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?

(Human) Cargo (E-)Biking

 One of the most significant changes to my daily routine in the past few years has been the active inclusion of biking into my daily routine--and not, as I have already mentioned in this blog, recreational cycling, but biking as a major part of my transportation mix. I bike to work; I bike to shop; I bike to pick children up from daycare; my bike is, if not a full car replacement (more on that below), a major car supplement and an option when the car is not available or inconvenient for some other reason.

I believe that this is a good change for me, and could be a good change for many other people, although if there were to be anything more than the smallest of small-scale movement in this direction in Quad Cities there would need to be a significant increase in biking infrastructure.

Let me tell you why.

1. For short trips, the bike is better

Let me define my terms for this claim, since I can already imagine people yelling at me out of their car windows about this. When I say that for short trips the bike is better, I mean the following:

a) the bike is just about as fast

My work is a mile or so from my house. To bike there takes 10 minutes door to door; to drive takes about 5, except that I have to park my car further from my actual office than I have to park my bike. Thus it literally takes about the same amount of time to do it--and this is when the streets around me are not under construction. When they are, the bike is faster because the optimal route for the bike is both more flexible than the optimal route for the car and goes on fewer main roads (that therefore are less likely to be affected by maintenance).

b) the bike has advantages the car does not

The most obvious of these is that I get some exercise while biking. Yes, an e-bike (which I use) is not going to produce as much exercise per mile as an analog bike. But it's more than my car, for sure, and I'm much more likely to use it than I was when I had a non-electric bike to work with. And there are other benefits: I see my neighbors, I explore my neighborhood, and I find that I arrive in a better mood and more ready to do whatever comes at the far end of the ride on an e-bike than in a car.

c) side trips are easier on the bike

I can stop by the library or the store very quickly on the bike; they have bike racks right by them, I can pop in and out, and then I'm back on my way. This is harder with the car because it's harder to fit the car into traffic, it's harder to find a parking space (and it's often further away), and I'm usually not going by those places on the car (since as I said above, the optimal routes differ for the two vehicles). This is particularly true for destinations, like the library, that are in places with large parking lots and not many other options for cars, since the bike usually avoids having to park-and-walk.

This is most visible, perhaps, at Aldi, where the bike rack is right next to the carts:

2. For long trips, a car is better but a bike can be an option

My wife's work is 9.5 miles away by car from our home and 10.7 miles away by bike. Not only is that route less efficient by miles for the bike, it also takes much longer. It's a pleasant ride for most of it (though see above about Quad Cities bike infrastructure needing improvement) but it's definitely not great for an everyday commute. I have done it a couple of times, especially when a car is in the shop, so I can say: it is doable.

It would be much more doable with functioning public transit in the Quad Cities, but that's again another post topic. But bikes and transit do work better together, a force multiplier if you will, so if you are somewhere with good transit that lets you bring your bike, that makes longer distances much easier.

3. The e-bikes are fun and more capacious than people think

This matters. A lot of people think cars are cool, but the e-bikes are genuinely fun to ride and I think they're cooler. My kids agree; I've been told by the older one that I ought to get them on the bike all the time and not the car. This is not actually going to happen, not least because of that bad QC infrastructure, but it's nice to hear.

And yes, them: I can get two kids on a cargo e-bike, and also a load of groceries at the same time. Well, I can do that on one of them. We have three e-bikes as a family, and all three can take at least one child. Two can take one, the Lectric XP 2.0 and the Jetson Bolt Pro (with in both cases an additional modification for child carrying):

And one, an Aventon Abound, can take them both:

I love the capacity on the Abound--and I love the torque sensor that makes the ride smooth and easy too. I can't get literally anything on the bike I could get with a car--there are four of us in the family, and none of these bikes can take all four of us, for a start, though two at once can--but I can get most of what I would get with a car on a bike for a much lower cost of purchase, maintenance, insurance, etc., and without a big loss of time or a huge amount of effort.

E-biking, especially the kind of cargo e-biking I'm doing, is not a full alternative to a car, at least not here in the Quad Cities. Snow and sleet and freezing cold are still much less pleasant in a vehicle open to the elements, not least for the children. The distances in our car-centric city designs are still ridiculously large and often not good for bikes. But I've gotten out of the car a lot in the last two years, and for the last month my wife's car hasn't been working and we've been able to make things still happen largely because the e-bikes are there. If that's not an argument in favor of having one available and trying it out, well, I don't know what is.