I’m definitely a fan of getting on my bike, and for the extent of the current contract work that I’ve been on, I’ve been looking at ways to add more biking into my day. Despite finding a few hurdles with that client work, I have been able to get on the bike a good bit more.
In my browsing around the web today, I found a few sites that have sparked me a good bit. The first is Charge a bicycle company. I don’t know why, but their site and the work that they’ve done caught my eye and has me thinking on everythingfrom biking more to wearing more clothing that’s conductive to just getting out and riding.
The second site that I’ve been sitting at is called CarFree.us. This was a site that seems to have been started late last year by a person here in Charlotte who is looking to add a good bit more pedal power to his daily life. The interesting thing is that this person is married with one kid, and the idea of biking in Charlotte is quite dangerous (a number of accidents and one fatality last month alone). So this endeavor to pretty much center in on cycling, and then measure the benefits moreso as a “normal” person than as an avid cyclist is interesting. In one post, he even crunched the numbers and it came out as pretty impressive.
Now, if I could get back to the point of having an 8-10mi commute, this would be my kind of run. As it is, I communte 70mi (total) per day, and there’s just not a good way to say that it should take me 2.5hrs each way to get to and from the client’s area.
Nevertheless, its biking. And even having had an accident of my own recently, I am taking some adventures and precautions in the sense of just getting out and riding.
The good thing is that instead of where I was at this point last year, I’ve got a good bike, and a number of newly minted bike lanes and greenways to play on. Its just about getting out there and engaging with the local community.
Two wheels equals the kind of freedom that just can’t be grabbed by any other means IMO.
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