Bike Commuting and the Human Body

 If you've read this blog enough, you're probably aware that I prefer to commute by bike, but can't always for a variety of reasons. Some of these are practicalities in the Quad Cities (infrastructure, weather, etc.). Some are choices I've made interacting with those practicalities (school schedules, where I live, where the services I wish to access are).

And some are more about the human vessel that has to actually do the biking.

1. Weather Can Be A Problem

I, as a person, do not mind rain much.

I, as a bicyclist, mind it a lot more.

Ignoring for a moment its impact on infrastructure, weather also affects my body much more when I bicycle than when I drive--or even when I walk. The heat feels more hot because I am exerting myself; the rain beats down harder at speed; the cold feels more chill because the air is moving faster.

I can of course compensate for this. My dad is a pro at this; you'd think when he was biking that the rain didn't exist. But there are limits to this, especially as commute rather than a recreational choice (what I'm wearing isn't entirely up to me and there isn't a usable shower at my destination usually). 

There are even bigger limits when I'm carrying someone else with me or going shopping after work or any of the myriad other errands that attach themselves frequently to a commute.

Not to mention parking the thing...

This is fine in the sunshine; it's a pain that it's not covered at all when it's raining or snowing.

The Tern Storm Shield is great at protecting my passengers, but not my seat.

2. I Age

Cars depreciate; so, I suppose, do e-bikes, though there's a less familiar resale market there.

So, alas, do human bodies.

I have had a few ailments in the last few years that have made bike commuting harder. Tennis elbow makes grasping the handlebars as the street bumps you along painful. Gout flareups make pressing on the pedals difficult. Sciatica...well, enough said.

Infrastructure does play a part here: the street above, with its big pothole and loose gravel, makes most of those physical conditions worse. But they're barriers even on the best of roads or paths. And they can take weeks, months, or forever to go away.

Though one positive of the e-bike is that it does double as a scooter (at least here in the US in Iowa): the existence of a throttle up to 20mph (Class 2) makes for a major benefit. I'm not stranded if I biked in and had a flareup of some kind of condition at work.

3. Mood Matters

Now, I want to preface this as follows: I actually think I drive worse when annoyed, tired, or pissed off too, and it would best for all involved if I (and everyone else too) could avoid the car when in a bad mood.

But I do feel that biking exacerbates that in many ways as well.

If I'm exhausted, well, I have to move myself along now, which is more work.

If I'm annoyed, well, the way the city and the cars treat bikes is not going to help with that.

If I'm pissed off, I also think I tend to bike a little less straight and a little less clean and generally less safely (see: also not optimal with car).

Now, the bike brings its own prophylactic to this: biking does improve my mood.

And sometimes, how could it not?

But that only goes so far. When I'm really out of sorts, I often don't take the bike because I'm so aware that being in a bad mood makes my biking worse.

Now, if only we could do that with cars too...

Maybe the takeaway today is really that I just want better public transit, dagnabit.

Though then we'd be talking about level boarding, and distance from stop to destination--because the human body is ultimately the vehicle we all take everywhere.

So maybe this is actually covertly about the 15 minute city.

Either way: bike commuting is great, but it does have some limits due to human involvement--as does everything we do.

On Bike Racks

 A pair of videos that still live rent-free in my head are the "Safe City Showdown" pair from Not Just Bikes and Shifter a few years ago. In them, the two bicyclists bike through Amsterdam and Calgary and compare the positive and negative elements of the two rides. The ride in Calgary reveals a bike rack at the hardware store that's the end point of the ride, and the two reviewers have opposite reactions: one is excited to see a rack at the store at all, and the other complains about its poor location and visibility.

It's a strong reminder that the existence of infrastructure is not the same as the quality of infrastructure, and that here in North America we often get too obsessed with the question of whether there is even any non-car infrastructure at all at a given location, and not with whether that infrastructure is actually making bike/pedestrian/transit functional, pleasant, or positive.

This brings me to the subject of bike racks. A friend recently pointed out that the bike rack at their kid's school was big, but functionally only had two spots they could lock up their cargo bike--the two ends.

My bikes aren't as big as theirs, but I also know this feeling very well.

Another friend recommended I write about that here--and so I am. What makes a bike rack better than merely existing? What bike racks might be worse than nothing? And how do we tell the difference?

1. Is It Significantly Better Than Leaving My Bike Out?

There are a surprising number of bike racks that are not, actually, much better than just leaving my bike out.

Sometimes, that's because the rack is unusable or doesn't fit my bike, so I have to leave my bike out anyways.

Cool as bikeshare is, it doesn't actually include any parking for my own bike, for instance.

Sometimes, it's because the bike rack isn't actually secured to anything, so while it's more bulky for a thief than just having my bike there, it's not really much more secure.

This rack can be moved anywhere, and often is (I frequently see it on the other side of that staircase, for instance) which doesn't really give one a sense of security.

2. How Much Can I Use?

This goes back to my friend's point: sure, there might be a bike rack, and I might even be able to use it, but what percentage of the actual rack is useable to me?

This rack has one usable space for my cargo bike, because the other end is on the wall and the middle spots are too tight together to allow my cargo bike access. So I can lock up on one end, only.

This rack has two spots for me, despite being advertised, I'm sure, for a dozen.

These racks are better proportionally, though because they're higher up they are useful for different bikes--still, as a proportion of space, it's much superior to the wide racks whose middles are useless for large bikes.

These racks are much better--but they're still a bit tight together for a larger bike. As a matter of spacing, though, they're far superior to the ones above that only work for front tires (ask me how many bikes I've seen that had the front tire removed to steal them over the years).

3. How Many Options?

The bike racks in the tram picture above might seem inefficient, since they can each take at most two bikes, but note that they're really frequent on the street. Toronto does OK with this; Montréal, I noticed, does even better.

This street has a lot of these little posts, which allow a chain to pass through, and also allow the street to have a lot of them without blocking everything else.

If you don't like those because your U-Lock won't go through, perhaps this street full of this design?

Or this one with these?

The key is that the street is just full of places to park your bike, ones that are relatively efficient in space-per-bike and are very firmly anchored in place.

Then there's Amsterdam, of course:

I can scarcely evaluate the actual posts because the bikes are so crammed in there. Frankly, I expect the racks themselves are mid-tier here at best (the underground parking is better) but the sheer quantity of bikes serves as its own protection--is yours the specific one someone will steal?

I like this kind, which as you can see allows for multiple bikes to be anchored well to the ground but has enough space between curves to allow a bigger bike or two.

And the weird hanging racks in downtown Davenport, while not my favorite, do have good anchoring and a number of spots--and there are a sheer lot of them at the Farmers Market, so you can again get a good set of options even if an individual rack is less than optimal.

For huge ones like this cargo bike, the wave rack is not really that different from a single loop--you can only get one on, but hey, at least you got one.

The real key in my mind is this last question of how many options relative to demand. A single rack will probably only take one to two huge bikes like this--and even for smaller, more recreational or single-person bikes, they'll only have so many places that are actually securable (the bike in the first picture in this whole post is attached only with a basic cable lock through the front tire--that's not secure).  But a series of them across a market, a street, or a giant bike parking lot can mean a lot more options even if each individual rack is not ideal.

What you shouldn't do is a single rack that isn't even tied to the ground in any real way and pretends to offer access while really creating merely an illusion of security.

These are cool, though--as long as the tree-sprayer isn't hitting your bike.

Sharrows Suck

 Look, this is a pretty basic post, and I know that.

I'm hardly the first person to note that sharrows are "bullshit," that they are "useless," and that any initial optimism about them when they were first introduced was "wrong." 

But I'm going to talk about them a little anyway, because the ones on the Goose Creek Connector annoyed me so much.

But because I'd like to focus on the positive despite the post title, I'm going to focus on other options that can exist that do a better job than sharrows--without much more in the way of infrastructure investment.

That is, I'm not going to talk about this:

Because that divided, separated, bike-specific roadway requires real infrastructure investment that many cities aren't willing to put in. Sharrows are lazy--but so too are better options. 

1. Targeted Bike Spaces at Intersections

One problem with sharrows is that they just sort of generically act as a sign of "expect bikes here, somewhere, because there won't be a bike lane for them." They don't have any specific, targeted expectations for either bicyclists or drivers, since pretty much every street at least in the US (sharrows or not) could, legally, have bikes on it, and the sharrows rarely make any legal difference to their presence (you can't hit me on my bike without the sharrows either!).

This little box, however, does: and it doesn't require anything more than paint on the road, just like a sharrow. By giving a clear area at the intersection where bikes are allowed, nay, encouraged to be, and cars aren't, it makes the turn easier  for the bikes, makes the cars understand where the bikes will be, and allows everyone to move by each other more easily.

This is at a stoplight in Montréal; I've also seen them at stop signs (if the cross-traffic doesn't stop, so there's an expectation that cars will back up). Wherever they're positioned, giving a clear sense of where bikes can stop without cars there (and often in front of cars) is a very helpful and low-impact way to make cycling safer and easier--unlike sharrows.

2. More Complex Signage for More Complex Places

Building on this, but adapting it, is the next level: acknowledging that there are spaces where bikes in particular might have difficulty being seen and properly yielded to, and accommodating that--again, just with paint and signage, not with physical barriers.

Chicago does this beneath the El:

See both the "look bikes" signage and the clearly marked space for bikes to stop at the light (as in #1). The El supports by the Loop here make it hard to see bikes, and the expectation of slow and single-direction car traffic (which puts bikes out of mind for many drivers) makes this a place where the reminder is very important. Clearly indicating the presence and location of bikes--not just a generic "there may be bikes" but a specific, targeted indication of where to expect them--is a big help.

3. Consistent Visual Indicators

Look, this example is cheating, because it comes from Amsterdam, but I'll explain why you don't need to be Amsterdam to use it in a moment.

The Dutch bike paths are a distinctive red color. Now, I'm not saying that everywhere needs to be the Netherlands to accommodate bikes (no matter how much I might wish they were, that ain't happening anytime soon). What I am suggesting is that the very consistency of that usage makes a huge difference in people's acknowledgement of the presence of bikes.

A sharrow appears intermittently on the pavement to indicate the possibility of needing to share with bikes.

The changed color of the path is constant and thus makes obvious the expectation of bikes.

This is why what I'm suggesting here isn't full Dutch-scale urbanism: I'm not expecting a whole network of separate bike paths (see above when I explicitly disclaimed that!). What I am saying is that bit of paint on the road could be more paint on the road, in a distinctive color, to indicate a shared street. 

And that, unlike a sharrow, might actually help communicate to the car driver that it is a shared street.

The consistency would be my emphasis, rather than the separation in the Dutch style.

None of these would be expensive in terms of infrastructure (at least not the version of the painted lane I'm suggesting). What they would be is a lot better than a sharrow, which honestly does nothing at all.

The Goose Creek Connector: The Short-Sighted

 This is the third of three posts on the experience and design of the Goose Creek Connector, following up on the good and the bad of the implementation of the design. Today I want to talk about the elements of the Goose Creek Connector design that aren't misimplemented in terms of what they decided to do, but rather that to me fall short of a good idea in the actual design or planning. 

To be clear, all of these would be fixable in the future! But these are missed opportunities or strange choices that were made. I expect a number of them were made in order to deliver the project faster, cheaper, or at all; I'm not, in this, trying to criticize the designers of this project. They had to actually cost, plan, implement, and negotiate the details of this route, and I'm very glad that they did.

But there are, nevertheless, some points where I think the design could have used some improvement, and could be improved in the future.

1. What The Heck Is Going On Around Kimberly?

So far I've been burying a key part of the design here: the Goose Creek Connector doesn't actually fully connect.

What is going on here, folks? Suddenly we're in Sharrowland, with a vehicle parked across the sidewalk for those who might be using the path as pedestrians. 

And then, as noted last time, it becomes hard to find where you reconnect to the trail proper if you're on a bike (not, admittedly, if you're on foot). Was I supposed to be on the path already? Should I be sharrowsing the road? Who knows!

That's not even getting into the tight turns around Kimberly:

The route takes a 180 here to get to street level.

That, I'm not necessarily critiquing: land is very tight on a major corridor like the Eastern/Kimberly intersection, and the creek itself and the railroad have clearly taken most of the best ways through that aren't the road. The tight turns are necessary, unless you had complete eminent domain power to just bulldoze people's buildings (which would have created massive costs and resistance to the project, so don't do that!).

But the road/sidewalk section sucks. If it were a protected bike lane on the street, that would be one thing. Mississippi Ave is wide enough there: it has parking on one side even though the businesses all have giant parking lots, so if you could take that and make it instead a protected lane you could make this actually connect. Would it cost more? Yes, and I expect that (plus the kneejerk resistance to losing even minimally valuable parking) is why it wasn't done. But it would be a great way to futureproof this route, which right now has a glaring hole.

2. Lack of Intersections

I don't literally mean intersections here, in that I like the fact that you can do an uninterrupted ride from about 33rd to 59th. I mean that there are a lot of missed opportunities to make what is currently a great recreational trail into a great bike connector more generally. I'm not suggesting we should be at Houten, Netherlands-level bike functionality, where houses front on bike paths without a street in sight. But I am suggesting that it would be a great step forward if the new north-south trail had more access points for people to actually get on and off it, particularly from the housing and businesses that are so close to connecting.

Here, the trail splits to go under Kimberly and to intersect with the Kimberly sidewalk (which is its own issue, see below). But there's also a Walgreens literally right next to me as I take the shot: why can't that Walgreens have a connection directly to the trail, instead of looping around?

More broadly, there's a lot of stuff at that intersection, but to get to the Hy-Vee across the street you need to bike about a mile and a half around to the Duck Creek Trail, across Eastern Ave, and back up Spring St. instead of just...across the street. 

Not designed with bikes (or pedestrians) in mind. I also used the beg button here but had it skip 2 straight cycles, so I don't think it works...

Why couldn't these connections be improved?

Likewise, these apartments back onto the trail--why not have a connection?

Now, some of this was outside of the designers' hands (they don't own that apartment complex!) and some would be challenging for political planning reasons (messing with lights/bike lanes around or on Eastern and Kimberly). But that doesn't make them not missed opportunities; it just means that I can see why they are currently missed. I hope they improve; it would be cool to see a path with a gate instead of just a fence at the apartment complexes, for instance. 

3. The Sidewalk Problem

Look, I know I harp on sidewalks a lot. But seriously: make up your mind if you're designing a big sidewalk or an actual mixed-use trail that you expect non-pedestrians to use. And then remember that you're definitely doing the latter, since you literally put bike signage on the trail.

And then stop terminating the exits from the trail onto pure sidewalks--both in terms of the legality of biking on the sidewalk and terms of sheer width. The path itself is a nice width for bikes and pedestrians to coexist. The sidewalks they deliver you to are not.

And sometimes those sidewalks just end themselves: Kimberly doesn't really have any, for instance, except the bit used for the trail itself.

Again, I see why this happens: dumping pedestrians into the street is bad, and the cost would skyrocket to redo all the sidewalks into full paths as well (though Bettendorf has a lot of those, so there's local precedent at least). 

But dang if it doesn't meant that you can't really use the connector for anything much besides driving from end to end: the places it delivers you in the middle are either not well connected to the path (see #2) or only accessible on foot.

It's great for recreation, in other words, if all you're doing is biking a long distance along the path. But as soon as you want to use it mid-path or to actually get somewhere, it doesn't work nearly as well. Short-sighted, in other words, though not necessarily bad.

And all of this is definitely improvable--if and only if we actually decide to do it.

The Goose Creek Connector: The Bad

 This is the second in my series on the Goose Creek Connector, following up on the good last week.

I liked biking the Goose Creek Connector but there are some ways in which it is not well-implemented, and I wanted to talk a bit about those today.

1. Signage

Quick quiz: where is this?

The only sign you see in the picture is an (already damaged??) bikes-go-downhill sign. There's a small stop sign just out of frame to the right. What there aren't are trail markers, that would tell you where the two dividing sides of the trail go, or a marker on the bridge to tell you what road you're about to go under.

Here's a better view of another fork in the road with absolutely no guidance. 

And this isn't just abstract: I kind of figured I had passed 53rd St. at some point, but the first time I had an actual piece of official guidance of where I was was when I was suddenly dumped out on the sidewalks by 59th St. and could see the regular road signs.

The Duck Creek Trail itself has signs in most places where the road splits off--why doesn't the Goose Creek Connector? 

2. Maintenance

Let's zoom in on that already damaged sign above. That's not a great, well, sign for the trail. And there are other spots where this brand-new trail is already showing signs of less than optimal maintenance.

This is already overgrown to the point where I had to slightly swerve out of the way to avoid hitting the grass on my return trip.

This might, optimistically, be a sign of maintenance happening, but the fact that, again, the week it opened it was already having "sidewalk closed" signs prepared to deal with overgrowth is not ideal.

We'll get to whether this is a sidewalk at all next week.

Basically, I continue to worry about the ongoing state of maintaining, rather than simply opening, this trail--especially when (not if) the low-lying parts flood.

3. Getting Off It

This is where we start almost sliding towards next week's theme of what is short-sighted in the design here. We'll talk about where the trail goes and what opportunities it might miss elsewhere. Right now, I want to focus on this:

Great, the bike route ends. Where the heck am I? What am I supposed to do with the bike I'm on? I don't love trails that dead-end into parking lots, but at least those are clearly intended for people who bike to the trail--not me, but a defined population of people, many of whom use our trails. But this? Bikes are allowed on multi-use trails and paths in Iowa, but otherwise they're vehicles. Legally, they belong in the road.

And this doesn't deliver them to the road. Even if we assume that the bike route ends at the sidewalk, not the sign, there isn't a curb cut there--there is one a bit down the street, but it's not exactly well-designed to get bikes on and off the sidewalk to the trail.

The opposite problem happens just north of Kimberly, where the trail briefly detours into the street (more on that next week) but the signage is only in one direction for getting back on the trail? You can see the back of the sign, but there's nothing from this direction that tells you the trail is going to the left. You're just on either the street or the path (unclear directions on which is the trail coming from the south) and then you have to notice that the trail is going off--otherwise you're right into Eastern Avenue.

Why make this trail so hard to legally get on and off? Why not sign (see #1) more clearly? 

These are not insurmountable problems, and they're not hard to solve either. A few additional signs, a curb cut or two, and some consistent repair and mowing would do it. I'm hopeful that these are just growing pains and we'll see the Goose Creek Connector being well taken care of and well-marked going forward. It just isn't quite there yet.

The Goose Creek Connector: The Good

So the Goose Creek Connector opened recently, and I decided it was worth biking on it and evaluating it as a significant piece of new bike infrastructure here in the QCA. 

It was a very pleasant ride, and I'm going to share my thoughts on the new trail in a three-part series, this being the first.

And because it is the first, I want to start positive, so here we have the good! Check back in for the bad (things that weren't implemented as well as they could be) and the short-sighted (things that were implemented as designed, but designed less than ideally for the future) the next two Sundays.

As I said, it was a good ride, so let's start there:

1. The Ride Experience

The Goose Creek Connector trail is a great trail for recreational cycling: the physical experience is excellent. I mentioned in my prior post that I was hoping that they'd improved the feel, because when it wasn't fully open parts of it felt bumpy. I'm happy to report that I had no such problems this time, and it felt much smoother--as it should, as completely new trail infrastructure!

It's smooth, mostly straight (but not so straight that people get going at ridiculously fast speeds or anything), and generally wide enough to pass two people walking or riding abreast.

The curves are generally pretty easy to navigate--the only places where there are hairpin-type turns are by the Kimberly Rd interchange--and even there the other elements of the design make it easy to tell you're going to have to slow down well before the turn. It was, frankly, a great ride, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

That's a really good thing. That might seem obvious, but I have definitely ridden new bike infrastructure in cities that did not provide a pleasant riding experience. This is one.

2. Completely New Angles on the City

Another really positive element of the new connector is that, because it angles through land that really hasn't been developed or used before along Goose Creek, it opens up a completely new angle on the city.

The back country, so to speak, has been largely inaccessible--a significant section is on the unused (and in some cases unusable) back-end of cemeteries, for instance--and the fact that you can now see these places is very cool.

Then there are things like this big soybean farm that you might not even realize were in Davenport proper until you bike by them. 

More metaphorically, the existence of such a connection that never previously existed opens up new angles on the city as a cyclist. My dad biked from his house to ours--something that was technically possible before but deeply unpleasant, and now can actually be done reasonably. I was able to get to 59th St from Duck Creek Park in about 15 minutes--something that would have taken much longer before, not to mention being almost entirely street riding with cars. It makes Davenport much more open to the cyclist, and much more pleasant to experience.

3. The Views

Relatedly, it's just a gorgeous experience to bike on this trail. I list this separately because you could have gorgeous views that aren't new angles on the city or that are unpleasant to bike along--think the current mess in downtown by the river where they're building the new Main Street Landing and have disrupted the bike trail. The bike experience is thus worse, and there's been bike access there forever, but it's still really pretty.

Here the experience is both new and pleasant--and the views are still pretty.

You can probably already tell that from the pictures above, but here are a few more.

Even the bits that are mostly pavement have nice trees and greenery.

The properties you back on are pretty too--nice fountain, apartment complex!

In all honesty the pictures don't do it justice. Partly that's the nature of foregrounding the trail in the pictures, but also I was busy enjoying the views rather than always taking pictures of them.

Trust me on this: it's a gorgeous ride, and you're in tree cover almost all the way. As someone who does not always enjoy the physical beauty of Davenport, this trail is a great advertisement for how pretty the city can be.

I'll be back next week with quibbles and concerns--some even featuring these same pictures--but for now let's end on a happy note: this was a lovely ride, and I am very excited that the Goose Creek Connector exists!

Welcome the Connector!

 This post is just to say that hey, it's pretty cool that Davenport has finally connected the trails in the north to the main trail along Duck Creek. 

I'm hoping to ride it soon and have more to say--last time I tried, it didn't go so well.

To be fair, they weren't kidding that it wasn't open!

I do hope they've fixed little glitches like this single square of concrete that for some reason hadn't gotten laid.

And the fact that this section was bumpy as hell even though it was supposedly newly laid.

And let's all hope they keep up the underpasses better than the Duck Creek Trail itself sometimes gets.

But overall--congrats to the Davenport Public Works and here's to even more ambitious plans that help connect our bicycling infrastructure in the QCA!

Zen and the Art of Trail Maintenance

This post could also be called "the curse of 'recreational' paths." 

Basically, we had some bad rains and flooding in Davenport recently, and so when I tried to bike home from work I encountered this:

And this was just the one that I bothered to dismount, photograph, and continue. Basically the whole Duck Creek Trail was like this, from pools of water across the entire trail to every underpass choked with mud.

And unsurprisingly, I have some thoughts about that.

1. Bike (and Pedestrian) Infrastructure Should Count 

This is the reason for that alternate title up there: because these trails get identified as recreational, the city (and not just Davenport, in my experience) acts like they don't count as infrastructure. They're just for fun, just for exercise, just for recreation. And thus when there's a storm or some other major disruption they basically don't count in the calculus of what needs repairing, cleaning up, or just general maintenance in the aftermath.

But while it's easy to discount these trails, they're actually pretty important: not only are they unique opportunities to get cars off the road and people moving on distinct paths that have affordances that streets don't (no easier way to get to the softball fields!), they're also relatively small and easy to repair. If we bother, of course. 

In some ways what annoys me most is the tire tracks in that mud up there: someone did drive a vehicle through (and given what I see on the trail they were almost certainly a city employee). But whatever they drove through didn't clear the space. All it would take is a few minutes with a plow to get that mud off--much less than a street takes to clear, because the trail is smaller. But it never happens.

2. Ongoing Problems Compound 

Making that mud worse is the fact that the trail also has consistent spots where it's graded poorly so the water pools instead of draining off. This happens without flooding anytime there's a rainstorm. And every time it makes the trail significantly harder to use--while also compounding itself by encouraging people to use the grass next to the trail instead, worsening the overall health of the trail space.

I'm not suggesting these are as easy to fix as the mud--but I am suggesting that if the only major roadway in an area got the same consistent giant puddles it would have been a much higher priority. 

3. The Knife's Edge

Overall, this is symptomatic of a larger issue with bike and pedestrian infrastructure not only in the QCA but in the US outside of very few cities. It can function for commuting, or eerands, or generally for life for a while, but it's on a knife's edge. Just a little nudge: one storm, one rainfall, a section of trail that wasn't a priority to restore when roadworks took it out, and suddenly the whole system collapses. I had to change my clothes afterwards when I rode this because there was so much mud and water on the trail. If I had had a meeting or other event I needed to be clean for, it would have meant I could not use the bike to get there. And it wouldn't be the bike's fault.

We treat trails and paths and other bike infrastructure and pedestrian infrastructure as a complete afterthought, at best. It's always on the periphery--sidewalks and gutter bike lanes get the worst of storms too--and it's always the last priority. This makes it difficult to impossible for people to commit to using it, which creates a vicious cycle where no one uses it and so it looks like investments would be wasted.

So please, keep the dang trails open even after a storm. And stop treating this non-car infrastructure like it doesn't matter--because it can only matter if it gets some actual attention.

Bike Commuting Continued: Expectations vs. Reality

 After a couple years now of biking to work (most days) in the Quad Cities, I have a few thoughts I'd like to share on the idea of expectations versus reality: both where my expectations have been positively exceeded and where they've been underwhelmed. Overall, I enjoy commuting by bike, but there are specific things that make that possible for me, and I'll try to make it clear how that works or doesn't in what comes below.

1. Easier Than Anticipated

Overall, I would say that using a bike as my primary mode of commute this year has been much easier than I anticipated. I'm not going to pretend that our infrastructure here in the Quad Cities is great for bikes--it sucked significantly that the city took weeks-to-months to redo the bike underpass under Harrison--but for the ~1 mile distance I'm usually riding (5 miles roundtrip including two school dropoffs, but 1 mile-ish straight line to work) it's more than adequate.

This guy can do a bunch of roundtrips on one charge, as can my other main cargo bike, and as you can see from the bulging saddlebags, I don't have any difficulty either taking what I need to work and back or stopping for an errand or two. Obviously it's not in child-carrying mode in this photo, but that works just fine too. 

Are there days I need to use the car? Yes, because sometimes I'm taking the kids to the dentist across town or meeting my partner in Illinois or something. But for everyday commuting and normal errands within the neighborhood and just outside of it, the bikes work great. And the kids even demand them: we went to the library and the grocery store this week and I offered them bike or car and we ended up on the bike. It's a treat for school dropoff too, because we can skip the car line but not go as slowly as we would walking. And then I get to work energized and can park the bike right next to the building I work in, so really it's a good deal in the mornings.

2. Roads Are Worse But It Matters Less

The roads here are worse than I expected for the bike (I've had multiple blown tires from that!) but they matter less than I expected for the experience. Why? Because for all their faults, most QCA roads are wide. Here's a section of Locust (not actually on my route, and the photo is taken from the sidewalk which I don't bike on, but it should suffice to stand in).

The road isn't in great shape, but this is actually one of the less bad sections. I'd call it serviceable: if you were actually biking on it you'd notice a lot of little bumps and ridges, but big cargo bike tires take care of that just fine. The street is way wider than it needs to be here, to the point where it's probably too wide for the speed that cars are supposed to take (25 mph, there's a school right there). But while that makes speeding cars a danger, it also means that there's plenty of space in the lane and even out of it for cars to pass you on the bike. 

This is typical of the QCA biking environment. It's not great, because no cars expect you there and the roads aren't good for biking on. But it's not horrific, because they're wide enough to make up for that in most instances. Now, if you biked here at the absolute height of rush hour, or during the infinite construction season that sometimes narrows those wide roads, there would be more bike-car interactions (derogatory) but for most purposes it actually works out.

3. Lessened Flexibility In Surprising Ways

I knew that I would need the car for things like getting to Moline or Bettendorf from Davenport. I hadn't quite realized how much I would need it (or need to plan ahead) for smaller trips as well. I know I said above that it works great for errands around and just outside the neighborhood, and I stand by that! But it requires a bit more planning ahead than perhaps I was used to. If it's going to take 10 minutes instead of 5 to get home or to work, or 15 minutes instead of 7 to get my kid from school, I've learned that I'm evidently the sort of person who leaves that to the exact required margin--and thus changing the margin has made a surprisingly large impact on my time.

If I were a person who believed that on time was late, perhaps this would not be such an issue.

This is a fast vehicle compared to my own legs walking or acoustic cycling. It is a slower one compared to a car. 

Now, there are still times I've surprised myself by how quickly I can get from place to place, especially when there's construction on a main road (which I tend to avoid on the bike anyway) or problems with parking (rare in the QCA but possible, and the bike tends to have an advantage). But by and large commuting via bike requires just that little bit more planning ahead and awareness of time--even when I can leave a virtual meeting, much less one in person--and that's something I somehow hadn't anticipated.

Have you commuted by bike, here or elsewhere? What does it change about your routine, and how did it live up to your expectations?