Value-Add | The Bike as Transportation
by Chase Parnell — September 28, 2021
Author’s Note: Before I get into this I wanted to set the table a little bit. As some of you know, I’m wading through a bout of running-related malaise. Lately, as I’ve thought about potential running topics to write about, I find myself not really being able to muster the motivation. That said, I was reminded recently while listening to a podcast that the goal of Treeline Journal should always be to provide value to the reader. Otherwise, what am I even doing here? So if I can’t provide value at this moment for your running life, I thought I’d instead share an aspect of my life (outside of running) that provides a lot of value for me personally in an effort to persuade some of you out there to develop something similar. This value I speak of comes from the bicycle, specifically, using it as transportation. Now I know I’m clearly swimming outside of my lane but most of you out there are runners, and while there is definitely some overlap into cycling within our community, there are a lot of runners who never get on the saddle at all. So yeah, I’m taking a bit of a detour this week as I refuel the stoke for running. Hope you enjoy this foray into an area of my life that I love and hope to further deepen in years to come.
The image just below is my current no-frills ride. For all intents and purposes, it’s a very entry-level mountain bike. Honestly, I don’t have the faintest clue about bike tech, I still call the suspension shocks, I have disk brakes but I don’t know what that means, the only accessories I own are bike lights, a bell, a bike lock, and a clip-on rear fender for those very rare rainy days in Central Oregon. The only thing I care about is that the thing reliably rolls and gets me to where I need to go. Nikki bought this bike for me as a birthday present without me even getting on it beforehand. There it was so I rode it and said hell yeah, this’ll do. Can you feel the real cyclists out there rolling over in their graves?
This Specialized something or other was a safer alternative in winter months (Nikki also got me a set of studded tires) to my other bike, a roadie Orbea San Remo, which I bought back in 2008 during my short-lived sampling of triathlons. I like that Orbea, and being a road bike, the ride is smoother and it’s way faster, but I’d get a flat tire 1x-2x a year, which is a major pain in the ass for someone like me that doesn’t have the patience for even minor bike repairs like fixing a flat. Pathetic, I know. Someday I plan on changing that about myself, maybe once the kids are gone in like a million years from now.
I ride this loud neon-orange bike (Nikki said the bright color was a nice safety feature bonus) almost everywhere I go alone unless I need cargo space for things like groceries or children or the like. I’m probably an anomaly in that I absolutely love commuting places on my bike, and yet I don’t care to ride it in any other context. I’m not going to go ride this thing on trails, I’m only mildly curious about gravel bikes and I’m definitely not going to take my road bike out for fitness purposes alone; for me, it’s purely for transportation, which I enjoy immensely. To elaborate, I detest the automobile. Fact: human beings are at their worst when behind the wheel, myself included. I hate traffic, I’m prone to road-rage, and don’t get me started on the horrors of round-about ineptitude. So thank God we have alternatives: all those things essentially go away when I’m on the two-wheeler. It’s quite a blissful experience actually. I get warm fuzzies just thinking about it. So here I go, I’m going to try to evangelize you runners out there to join the ranks, maybe dust off that cruiser in the garage, pump up those tires that’ve been flat for half a decade. Time to drink the Kool-Aid.
Riding Your Bike Builds Fitness
Okay, I’m going to start with a soft ball here. Shocker, riding your bike uses your muscles, some of which you use to run and also some other ones that support the muscles you use to run. So the benefit there is two-fold: (1) you will get stronger than you would in your car, where all you do is turn a wheel, text, and depress the pedals with your ankle joint, and (2) you’ll mildly stress your cardiovascular system, get the blood pumping, reduce inflammation, and speed recovery for the next day’s run. Ain’t that wonderful.
Add to that, many of us (not all of us) are not actually that active outside of running. I for one spend a ton of time sitting on my ass typing on this laptop. Sometimes I put on weight (which personally I don’t want) even when running A LOT! Riding my bike a couple times a day helps me to burn more calories than I otherwise would, which generally speaking, is good because keeping the weight off, generally speaking, is good if your goal is to be able to run fast. See what I did there? By annoyingly including the term generally speaking, I’m making room for the cases where burning more calories and keeping weight off are not actually healthy goals; we all know how prevalent eating disorders are in the running space. For me personally, in my mid-30s, I need to be intentional about keeping weight off during seasons of lower running volume and so the fact that pushing pedals burns calories is simply a nice bonus.
Lastly, have you ever seen a professional cyclist’s quads? They big. Have you ever gotten sore quads running down a mountain? Bingo-bango, strengthen them quads on the bike and you won’t be quite as sore when you run down mountains. This is especially true for you flat-landers, the #RunFlatStayLow peeps; if you live in Florida and you’re coming out to run Leadville next year, supplementing your running with some cycling will help you prepare. And that’s a Chase Parnell guarantee right there! No science involved. Pure logic.
Riding Your Bike is Almost as Fast as Driving Your Car
Some of you out there are already creating reasons in your head why you can’t actually ride your bike to work or to the coffee shop or to the movies or to your Tuesday morning tea with grandma. Time constraints is a big one. Sure, if you have to travel somewhere over, say, 10 miles, then yeah, hopping in the car is much easier and way faster, but I’m not even really asking you to consider swapping the car for the bike for trips of that duration. But most (not all) people live within a handful of miles from their place of work or the neighborhood shopping center or your friend’s house, and the time it takes to ride the bike is likely only slightly longer. Because remember, on a bike, traffic doesn’t really exist. If you have even basic cycling infrastructure in your town, like bike lanes, you’ll get to ride all the way up to the stop signs and streetlights, and sometimes there are even shortcuts like cutting through parks and whatnot. You also get to chain up your bike right in front of wherever you’re going. No driving around like a fist-shaking crazy person looking for parking!
For me personally, the Bend, Oregon city center is only about two miles from my house. I hop on a short stretch of bike path, I merge onto a long straight fairly busy road, I may or may not have to stop at the light at a major intersection, I proceed on and go under an overpass (watched a guy shoot heroine under there recently), and then all that’s left is a short cruise downhill into the absurd density of coffee shops, breweries, restaurants, galleries, and boutiques that make up this not-real-life wonderland that is Bend, California, I mean Oregon.
Two miles is a nice distance. I don’t know what the best distance for bike commuting is. About a 10-15 minute ride is good for me but anything shorter and it might feel frustratingly short or it might be tempting to walk (which I also whole-heartedly promote). And then if the distance is longer, it might start to get a little tedious; I imagine the car temptation really begins to strengthen as the miles increase. That said, there are people that commute 20-30 miles every day and absolutely love it, but it has to work for you and not feel too stretching or else you won’t do it. For this very reason, Nikki and I factored in proximity to town/amenities/work when we purchased our house. It’s important!
What do you think? Are we getting any closer?
Did You Know Bikes Don’t Use Gas?
Sorry, don’t mean to be patronizing but gas consumption, in this day and age, is of concern. A few things to consider: (1) you will absolutely 100% save money by riding your bike. Gas is expensive. It’s one of those sneaky expenses too that feels inevitable and is hard to track. But why aren’t we frugal with our gas usage like we’re frugal with other types of spending? A simple equation should help if you want to see the dollars and cents. If you’re considering bike commuting to work, just take the distance to work times the number of trips you’d make in a typical week, and then calculate how many gallons of gas that would save you based on your vehicle’s MPG and multiply the number of saved gallons by the average gas price and voila, that’s your weekly savings, times it by 52 weeks if you want to see your annual savings. Invest that money and boom you’ll be a millionaire in 50 years!
Secondly, and this might be where I lose some people, but can’t we all agree that decreasing our carbon footprint is a good thing? Regardless of your feelings around climate change and whether or not humans are indeed largely responsible for causing the phenomenon, fossil fuels are a finite resource that we extract from the earth. Non-renewable. As the population on planet earth continues to increase (it more than doubled from 1950-2000, going from roughly 2.5 billion to 6 billion), non-renewable sources of energy are inherently losers. Eventually, they’re not going to keep up with demand AND its use is bad for the environment to boot. Sure, there is a carbon impact in manufacturing and shipping bicycles all over the world too, so if you want to be ultra-purist, travel by foot at all times, but a giant step in the right direction would be to double the population that primarily transports their bodies by bicycle instead of car. What are we waiting for? Be the change. Let’s flood the cities with bikes!
Riding Your Bike Feels Good and Builds Community
My father in law rides motorcycles. He has a lot of them. I think the reason he loves them is because it feels good to ride them. You know, just the feeling of being on two wheels, outside the metal container, moving fast and smooth, leaning into turns. Well, even if bicycling is in some way a duller version of that, the feelings have to be related. Gliding, balancing, the chain working around gears, sensational connectivity to the mechanics and ground surface; it’s wonderful. On almost every ride I still do that whole back and forth lean thing, where I oscillate from one side of the bike path to the other. Smooth like butter. And I’m on a clunky fairly cheap mountain bike! It’s fun to reconnect with that child within and just do some things that feel good every once in awhile. This is an opportunity to do it a couple times a day and unplug from an otherwise sort of stressful and overwhelming world. A rolling meditation.
Next, the parallel with motorcyclists continues: bike commuters are in a club, no doubt about it. Head nods, eyebrow raises, checking out bikes at the rack. You pass the same people every day if you maintain a fairly regular schedule. You see another commuter and you know that at the very least you share one thing in common. Don’t you want to be apart of this club?! It’ll change your life, you’ll contribute to decongesting the streets of your local community, you’ll get fitter, save the planet, build community, and be apart of something important. It’s so good.
Things to Consider Not From My Brain
I appreciated this article from the Washington Post with the very click-baity title: Cycling to work means better health and a longer life. I didn’t read the studies referenced therein so it’s hard to know how valid many of the claims are but I really appreciated the profiles of the bike commuters and their stories about how they got into it. You can argue numbers, science, and economics, but simple opinions of day-to-day commuters and their experiences are hard to poke holes in. The comments at the end are the most depressing element and I advise not reading them unless you want to accelerate a coronary.
According to this article by National Geographic, “Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse emissions in the U.S., and cars and light trucks account for 58 percent of transportation emissions. Switching from cars to bikes cuts emissions much faster than switching to electric cars. And motor vehicle accidents still kill more than 39,000 Americans a year—including more than 700 cyclists.”
In the same article, “Clearly the U.S. is not a bike-friendly country overall. Only one percent of all trips that Americans take—to work, to the store, on vacation—are by bike. […] Compare that to the Netherlands, say, where 27 percent of workers commute by bike. But Dutch cities didn’t used to be that bike friendly, said John Pucher, a professor emeritus of urban planning at Rutgers University who specializes in biking. […] If some European cities look heavenly to American cyclists today, he said, it’s because over the past few decades they’ve actively reclaimed space in the urban landscape from cars.”
Here are the top twenty bike-friendly cities in the world. There are currently no cities in the United States on the list. The most recent was Minneapolis in 2015.
Good vibes family to follow: “Melissa and Chris, along with their children Coralie and Etienne, relocated from Vancouver, Canada, to Delft, the Netherlands. Melissa works with Mobycon—supporting the promotion of Dutch transport knowledge, policy, and design principles in countries across Europe and North America. As communications manager for the Dutch Cycling Embassy, Chris uses his knowledge and passion to share practical lessons for global cities wishing to learn from the Netherlands’ extraordinary success.” Love seeing their photos of every day citizens cruising around town (helmetless I might add) on the safe idyllic paths and bike lanes of Delft. Website | Twitter | Instagram
Life Goals: Although toting around three kids on a bike sounds pretty intimidating, I’m determined to develop a setup where we can continue to decrease our reliance on cars and have this be more of a family thing instead of just me. We have a double chariot (if you are an active parent to humans you know what this is) that we used a little bit when we only had two kids but it wasn’t that awesome. I’ve been eying these Madsen Cycles with the bucket seat. Have you seen these?! Fits four ankle biters with seatbelts.
Are you in? I’ve sort of unintentionally postured this as some sort of ethical/moral imperative, but really the goal was just to share something that matters to me and maybe spur on some thought around how you move about your town. I absolutely love that I can grab my bike and disconnect from the network of machines, even if just a few feet away, sharing the same road. If I’ve convinced you to give it a try, let me know about it. If you’re a veteran commuter, let’s connect. I’m sure I have a lot to learn from you. I picked up a book about urban land use reform with an emphasis in transportation planning. I downloaded a University of Oregon professor’s Evidence-Based Guide to 25 Bike Focused Street Transformations. I researched local municipal projects and am encouraged by the direction Bend is headed. I’m becoming obsessed and I’ve had a lot of fun writing this article. If you enjoyed it or found value in it, please consider becoming a patron of Treeline Journal for as little as $2 a month. We are a reader supported website. We rely on you wonderful people to keep us afloat. Thanks so much for your support!