Almost everyone knows how to ride a bike. I learned to ride as a kid, but it wasn’t until college and after, living in the city with no car that I discovered the joys of cycling for transportation. In the years before I could afford a car, the bike was for getting to work, meeting friends around town, and the weekly grocery trip. Not having a car til my mid-20s has influenced my thinking about where to live, and although I grew up in a rural area and love the outdoors, I also love having transportation options aside from a car. Cleveland’s public transit isn’t bad; for over a year they have had all their buses equipped with bike racks, and they recently (October 2007) started letting bikes on the trains at all hours, with no rush-hour blackout.
Bicycle as transportation has always made sense to me. The objection I hear most often from people is that they’re afraid of traffic. If you’re riding legally and safely, you ARE traffic. On the road there are rules; I follow them, and rarely do I ever have a problem with my fellow drivers. I maintain a steady line in traffic, am highly visible, ride predictably and communicate my intentions clearly. It’s the POWs (Pedestrians On Wheels) that give us all a bad name by running red lights, weaving in and out of traffic, and riding on the wrong side of the road.
I’m far less comfortable on a multi-use path (rarely are these paths solely ‘bike paths’), where people may or may not ride on the right, usually don’t signal their intentions, and quite often stop in the middle of the path for no apparent reason. There are joggers with headphones on, dogs waiting to clothesline you with their leash, and rambunctious toddlers darting across your path. If you’re traveling at anything over 5 mph, in my opinion, you belong on the road, because on a sidewalk or multi-use path, you’re a semi truck just waiting to cause damage to yourself or others.
Cleveland has a great bike advocacy organization in the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op. If you drop in to one of their weekly Saturday rides, you’ll discover more back roads around town than you’d ever discover on my own. I also became a League Cycling Instructor through a seminar hosted by OCBC. If you’d like to see a little more about me and my bike(s), click here.