July 10, 2008

Smooth ride, powered by you
With gas prices rising, some commuters are turning to bicycles
By Brian Early bearly@hippopress.com

It was in 1983 that Bill Fisk prepared himself to start riding a bicycle to work. He could see that his marriage wasn’t going to last, and he wasn’t sure of his financial future, but it wouldn’t be another 10 years before he had to ride a bicycle to work, for shopping and for recreation. At that time the divorce became final.

“I could either ride my bike from my house, or I could drive a car from an apartment,” Fisk said. He chose the former, selling his van and using the money for a down payment. And he started riding his bike to work. Every day. Every season. He lives in Litchfield and works in Merrimack at the Anheuser-Busch Brewery Plant. He lives about a mile and half from the brewery, and on quiet nights, he can hear the trucks backing up with the backing-up beep. But it’s a 12-and-a-half-mile ride by bicycle, as he has to ride to Nashua to cross the Merrimack River before heading north to Merrimack.

“I had to do it, and now I like doing it,” he said. “For transportation under 15 miles, it’s the ideal vehicle if people operate it legally. Nothing compares to the cost-effectiveness. I tell everybody I don’t have time to drive my car.”

Fisk estimates he rides about 7,000 miles a year going to work, buying groceries, visiting friends and riding around. For that, he averages about two to three cents a mile in repair costs, which compares nicely to the 58.8 cents the Internal Revenue Service estimates as the per-mile maintenance cost of an automobile. In addition to saving money, the now 58-year-old is in good shape and doesn’t pay a gym for the privilege. To ride the 25 miles round trip to work takes him just 20 minutes more each way than it would driving his car.

And “I have more time to do things if I ride my bike than if I drive my car,” he said.

Doing it for the money
It’s the year of the bicycle. Many shops can’t keep enough bicycles and accessories stocked for all the consumers wanting to ride. Some families buy bicycles and ride for recreation locally instead of splurging on vacations to faraway places. Some ride for exercise. And there is a surge of riders who are buying bicycles for commuting to and from work as gas prices continue to rise.

Patrick Lessard, who works with his brothers at the family business, The Bike Barn in Manchester, said that 25 percent of their sales this year are for commuters, up from roughly five to 10 percent in previous years. His brother Tom said the last time bicycle sales were this good was in the mid-1990s, when the economy was strong and people had lots of disposable income, but even then, it was more for exercise and recreation, not so much for commuting.

“You would have to go back to the seventies when we first opened the store,” Patrick said about the last time people bought bicycles for commuting in droves. The oil crisis then, as now, was a main motivator.

Fisk is probably not the norm when it comes to commuting to work by bicycle. In fact, there aren’t too many norms for commuting cyclists. Each person has a different schedule, and different responsibilities at work and at home.

The mommy-cycle
Some, like Jessica Fleming, hope to commute by bike at least one day a week, and maybe three days a week if weather conditions and schedule allow.

Fleming works at Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc., an engineering firm that has an office in Bedford. The firm’s managers encourage people to cycle to work, and they provide showers to their employees, a plus for those working up a sweat on the way to work. Fleming lives in Manchester’s North End and rides the five miles to work when she can.

“I felt so guilty getting in my car the whole time. I quit the gym. I quit yoga and I exercise outside right now. I can muli-task,” she said. “This is a good solution.”

She also has a four-year-old daughter whom she’ll drop off at day care in downtown Manchester. She pulls her around in a trailer she bought earlier this year.

“She loves it. She sings, she plays. She likes going over bumps so she can hear her voice waver. She waves to other cars,” Fleming said. The only time the riding is tough is when she goes up a hill into the wind. But her daughter helps her out, saying, “You can do it, Mommy.” “Sometimes, it’s all the encouragement you need,” Fleming says.

The trailer wasn’t cheap. It cost about $300, but it came with a secure buckling system and a roll-over bar, and it attaches to the bike in such a way that if Fleming wiped out on the bicycle, the trailer wouldn’t flip over. After she bought the trailer, she took a day to ride around to get the feel of the trailer before she put her daughter into it.

She avoids roads with a lot of parked cars. When she arrives at the day care facility, she unhitches the trailer and rides the rest of the way to Bedford trailer-free. She says that if she had to drop her daughter off at day care in Bedford, she wouldn’t do it. Not because of the trailer.

“I feel safer riding with her in downtown Manchester than the main corridor in Bedford. I feel people disrespect my presence much more in Bedford than in Manchester,” she said.

Safety first
The fear of riding a bicycle and being hit by a car is common and it keeps many from taking up riding. There was a tragedy in Manchester last month, when a 15-year-old female was killed when she collided with a vehicle. A six-year-old died from injuries in Concord in April from being struck by a truck. My active grandmother was killed riding a bicycle when she was hit by a vehicle years ago.

The odds are low. According to the National Safety Council, the lifetime odds of dying while riding a bicycle, for a person born in 2004, are one in 4,472, compared to one-in-84 odds of dying from a motor-vehicle accident, and dying on a bicycle is about as likely as dying from a fall involving a bed, chair or other furniture. About 5,100 more people died from walking than from riding a bicycle in 2004, the NSC says. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the number of people who die in automobile accidents every year is about 9,000 less as the number who have died in bicycle accidents altogether since 1932 — about 51,000.

In 2004, the U.S. DOT says, there were 171 traffic fatalities reported in New Hampshire, and only one was from bicycles. In 2006, the numbers were 127 and two.

Of course, these numbers might change if more people take up bike riding. The key is to ride safely.

Fisk has had numerous crack-ups over the years, but he still gets up and rides. “I ride 7,000 miles a year. Things go wrong, things happen,” he said.

He’s a big proponent of following the rules of the road and operating the bicycle as a vehicle, like all other vehicles on the road. In his research, he’s found most of the people who are involved with fatalities are not following the rules of the road. Those who ride their bicycle like a vehicle decrease their chances of injury dramatically.

One of the most dangerous situations is riding a bicycle the wrong way in traffic — especially at night.

A few weeks ago, I was riding back from the Rock ’N Ribfest in Merrimack to Manchester on DW Highway. It was dark, but I had a light. As I was riding up a hill, I had to quickly jump off to the side of the road as a non-lighted cyclist was speeding down the hill the wrong way.

Fisk carries brochures with him in the panniers of his bicycle to hand out to offending cyclists such as this one.

A couple of weeks ago as he was riding through Nashua, he witnessed a cyclist riding the wrong way on a sidewalk — a double no-no. He stopped, corrected the cyclist and told him he should know better. The cyclist was an on-duty Nashua police officer.

“You obey the law and learn how to avoid being in situations that you don’t want to be in,” Fisk said.

Learning how to bike
Dave Topham is one of three certified bicycle instructors with the League of American Bicyclists in New Hampshire. He co-founded the Granite State Wheelmen in 1971, and in 2004 he co-founded the Bike-Walk Alliance of New Hampshire. He’s been a certified instructor since 1981. Through the Bike-Walk Alliance, he does lots of bicycle advocacy to help change state laws to create a better state for cyclists. But, he says, cyclists have to ride thoughtfully and respectfully to be fully respected on the road.

Usually once a month, he hold instructional rides, where he’ll take a group, teach riding basics, and then take a 10-mile bike ride, critiquing the riders. Beginning riders have to learn to be assertive on the road while respecting the flow of traffic and understanding typical situations and what to do in them.

One of those situations is that of a car not respecting how fast a bicycle can travel. On flat ground with a road bike, 15 to 20 miles per hour is a common speed. One of the most dangerous situations, Topham said, is when an automobile passes a bicycle and then immediately takes a right-hand turn. Sometimes the biker can swerve or slow down to avoid, but sometimes he can’t. In this situation, Topham advises the biker to take the right-hand turn with the vehicle.

It’s important for bicyclists to become aware of what other vehicles might do, like looking at the wheels of vehicles to see if the vehicle is about to turn. Sometimes, he said, making eye contact with other drivers is not enough. He’s heard many stories of cyclists who said they’ve had eye contact with a driver but then the driver lurches like he or she hasn’t seen the cyclist. Topham often will give a small wave to a driver to get non-verbal confirmation that the driver sees him.

“You’re handling the bike as a vehicle,” he said. “How do you handle the bike so you don’t become a statistic? These are things that we work through the demos.”

The biggest fear that people have, Topham said, is of a car or truck hitting them from behind. That is one of the least common accidents when people are following the proper vehicle rules, he said.

There are few areas in the state with bike lanes, though that is beginning to change as transportation planners acknowledge other modes of transportation than just cars and trucks. It’s common to find a road that has no shoulder with lots of sewer grates on the edge of the roadway where bicycles ride. For instance, one of the main bicycle routes to get from Manchester to Merrimack is along South River Road, a busy four-lane road with no shoulder and lots of sewer grates. On a road like that, it’s tempting to ride on the sidewalk, but that has its own dangers, like frequent driveways and intersections where drivers are less likely to be looking for oncoming bicyclists.

Commuting for profit, maybe also for fun
As riding becomes more popular in the workplace, Topham is often is commissioned to do bicycle demos in large workplaces, like HP and Verizon, during an employee lunch hour.

“It’s being promoted more than ever by the high gas prices,” he said. But before people take the plunge into riding to work, there are things to think about.

“There are a fair number of guidelines. It’s different than recreational riding. You need a bike that’s reliable,” he said. “Your boss doesn’t want to hear that you got a flat tire on the way to work.”

Do you need to bring a laptop to work? How are you going to bring a change of clothes, and bring them so they’re dry and not wrinkled? Do you have paperwork to bring in? Are there showers at the workplace? If not, what else can you do? And what about places where bicycles are not allowed, like bank and fast-food drive-throughs? There are even some shopping plazas that ban bicycles, Topham said, though he is working to change those laws, through the Bike-Walk Alliance.

“You don’t have to ride every day of the week,” he said. “When it fits into your schedule.”

Some companies, in efforts to encourage workers to ride bikes, will offer a guaranteed ride home, he said. If there is a family crisis, or if it was a beautiful day in the morning but now it’s raining, the company will give the individual a ride home.

Topham, who lives in Salem, will ride to clients often, wearing pants and a dress shirt, tying his right pant leg so that it doesn’t accumulate chain grease.

“I have to be reasonably presentable when I walk in. I can’t be wearing bike clothes. You stand out like a sore thumb,” he said.

If he can, he’ll stop by a bathroom and wash his face quickly before entering.

For those who don’t have showers at their workplace, there are still other solutions.

Liz Pereira, a single mother, lives in Milford and works as a bartender in Nashua. She started riding to work last year to train for the Cape Cod Getaway, a two-day, 150-mile ride from Boston Harbor to Provincetown, Mass., to raise money to fight Multiple Sclerosis. “I didn’t have a ton of time to train for the MS ride,” she said. So she started riding the 14.8 miles to work. Though she stopped riding after the big ride last year, she’s riding much more this year, two to three days a week if she can. There’s no shower at the restaurant she works at, so she improvises.

“I give myself a hell of a sponge bath,” she said.

She’ll take two microfiber towels, which dry quickly. She’ll wet one with hot water and lather it up and wet the other to rinse. Inside the handicapped-accessible bathroom at her work, she’ll scrub and rinse herself down. Then she’ll put on the makeup that she carried with her in a backpack.

“I’m good to go, ready for work,” she said. “At first it was a pain in the ass.”

But she got her routine down, packing her extra clothes, towels and makeup the night before. The ride now has become her relaxing time.

“It’s quiet time for me. It’s my time. It’s really mellowed me out quite a bit,” she said. “When I’m on my bike, I hang out. When I’m in my car, I have such road rage. This beast takes over. I definitely will continue to do this as long as I can.”

All sorts of accessories can be added to the bicycle to ease the commute, like baskets, or panniers that easily attach to the bike that can hold clothes or a laptop. There are bike trailers for both cargo and for children. Fisk has enough room to carry two 30-packs of beer on his bicycle. With a trailer, he carried eight 30-packs though Nashua one time — but he won’t do that again.

“I had every high school kid in Nashua seeing how tough I was,” he said.

Helmets are a must, though they are only required for riders under 16 years old. Lights at night are also important..

The wind in your hair — priceless
Depending on the type of bicycle and how much riding you want to do, a complete set of bike and accessories will start around $600. Topham urges riders to stay away from CIC’s sold at department stores — Cast Iron Clunkers. “The problem with those is that they have two wheels and a saddle. They’re not responsive. The components cannot be changed. You can’t make adjustments,” he said.

It’s worth the time and money to go to a bike shop to be properly fitted, and to find the right bike for the right person for the right type of riding.

“Bike fitting is very important at many levels,” Topham said. “You don’t find that at K-Mart or Wal-Mart.”

Many who ride only ride in the warmer months, but for Fisk, after you get the proper gear, riding in any temperature and any weather is enjoyable. A thunderstorm? “I put my Gore-Tex on — no big deal,” he said. He likes below-zero riding at midnight under a full moon alongside the open fields of Litchfield.

“You own the world,” he said. “Riding your bike is like running with the wolves.”