I Flooded the Mississippi

Thankfully the news media is keeping quiet about this or I could be in big trouble: I flooded the Mississippi earlier this month. I’m also responsible in some small part for the Arkansas killer tornados last month. I may even be implicated in the Japanese earthquakes earlier this year, though the evidence for that is not so clear. But certainly without a doubt (as I confessed in a previous post) I share with BP responsibility for the gulf oil spill last year. How did I manage to cause such massive death and destruction? Simply by living my life as usual, getting around by car. I feel a little bit guilty about it actually. But what can I do?

I think more and more people will, as I have done, make this important connection: my driving habit (among other things) causes global warming which causes extreme weather which leads to premature death and hardship around the world. I can no longer read about the misery in Mississippi, the anguish in Arkansas, the grief in Japan, and the environmental destruction in the Gulf of Mexico without knowing that I am in a small way responsible. I think more and more people will feel a little bit guilty like I do. And we’ll have to weigh our guilt against our need to use our cars. After all, don’t we have to use our cars to pick up our kids now and then? Don’t we have to go get the groceries, commute to work in the rain, and occasionally drive to our parents’ house in another state? What choice do we have? I mean, these are all errands that we can’t do on our bicycles, right?

Wrong. It depends how you define bicycle. Most people in this country think of a bicycle as a recreational device for children or athletes. Most people don’t think of a bicycle as something they can use to carry passengers or to carry heavy loads. And most people think that it requires great strength to bike up steep hills or to go faster than 10mph or to go long distances. These are all misconceptions stemming from peoples’ limited idea of what a “bicycle” is. I’ve spent the last couple of years rejecting what a bicycle “is” and experimenting with what a bicycle “can be”. And I’ve concluded that my large (cargo) bike with an electric motor can be almost as capable as a car for almost all of my errands.

I still have a lot of work to do to make my bike into a true car-replacement-vehicle. I recently added batteries for long trips that enable me to go 60 miles in 3 hours or 120 miles in 12 hours, depending on how much I lean on the throttle. As a former bicyclist that speed and distance is more than good enough for me. However I imagine others might want to add a few more batteries to make a faster but slightly heavier car-replacement-vehicle. How is a true car-replacement-vehicle different than a motorcycle? For starters, it uses one hundredth the energy of a gasoline-powered motorcycle. And the energy it uses (namely electricity) comes in a form that is easily gotten from renewable sources. I can satisfy all my transportation energy needs by putting a modestly sized solar panel in the sun for a day or two. Secondly, unlike a motorcycle my true car-replacement-vehicle is designed to go slowly. That’s right: slow by design.

My bike as it is now replaces almost all my personal transportation needs and most trips carrying a child; a little more power and a larger frame would enable me to carry adult passengers too. A canopy would make winter riding more comfortable. But these are minor improvements to an existing proven technology. The car companies would have us think that they need a technological breakthrough before they can offer us environmentally responsible vehicles. Not so. You can begin your car-free lifestyle now with an electric cargo bike.

If the car-free revolution doesn’t require new technology, what is stopping us? The revolution only requires a simple collective change in our attitude: the willingness to go slowly. An electric-vehicle-centered lifestyle requires a willingness to go say 15mph rather than 30mph in the city, or 30mph rather than 60mph on the highway. Is that too much to ask? I hope people are willing to make this attitude change. It seems like a small thing: take a little more time to run your errands in order to spare us all from extreme weather events, in order to prevent permanent damage to the earth’s climate.

Aside from preventing planetary destruction, there are plenty of other reasons for people to travel slowly. At 15mph traffic lights and stop signs are no longer necessary; people have enough time to negotiate their way through intersections. Other signage for restricting cars from doing annoying things (such as parking in the wrong place) becomes unnecessary. Pedestrians—even kids and pets—can roam the streets. Because we all have smaller vehicles, more of our cityscape can be green rather than concrete. People driving bikes and other open electric vehicles can greet each other, stop, and talk. No more massive concrete structures dotting our landscape and draining our government budgets. Imagine what our living spaces can look like without cars! It almost seems like paradise, until the next tornado comes rolling in because the climate hasn’t changed back yet.

I confess that I still drive occasionally. I apologize for that. I am confident that by driving an electric cargo bike I can wean myself from causing further environmental destruction. But until then, sorry about the flood y’all.

The Way Highways Should Be

I found paradise. I am on my way to Washington DC by bike, and I chose a route that passes through the Pine Creek Rail Trail in Pennsylvania. This trail is awesome. Sure the scenery is nice and the weather is nice, but what really struck me is that this trail is The Way Highways Should Be. My fellow travelers were pedestrians, bicyclists, and horseback riders. We greeted each other as we passed. The pace was slow. The mood was happy. Old folks tottered along on their bikes and and in their electric wheel chairs. Lycra-clad young guys zipped by on their road bikes. Little kids played in the dirt in the middle of the path. Residents waved from their porches. It was humanity at its finest. It was idyllic. And it was my highway.

Anyone who is willing to give up a vehicle that is wide, fast, and heavy can have this too. What does a vehicle’s width have to do with it? There are many hidden consequences when a cultures embraces wide vehicles. Traffic jams, parking structures, massive concrete structures dotting the landscape. Heavy vehicles also lead to an imposing and expensive infrastructure that could easily be replaced by lighter vehicles on crushed gravel paths. Fast vehicles make it necessary to have a bewildering amount of traffic control–stoplights and signage. And high speeds make it difficult to greet the people you pass.

The Pine Creek Trail epitomizes the humanity in transportation that we as a culture have given up. Can we get it back again? I am hopeful. Over half of my 470-mile route to Washington D.C. will be on bike trails: 65 miles on the Pine Creek Trail, 16 miles on Pennsylvania’s Lower Trail, 180 miles on the C&O Canal Towpath, and lastly a few miles on the Crescent Trail that circumnavigates Washington DC. That’s 265 miles of trail! I look forward to the day I can do the entire trip on humane highways of crushed gravel.

Report on the State of Bicycling in Washington D.C.

The Well-Loved Crescent Trail in Washington D.C.

I recently visited my parents in Washington D.C. and as is my wont I paid particular attention to bicycling-type activity that I saw. As we rode through Adams Morgan on the bus, for example, I was pleased to see freshly painted bike lanes, but my adulation turned to horror when I saw that the lanes abruptly disappeared and reappeared as we rode alongside. And sure enough the bicyclists I saw cast their votes by their behavior: I saw lots of bicyclists driving on the sidewalk rather than risk driving on such deceitful bike lanes. (By the way I am purposefully using the word “driving” instead of “riding” for what a bicyclist does. Now that more and more bicycles have passengers, I reserve the word “rider” for what the bicycle passenger does.)

But for the most part I was pleased by what I saw in D.C. I saw an active bike community. I saw groups of tourists touring the city by bicycle. I saw lots of bikes and scooters parked around the buildings downtown. And for me the crowning jewel of our nation’s capital is not the Capital building, but the Crescent Trail. This wide tree-shaded bike trail circles more than 10-miles around the western side of the city. It is well-used by bicyclists, runners, and strolling families. It is built from an old railroad bed that passes over and under most cross streets. It is I think what all cities should aspire to create, ultimately for all short-distance non-commercial transportation. Imagine if all the beltways in our country were replaced with tree-lined boulevards on which ultralight vehicles (bicycles and cars weighing less than 100 pounds) rolled along at 15 mph amongst runners going 6 mph and pedestrians strolling at 3 mph. You might say “yes Larry it sounds very idyllic but it’s not practical; people wouldn’t be able to get to work on time on a bicycle.” I would reply that Washington D.C. is only 10 miles wide; at 15 mph a bicyclist could get from any one point to another in less than an hour. That’s certainly not the case now for people traveling by car. The Crescent Trail is the best example I’ve seen of How Wonderful Transportation Could Be If Only We Decided That’s How We Want It to Be. It doesn’t require any new technology. It doesn’t require drastic sacrifices. It just requires using what we already have in a new better way.

German Bike Paths Rock!

I’m reading the book Rowed Trip by a couple that rowed and biked from Scotland to Syria in 2008. When they were biking they towed their custom rowboats behind their bikes, and when they rowed they stowed their folding bikes in the hold of their boats. Cool.

I was particularly interested in how the biking situation is in Europe. I have this idea that the Europeans are way advanced in that department. Certainly their biking experiences in remote areas sounded nice. They described single-lane roads which they had pretty much to themselves, seeing only a few cars per day. But other areas sounded nasty. They described narrow roads which pimply teenagers used as race tracks. However, when they reached Germany they wax poetic:

…my spirits were buoyed by…the fabulous condition of the bike path. Even though it was wide enough for a car and paved, it was strictly for non-motorized travel. Regular signs marked distances to upcoming communities, while fruit trees and park benches appeared with regularity. I was happy to see the path was amply used by dog walkers, stroller-pushing mothers and touring cyclists, almost all of whom seemed intrigued by our road boats.

Cycling is big business in Germany. Every year millions of touring cyclists pedal along the nation’s 50,000 kilometres of bike paths. Not only is cycling an excellent way to discover a country, encouraging you to experience hidden gems away from typical tourist itineraries and to eat hearty meals with complete justification, it fosters a host of mom-and-pop businesses catering to the visiting pedaller. Small villages that would be overlooked by tour buses have bustling cafés, bicycle shops and accommodation geared to passing cyclists. The bed and breakfasts are wholesome and inviting, the kind of place where the hosts would yell at you in contented bliss and topple oversized swaths of fresh bread and farm cheese onto your breakfast plate. The pleasure of lengthy cycling trips on roads exclusively for human-power traffic is a foreign concept for Canadians. While we have the gorgeous scenery, long-distance cycle-touring in Canada involves sharing the roads with cars and trucks. The noise, fumes, and danger detract from the trip, and our experience in Germany made me realize what we’re missing. On bike trails, you can let your imagination wander without worrying about straying into the path of a semi, the birdsong comes through undiluted, and it is easy to chat idly as you pedal side by side.

…

When I praised the quality of the German cycling paths, our host related the origins of their cycling movement. In the 1970s, a group of students spearheaded a drive that ultimately led to a pace of bike-path construction exceeding that of roads. Since 1976, the total length of cycle routes in Germany had quadrupled from 12,911 kilometres to by some estimates about 50,000.

Canada has a few quality bicycle paths, but they are not interconnected, and for most randomly chosen A-to-B trips, a cyclist is forced to follow busy roads. Whereas in Germany, a pleasant bicycle path can be found connecting most towns. In 2007 Colin and I cycled in the Pacific Rim National Park on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a world-class tourist destination, and we encountered some or our most dangerous cycling conditions ever. We’ve cycled through Third World countries with a better shoulder for cyclists than those found around Long Beach. When we queried the park officials, they insisted the environment couldn’t take the extra burden of a track catering to fossil-fuel-free vehicles. The highway and numerous vehicular parking lots are the limit of what the park can handle. The Canadian government could learn a lot from the Germans.

Germany’s abundance of cycling paths is a case of “if you build it they will come”. In Münster, Germany’s most cycling-friendly city, bicycles are used for one in four trips. By comparison in Canada’s most pedalled city, Victoria, B.C., only one in twenty trips are made by bicycle. On average, 10 percent of trips in Germany are pedal-powered, which is five times higher in Canada and ten times higher than the United States or the United Kingdom.

I wasn’t surprised to find that more  people cycle here as to discover it hadn’t always been that way. The advent of the automobile led to a precipitous decline in cycling in Europe, which would have undoubtedly continued if it hadn’t been for concerted efforts. In the 1950s, cycling in England was more popular than it was in Germany, as the Germans fully embraced the automobile industry, building world-class autobahns and mass-producing cars. Interestingly, grassroots efforts in Germany began breathing life back into cycling as an alternative, while Britain continued catering almost exclusively to the car. It’s hard to say what cultural forces spawned such differences, but these two European nations, both with strong economies, now have distinctly different cycling habits. The Brits are tied with Americans in their rejection of the bicycle, while Germany is a world leader.

The thing is, people don’t want to ride their bikes if it elevates their chances of dying or being maimed, and that is a real likelihood in the U.K., U.S., and Canada. If you ride your bike in the States, you are seven times more likely to be injured and 2.5 times more likely to die than if you ride in Germany—a factoid that may help explain why in America 75 percent of cyclists are male, while in Germany and the Netherlands, the number of women on bikes is equal to our surpasses that of their mail counterparts.

We were usually the only foreigners on the bike paths and felt as though we had discovered a national secret.

In my estimation Colin and Julie Angus, the authors, are nothing less than heroic. We saw them speak at the National Geographic Society in Washington D.C. last November. The Society had awarded them Adventurers of the Year for 2006. They are professional adventurers who don’t hesitate to row across the Atlantic or do other such impossible-sounding feats. Colin and Julie are leading the way for the rest of us who embrace human-powered transportation. I hope that some day people will react to seeing a bike towing a rowboat not with an incredulous snort but with a yawn while they mutter “there goes another couple biking and rowing across Europe”.