful, they’re also short-sighted and self defeating. If Oregon is serious about funding transportation, the solution is to encourage rather than discourage people from getting on a bicycle.

This is a short video of the busiest cycle path in the Netherlands.  The street is named Vredenburg.  There’s a marketplace nearby.   It’s in Utrecht, a mid-sized city of 330,000 that dates back to the 8th century.  Vrendenburg averages about 37,000 cyclists per day.  Try to look at the first 35 seconds of the video if not the whole thing.  It shows what the street used to look like before bicycles became the preferred method of moving around Dutch cities.

I often hear from people that this sort of thing would never work here in the United States.

“Of course it would.” I challenge them.

“No, Europe’s different.”  they claim.  “Their cities are older and more compact”

“Hmmm.  Older, yes.  More compact?  Not necessarily.”

The Chicago Loop is as compact as any European city.

Land is scarce in Utah, so cities here tend to be compact as well. But even in mostly compact Ogden, the waste is obvious. It’s almost always driven by a need to accommodate automobiles.

Salt Lake City. I’m on a train on the TRAX Green Line.Parking and gas pumps are not the “highest and best use.”

Downtown Indianapolis. This isn’t inevitable. This is a choice…a bad choice.

Vredenburg, Utrecht.  This is also a choice.  It didn’t just happen.

Some American cities are quite compact.  Others aren’t.  It’s mostly about available space.  That’s why Detroit sprawls while Pittsburgh mostly doesn’t.  Most of Europe doesn’t have the luxury of carving up virgin cornfields, so they look at land use a little differently than we do.   When land is scarce,  allocating it to automobiles make no sense.

That’s the crux of the matter right there.  The reason most of our cities are not as compact as European cities is because we’ve chosen to build them around automobiles and they’ve chosen differently.  The results of this choice are stark.   Their cities are mostly thriving.  Ours are mostly dying.  We could fix this.  Maybe we should.   You already know this.  You wouldn’t have made it this deep into the post if you didn’t mostly agree.  The people we need to reach are not here.   They’re our friends and neighbors who think that biking is a peculiar hobby and nothing more when in fact it is the answer to what ails us.  Please share this with them.  Help them understand that they hold the power to make their very own cities and towns more livable.  We can’t do it alone.  We need their help.  There is no other way.

Thank you.

Lyft announced yesterday that they will begin service to the rural outback in 40 US states.   This is what I was hoping for when we moved to Jefferson.  It happened far quicker than I thought it would.

Car sharing is the future.  Companies like Ford have embraced it as they’ve run out of creative ways to get people into their ever more expensive products.   Some people see it. Many don’t.  More still don’t want to see it.   It messes with their worldview.  But more and more people are either accepting or embracing the fact that even if they can afford their own car that maybe it doesn’t make sense to allocate scarce resources there.  It’s not just young people, either.   Yeah, they led but others are following.

A new day is dawning in rural America for cyclists and those who would rather get around without the expense of their own car.

So what does this transportation future look like?  Well,  Ford  has also embraced electric bikes,  Their vision is that more of us will use bicycles for trips close to home and share a car for longer trips.   All of our transportation needs will be met and at a fraction of the cost of owning a motor vehicle.    I’ve done the math here before.  The average car costs the average person $9,000 to own and operate.   You can get a high quality electric bicycle now for $2,000  or less and it will last for years.  If you don’t need the motor, it’s cheaper still.  That leaves a lot of extra money for Lyft and other types of transportation, or you can spend it on something else…or even save it.

Lyft in rural America is a huge game changer and not just for Jan and me.  Many of these small towns offer an insanely great quality of life.  They’re less expensive than the big city.  There’s very little traffic.  The air is clean and crime is isolated.  In states like Iowa, most people I speak with who have migrated to the big city tell me that they would come back to the small towns of their youth in a heartbeat if only there was economic opportunity here.  Interestingly enough, it’s not so much an economic problem as it is a transportation problem.   Small towns have always been tethered to reliable transportation.

But the times they are a changing.  As global companies shutter manufacturing facilities, many of these places have become job creators out of necessity.  It’s an old lament that the new jobs don’t pay like the old ones and it’s true in a lot of cases, so the way you make it work is to cut costs…like learning to live on one car instead of two.  The availability of low cost ride sharing changes the economics of these towns.   It makes it possible for some of those folks who left to come home and live the good life.   It gives us another edge and I have no doubt we will leverage it.    Bikes and car sharing are the future.  Thanks to Lyft, that future has arrived in small town America.

And you may ask yourself,  how do I work this? -Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

We were  in Des Moines earlier this week and stumbled across some freshly painted bike lanes along Grand Avenue in the city’s trendy East Village neighborhood.  They were protected bike lanes, too…the kind that used parked cars to shield cyclists from speeding motorists.    This is good because study after study shows that the general public is more likely to use bicycles for transportation when and where this type of infrastructure exists.  More bikes means less cars.  Less cars means more livable places.   Move smarter.  Live better.

New and improved Grand Avenue, Des Moines Iowa

So all is well in River City, right?  Well, no, not exactly.  As I walked around and shot pictures, I couldn’t help but notice the confused looks on both motorists’ and pedestrian faces.  They didn’t know how to interact with the new markings on the street.  Pedestrians crossed the bike lane without looking for oncoming cyclists.  Motorists struggled to figure out where to turn.  A Pepsi truck ran over the pylons protecting the lane.    Most of these issues will work themselves out with time but as someone who rides a lot of this sort of infrastructure I know good and well that it’s gonna take a while and that in the meantime people are placed at risk.   I found myself wondering if maybe there might be a better way of implementing this type of change.

Take safe passing laws, for example.  More and more jurisdictions are implementing laws governing how motorists should overtake cyclists on the streets.  This has resulted in a hodgepodge of laws.   In some cases, it’s a three foot law.  Other places have four and five foot laws.  Some have laws that require motorists to move completely into the other lane.  None of these laws are ever explained.  In many cases, they’re not even marked.   They’re just enacted and so motorists have no clue what they’re supposed to do.  Neither do many cyclists.

The same is true of new infrastructure.  It’s great that communities are building this, but it’s simply not enough to throw paint down on the street and pretend that it changes everything.  That’s completely unrealistic.  You have to explain the how and why behind it and few places make the effort to do so.  If you don’t, frustration mounts and resentment builds.

I don’t know when we got so sloppy as a people.  It seems that when I was younger we did things like this a little better, a little more completely.  We sweated the details.  Maybe I’m wrong about this.  Maybe it’s just revisionist history combined with a longing for the good old days.  I don’t know.

What I do know is this.   Bicycles are transportation and we need more infrastructure.   Just as importantly, we need more education and enforcement of laws for all road users.  Engineering, education and enforcement are the three legs of a metaphorical tripod.  If you have all three, the thing stands just fine.  Take one away and it falls down.

I recently read an interesting book called “Street Smart:  The Rise of Cities, the Fall of Cars“.  It was written in 2015 by Samuel Schwartz, a New York City-based traffic engineer affectionately known as Gridlock Sam.  I learned a lot from this book and I wanted to share some of it with readers.

As the title suggests, Street Smart is about our streets and how they work (or should work)  for us.  I don’t know how it is for you, but most people I speak with just assume that the primary purpose of a road is to move people and goods in motor vehicles.  Schwartz slays that sacred dragon right up front.  The earliest roads, he writes, predate cars and trucks by hundreds of years.  They were built for pedestrians, oxcarts and other similar conveyances.  That’s something to think about the next time you hear that roads are for cars.  They’re not.  They never were.

This is the crux of the matter for those of us who believe that using bicycles for transportation can transform our places and greatly improve our quality of life.  It’s not about infrastructure.  We already have everything we need when it comes to asphalt and poured concrete.   It’s simply a matter of changing how we use it and that starts by changing perceptions of how it should be used.

Since moving to a small town in Iowa, I’ve been able to see this in a way I never could before.  Jefferson is a very easy place to bicycle.  Local stores and restaurants always have bikes out front.     We’re located on a regional rail trail and that certainly helps keep bikes in the public consciousness here, but we don’t have a single piece of dedicated bicycle infrastructure.  There are no bike lanes, protected or otherwise.  There are no sharrows.   If you ride in town, you ride on the street.  Motorists understand this and are generally supportive.  It works as well as anything I’ve seen anywhere.

This is important.  Most bicyclists I know do not want to hear this, but we simply do not have the collective will to build out a nationwide network of bicycle infrastructure.  Even if we did, it wouldn’t be complete until most of us are long gone.  What are we supposed to do in the meantime?

The obvious answer is to go back to basics.  Streets can serve a wide variety of users.  That’s what they were designed to do.  Instead of letting one user group impose their will on the rest of us, we need to go back to the future.  Roads are not for cars or any other single class of vehicle.  Roads are for people.  Sam Schwartz understands this, and he makes his case elegantly.

Way back in the 1950s, an epic battle of philosophies took place in New York City.  Robert Moses, the Master Builder, was on one side of the battle. Moses advocated on behalf of elevated, sweeping highways and was responsible for many of the access roads that were eventually built in New York.

The West Side Highway  photo: Ed Yourdon on Flickr – Originally posted to Flickr as “Playing ball under the West Side Highway”, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6959213

One of Moses’s elevated freeways  collapsed in 1973.  The West Side Highway in Manhattan was perceived to be a vital link.  Gridlock was feared but a funny thing happened.  Once the road was taken out of commission, the traffic didn’t back up.  It didn’t seek and find alternative routes.  It simply went away, never to return. Thus was born the principal of induced demand.  If you build it, they will come.  If you unbuild it, they will leave.

Induced demand changed everything.  For the first time, traffic engineers and urban planners were able to see clearly that building superhighways through the heart of our big cities was literally killing those places.  This was true in New York, but it was also true in Detroit, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Chicago and Indianapolis.  It was especially true in those places because they had something New York didn’t have:  a virtually unlimited supply of land for new suburbs.

Enter Jane Jacobs, the soul of the city.  Ms. Jacobs was Robert Moses’ alter ego.  Whereas Moses believed that the role of roads was to move cars and trucks through the city as quickly as possible, Ms. Jacobs believed that streets and sidewalks were the city’s vital organs.  They should be focused towards people, not machines.   When they were narrow and speeds were slow, they encouraged life.  When they were wide and fast, they cut life off.

In hindsight, it is now clear to many urban planners that cutting those highway scars created  demand for even more roads and lanes that wouldn’t have existed if the original highways were never built to begin with.  In other words, urban highways were a solution in search of a problem.  These days,  cities from San Francisco to Seattle to Dallas are now removing or considering the removal of urban freeways once deemed essential.  They know that induced demand works.  They know that once the road is gone, the traffic will go away.

Not far from the West Side Highway, there’s a park in the sky.   The High Line is a 1.45 mile long linear park that lines an old elevated railway corridor.   It opened in 2009 and cuts through the heart of lower Manhattan. Rather than divide people as the old railroad once did, it brings them together.   It offers them a place to gather and mingle…to relax…to heal.

The High Line photo: Beyond My Ken – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10811588

Things are getting better in New York and everywhere else.   Jane Jacobs is no longer with us, but wherever she is I suspect she’s smiling.  Robert Moses may have won the battle, but she won the war for the soul of the city she called home for so long.  That’s good for New York.  That’s good for the rest of us, too.

I hopped on my bicycle this morning with the idea of taking the Raccoon River Valley Trail (RRVT) to Perry, a town located about 25 miles south and east of Jefferson. Perry’s the halfway point to suburban Des Moines and the largest town on the trail.  That makes it a worthwhile destination.

The missing link (yellow) will connect the RRVT (west) to the High Trestle Trail (east).

These sort of decisions are always subject to change, but I felt pretty good today.  As I pedaled south and then east, I thought about how blessed and lucky I am to live alongside one of America’s great rail trails.  The RRVT was a big part of the reason we chose to buy a home in Jefferson.  We haven’t been disappointed.  It’s a special trail, mostly because it is loved and well supported not only by the communities that line it, but statewide.  I know there are a lot of fabulous trails in other parts of the country, but there’s only one Iowa.  This sort of thing seems to matter to people here more than it does most of the other places I’ve been.

And so I wasn’t really all that surprised to hear yesterday that Iowa health insurer Wellmark just wrote a $90,000 check to Let’s Connect, the local group that is working to build a nine mile connector from the RRVT in Perry to the High Trestle Trail in Woodward.  This process has been driven for the last year by Perry-based Raccoon Valley Bank.  They’ve also made significant contributions to the connector.   In fact, over 1/3 of the $5 million dollar total price tag has already been raised.  This is going to happen.

High Trestle Bridge over the Des Moines River between Woodward and Madrid Iowa

When it does, two of America’s premiere rail trails will be connected.  It will be possible to ride from our home in Jefferson all the way to Ankeny (120+mile round trip) on the north side of Des Moines via the iconic High Trestle Bridge without ever getting on a road.   We can also continue east on the Heart of Iowa trail to Marshalltown.  Our options, already many and varied, are about to get a whole lot better.

There are a few longer trails than the combined RRVT and HTT trails, but in my opinion none better.  In my work as an advocate for bicycles as transportation, I always come back to connectivity.  Trails may be fine recreational assets, but they can serve double duty as transportation resources…highways if you will…when they connect us to other places.  The thing that’s so unique about our network is that it looks a lot more like a grid than a single line.  That’s connectivity and it will lead to all sorts of serendipity for the region and the people who call it home.

I want to personally thank Wellmark and Raccoon Valley Bank and all the other visionary people and organizations who are working to build out this world class network of trails.  The connectivity they’re making possible will lead to all sorts of serendipity for our region.  I imagine a future where companies will locate along trails like this and people will commute from the small towns that line these trails to work, schools and other places.

Thank you, one and all.

A friend sent me a video of a crash between bicycles and a minivan in California.   It was in my Facebook feed when I woke up and fired up the computer this morning.   Ouch.  Thankfully, everyone’s okay.  Next time they might not be so lucky.  I realize that it might be difficult to watch, but I think if you cycle regularly on the road you should watch it all the same.  It contains a teachable moment.  Here’s the link.

Screen grab from video. Photo: Cycling Today

What I’m about to say is probably not going to be very popular among hard core cyclists, but I’m going to say it anyway.  As a League of American Bicyclists Certified Cycling Instructor (LCI #4661), my job is to help people learn the techniques necessary to  ride safely on the road in a variety of situations.  Sometimes that means riding defensively.  This is especially important when conditions suggest that what happened in this video might actually happen.

Here’s what I saw when I watched the video.

•  The road is narrow with no shoulders.
•  There are limited “escape routes” as lots of trees line the road.
•   Markings dividing the opposing lanes of traffic are washed out and substandard.
•  Line of sight is limited.  It’s somewhat twisty and hilly.

Maybe you saw more, but the four items I saw were enough.  The cyclists were properly positioned in the lane…no problem there.  The teachable moment?  If I ride this road, I need to slow down.  I need to exercise extra caution.  Why?  Because I’ve ridden enough to know that motorists do what this particular motorist did, and if I come across him or her at speed what happened here is likely going to happen to me, too.  If, on the other hand, I slow down I greatly increase the odds of avoiding the crash altogether and surviving it if I can’t.

I know all the arguments as to why we shouldn’t have to slow down.  I know the cyclists were in their lane.  I know the motorist crossed the barely visible line.  But I also know that at the end of the day, job one is to get home in one piece and how we ride has a lot to do with that.  We are responsible for our personal safety.    Each of us has to decide how badly we want to live to ride another day.   Every time we get on the road, our head has to be in the game.  We have to be focused not on the ideal behavior to expect from other road users, but rather the “most likely” behavior.  Once we do that, we then have to adjust our riding style to accommodate it.

So that’s why I posted this clip.   I’ve ridden 30,000 miles over the last three years.  Most of them have been on the road and many have been in traffic scenarios I couldn’t imagine when I started this magical mystery tour back in 2013.   I seldom feel unsafe, but that’s because I seldom put myself in unsafe situations.  I practice what I preach.

If you’d like to learn how to ride safely in traffic, I can’t stress enough how important it is to take Smart Cycling from a Bike League Certified Cycling Instructor.  If you find yourself in Central Iowa or nearby, I can help.  If you live elsewhere and don’t know how to jumpstart this process, please let me know and I’ll connect you with a local LCI.

Be safe.  Have fun.