How to Start Bicycle Commuting – Part 1 of many

Most of us bicycling advocates probably have it all wrong.

People who want to encourage others to ride their bike advocate cycling to work. Most cities advocate that too. We even celebrate a bike-to-work day where we take time off from work, drive our bike to a location, gather in large groups and ride to one central location with rolling police barricades, all without feeling silly about it.

I have been reading about Andrew Cline’s ‘One Mile Solution’ for a while now. His solution is to draw a one mile radius around your home, find businesses that you normally frequent in a car and try to get to them on a bicycle. Walkscore.com is a good website for finding businesses. The website finds all businesses like grocery stores, restaurants, medical facilities etc within a walking distance and rates your location on a scale of 1 to 100. My apartment gets a whopping 20 deeming it car dependent. My 5+ months of living car free puts the score to a test.

A car may be a necessity in my neighborhood but a bicycle can offset the dependency effectively. Here are some facts about me and my neighborhood:
1. I have been living car free for a little over 5 months and do everything on a bicycle.
2. I live in an area with no bicycle infrastructure (even no bike lanes). I do not live in a downtown area.
3. I am not an athlete and do not compete in mountain bike and road bike races.
4. I am not particularly well built and muscular; portly at best. I therefore have no significant muscles at my disposal to achieve 10 mile bike commutes.
5. Finally, I have chosen to live closer to work, in fact as close an apartment as possible given my 60 lbs dog.

I understand that for some people, it may not be feasible to live so close to work. Well, you don’t have to bike to work, no matter what day they tell you is tomorrow. Most people usually live close to a park, a grocery store, a restaurant, a bakery or a coffee shop. Starting small opens up a huge plethora of places and businesses one can commute on a bicycle. We do not have the luxury of living in transit oriented developments in a city with a master plan for urban development. Actually, the word ‘transit’ and the phrase ‘master plan’ does not exist in the City of Jacksonville’s vocabulary, but that is another battle to fight for another day.

I beg to promote a bike-to-grocery-store day or a bike-to-the-movie-theater day before promoting a bike-to-work day. Just like we learn to crawl before we learn to walk. In my future posts, I intend to prove how this can be achieved with ease and a minuscule capital investment.