Shek's Footprint

Walkscore.com is a fantastic way to find what shops and businesses you can comfortably walk to from your home. My apartment gets a whooping score of 20 out of 100. Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Walkscore.com graded Jacksonville as the least walkable city in USA (news link). A bicycle effortlessly bridges the distance gap between walkable destinations to drivable ones.

So how is living car free in a part of town with an undesirable quality? Challenging would be my answer on an optimistic day. The grocery store is only a mile away. With a tiny bit of planning, grocery shopping is achieved in one trip on the weekend. The trusted Xtracycle is a fantastic grocery hauler. For that mid-week craving of Mexican food or to buy a critical grocery item I missed, I whip out the old single speed Dutch bike. Its front basket has plenty cargo capacity for a doggie bag or a case of Yuengling.

Zaxby’s, the only fried chicken restaurant worth visiting, is 5 miles away, mostly through deserted local roads. A trip there takes 30 minutes. I usually go alone as what I do with my fried chicken isn’t pretty. Riding back can be tad adventurous. Sitting on a hard saddle for half an hour after ingesting spicy buffalo sauce smothered chicken fingers isn’t ideal. The Town Center Mall with its departmental stores, pet food stores and Friday Farmer’s Market is within 3 miles away. In fact, I am hopping over there this evening for errands, all on a bike.

Dry cleaning seems challenging but easily solved if you ask the good Turkish people to fold your clothes into boxes. A trip to the movie theater dictates a longer route than one would take if driving but I chose to not ride on roads with a loosely imposed 45 mph speed limit. A trip to downtown is 12 miles long and a fairly pleasant one. A trip to the beach is 13 miles long and not so pleasant. Surprisingly, distance is not a challenging factor. I have gladly ridden 10 miles to a dentist, had her drill, scrape and clean my teeth and ridden back smiling, only this time with better teeth. On days with tighter schedules, I have hired a taxi cab.

So what is the challenging part, you ask? It is the people who meet you on the road through their protective shields of glass and metal. Living in a neighborhood with a walk score of 20 subjects you to people, who usually love their car-dependent life styles. They also have a patriotic attachment to things like big rims on their Kia and the roads they drive those low-profiles on. Most walkscore-20-dwellers will take the on-road-bicyclist-infringement without any patience. The bridged gap between walkable destinations and drivable ones is ugly.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 10:28 am and is filed under Advocacy, bicycling, Car Free, Commuting, Living Green, Xtracycle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.