Moving Across Boulder by Bike

Bed on a BIke

My friend Bryan, with whom I’ve been living for the last year, is heading off on a round-the-world bike ride for an indeterminate amount of time.   So I had to find a new place to live.  The Masala Co-op had a summer sublet opening, and I jumped at it.  I used to be on the board of the Boulder Housing Coalition, which owns Masala (and Chrysalis, another co-op downtown), and I lived here for the summer of 2004, before heading to Baja to kayak that fall.  And of course… I was determined to do the move by bike.

Continue reading Moving Across Boulder by Bike

The Bicycling Orchardist

The Human Tractor

My friend Kerry is putting in some fruit trees, and we decided to make a trip out to the CreekSide Tree Nursery on 61st St. near Pearl by bike to pick the first of them up.  It’s fun to serve as a kind of “proof by existence”.  Look, I’m doing it, and I’m smiling, so it’s possible, and it’s okay.  The tree probably weighed 25 kg (50 lbs) and so did the trailer, which even when added to the weight of my bike, is less than my own mass.  Just avoid any serious hills if you can, make sure you’ve got some low gears, and maybe have a snack afterward.  I think 3-4 trees this size would have been totally doable, but then I probably would have broken a sweat!

Continue reading The Bicycling Orchardist

Bicycle Grocery Shopping Made Easy

Porteur in Use

In our recent survey of Boulder bicyclists, one of the most common reasons people cited for not biking more was that they have too much stuff to carry.  Based on the photo bicycle counts I’ve done around town, I suspect a lot of people find the idea of carrying cargo daunting because they’re trying to do it in a backpack — backpacks and messenger bags are far and away the most common kind of cargo I see, with baskets and panniers a distant second place, and hardly any trailers or dedicated cargo bikes.  It’s not the weight so much that makes riding with cargo challenging — even heavily loaded, your bike and cargo will generally weigh much less than you do.  Touring in Wyoming recently, heavily loaded, my bike weighed in at about 90 lbs.

Are you Experienced?

One of my fellow travelers (above), weighing in at under 100 lbs herself rode a bike that weighed 75 lbs.  We’re not heroic athletes.  We didn’t train.  You just go slow and make the weight as comfortable and stable as you can, and it’s all good.

A week’s worth of groceries for 2 people doesn’t come close to being that much stuff.  If you’re shopping for a larger household then sure, you might have to go more than once a week, but this isn’t really a big hassle.  In Europe it’s common for people to go shopping nearly every day, even if they’re driving.  It just becomes part of the routine, and it’s fine.  Pleasant even.  How often do you end up going out for that one little thing you forgot to grab anyway, even when you try and plan ahead?

My around-town bike has a rear rack that I use panniers on, and a front platform rack.  Sometimes people see it and comment on what a burly cargo bike I’ve got… but I think this is a very reasonable amount of capacity to have on hand at all times around town.  I definitely think of it as a city bike, not a cargo bike.  It will happily get me home with 50 lbs of food and sundries, with the weight split between the front and back ends.  I ride at a leisurely pace, and arrive home comfortably and generally without breaking a sweat, which certainly wouldn’t be the case if I took my backpacking pack shopping instead.

I was happy to discover a trick recently that makes the shopping experience even easier.  It’ll work with most panniers which attach to the rack via hooks at the top.  You just pretend that the edge of your shopping cart is a bike rack, and hook the panniers on there for checkout:

Ortlieb Pannier on Shopping Cart

Ortlieb Pannier on Shopping Cart

This makes it quick and easy to pack the bag inside the store, in a way that will work for riding, instead of doing it all again outside, or having the bagger pack for you (which never seems to go well, unless they bike too), and it makes it clear that you’re using your own bag from the get go, so you don’t have to have the “Oh, I don’t need a bag” back-and-forth, which is nice.  Then you can either just lift the pannier off at the door and leave the cart behind if your bike is nearby, or you can wheel all the way out to your ride, and simply lift the pannier off the cart and onto your rack.

Shopping Cart and Bicycle

Shopping Cart and Bicycle

Another feature which I can’t recommend highly enough for utilitarian cycling is a no-nonsense kickstand.  Something that can hold your bike upright even when it’s fully loaded.  No scraping up your bike on walls or railings, no precarious toppling load, just a bike that can take care of itself, like a grownup:

Look ma, no hands!

Have Spraypaint, Will Bicycle

Have spraypaint, will bicycle

Every year, Boulder organizes a fun ride called the B360 in June to help familiarize new riders with the bikeways, and to highlight newly added paths and lanes that those of us who ride every day might not know about (especially if The Google hasn’t yet been notified of their existence…).  If you ride here at all you’ve probably seen the faded little stencils all over town saying B360 and B180.  Well, this is where those stencils come from!

Have spraypaint, will bicycle

Continue reading Have Spraypaint, Will Bicycle

Bicycles, Transit, and the Last Mile

Bike Oasis on the Portland Transit Mall

Transit agencies have a problem called the Last Mile.  It’s especially problematic in lower density communities, where convenient, high frequency local feeder bus, light rail, and trolley lines are unlikely to be economically viable.  Many US communities have this problem.  The most common solution is the Park-n-Ride — a gigantic surface lot or parking structure adjacent to a regional mass transit line.  People drive their cars a few of miles and park them all day — usually at very low cost to the driver, and often for free (though of course, parking isn’t actually free).  There are lots of problems with this model.  Parking lots take up a lot of space.  Structures are very expensive ($10k-$25k per parking spot).  What do you do when you get where you’re going?  If the transit line doesn’t come within easy walking distance (500 meters?) of your ultimate destination, this model probably isn’t attractive.  It also assumes that you’re going to own or have access to a car, even though you’re taking transit, which precludes you from reaping most of the economic benefits of not driving, as they only accrue when you get rid of the car completely.

I bring the Last Mile problem up because I just came across a study entitled Bicycling Access and Egress to Transit: Informing the Possibilities.  Combining bicycles and transit instead of cars and transit can help with a lot of the above issues.  The cost per bike parking space is at most a couple of hundred dollars, not $10,000 or more, and for a given area, you can park ten times as may bikes as cars, making a bicycle park-n-ride much more economical in both dollars and space.  It’s also possible to take at least a few bicycles along on transit vehicles, which can solve the problem of getting to one’s final destination on the other end, though not generally for everyone since bicycle capacity tends to be limited, especially on buses.

Continue reading Bicycles, Transit, and the Last Mile

Potential Boulder Transportation Innovations

Portland Bike Box

Much cheaper than an underpass…

The Camera reports (in a pleasantly positive light) that Boulder is exploring a variety of low-cost bike and transit improvements.  Underpasses and separated trails are awesome, but quite costly, and often depend on external funding sources.  Thankfully there are also locally fundable small-scale improvements that can go a long way toward improving the quality of service for bikes and transit users.  Most of them are just better paint, information, and organization of the streets, but represent potentially large quality of service improvements.

Continue reading Potential Boulder Transportation Innovations

2011 Boulder Cyclist Survey Results

Southern Sun Bike Parking

We put out a survey in early March (more detailed summary here in PDF format), asking a bunch of questions about the bicycle habits and desires of Boulderites, and we’ve gotten nearly 200 responses.  This is an attempt at a summary.

A large majority (83%) of respondents reported using their bikes as either their primary (53%) or secondary (30%) mode of transportation.  This isn’t too surprising, since we targeted cyclists in promoting the survey.  It’s important to realize though that at some level, our most important audience is people don’t currently bike, or identify as cyclists, but who could be potentially be enticed into riding given the right inducements.  This group is important both because it’s large, and because it’s not “the choir” in terms of preaching.  It isn’t your base that you aim for in politics, it’s the undecideds.  At the same time, the current cyclists are the political constituency that we are trying to represent in an advocacy context.

Continue reading 2011 Boulder Cyclist Survey Results

Hero Biking to Fort Collins and Back

Strung Out Cyclists

The Boulder Bike Culture Meetup‘s first little social intro to bike touring went pretty well I think.  Didn’t lose anyone, no injuries that I know of, no major mechanical issues, only one flat tire.  Tail wind and gorgeous weather on the way up.  Good food, good beer.  Naps and gracious hostesses.  Tail wind and deteriorating weather on the way back, capped off by hail and sleet.  A well rounded taster.

Oh yeah, and I took some pictures… It takes a while to load, but I think it’s worth it.

Continue reading Hero Biking to Fort Collins and Back