Escape the Gridlock: How Bikes Can Save The World

I have a love hate relationship with cars. On the love side, you can add driving, or just the sheer kinesthetic sense of pleasure that one derives from taking a well-engineered piece of machinery through a fast, banked road. It's the same sense of speed and thrill that one might get riding a bike through a BMX or MTB trail. I'm sure some pilots get this experience as well.

This pleasure is further ingrained by the number of racing games I've consumed over the years. The first real driving sims really took off around NASCAR 2003 or so, and there was Gran Tourismo and Forza, with their progression of upgrades and tuning, up from the lowly stock Civic or something similarly unglamorous up to Maseratis, Porches, McClarens, and such. And I am American, also, so the car has always been represented or embodied by a sense of freedom to travel, to pick up and go anywhere.

On the flip side, one just has to look at how the automobile industry has captured our cities and suburbs, which are practically built around cars these days. We'll save discussion about white flight and how highway systems were used to divide low-income areas of a city from the affluent ones for now, I'm not going to blame the automobile for that, just recognize it. Everything seems to be built around parking, as the song says "they tore down paradise, and put up a parking lot". And of course we know the environmental cost of combustion engines over the last sæculum.

It's the more practical aspects of car ownership that I seem to fluctuate on the most. Having a nice car means keep up with it, and the cost of car ownership is something that people don't really factor into with the purchase of a car. My dad was pretty handy with his trucks, although he and I were too much at odds most of the time to really enjoy that. I must have picked up something from him regardless, since I'm fairly adept at changing brakes and doing other routine stuff like spark plugs or whatever. And having a nice car means keeping it looking nice, with the washes, waxes, detailing, restoration chemicals, &c., &c. It's a lot of work. I spent thousands of dollars on a used BMW once, and additional hundreds buying product for the seats and rubber and metal. More on that one another time.

The thing that bothers me the most about automobiles is the commuting. Now I'm East Coast and have never been to Los Angeles, but I can see the trend from where I'm at. The culprit is called induced demand, defined as an economic principle that describes how increasing the supply of something leads to increased consumption. Right now my metro area is split between two land masses, separated by two bridge tunnels and a drawbridge. The second bridge tunnel was opened during my lifetime. It might take fifteen minutes to get from one downtown side to the other at speed, but rush hour will back everything up and make that trip take 45 minutes. Of course the last tunnel was built to ease some of this pressure, and of course it got to the point where they decided they needed another crossing, and they've spent the last five or so years drilling under the bedrock, building pylons, and putting in new lanes to open. They'll be done in a year or two, but I can already tell you what the end result is going to be: more gridlock.

It looked like COVID might have brought some sanity at last with work from home policies. Obviously I don't think it was good for kids, and I'm sure we're still coping with that. One might argue that it's not good for parents or workers also, but if you think that you're probably a boss. We'll tear down your soft-layoff return to office policies another day. I fortunately had been WFH before the pandemic started. I had leverage with my job and my boss couldn't pay me enough to waste 90 minutes a day stuck in traffic. Plus, I drove a manual...

One of the dumbest things I've seen here is the pickup and drop-off system here at my daughter's school. The city terms it a fundamentals school, which means they're supposed to take a more structured approach to education that regular public schools. It's open to anyone in the city, but if it is outside your usual school zone then you have to arrange transportation for your kids or pay for before or after school care. What this looks like in practice is parents will show up a half hour or more before pickup starts and start forming two rows. If you show up near dismissal, you'll wind up with your car out in the street, hazards blinking, as the intersection gets chaotic with people trying to make blind turns or stuck trying to merge because they weren't paying attention. I'm surprised I haven't seen a wreck there yet. Either way you dice it, you're stuck in that line for a good twenty or thirty minutes, unless you come right at the end of pickup. Last year I sat in that gauntlet every morning and afternoon. I tried to make it useful by meditating or listening to podcasts, but it was too much of a waste. This year we had over-allocated in our tax-deferred childcare account, so we went ahead and put our youngest in after-care. For $45 a week it's a no brainer.

Which brings us to e-bikes.

When COVID hit, we had two cars, a CRV that my wife bought new, with cash, when she was pregnant with our first, and a Ford sedan that I had a lien on. We sold the Ford to another dealer, I wound up coming ahead on the deal almost $2k. We weren't going anywhere, so it didn't make sense to keep it around. When I'd gotten the car, it made sense to get a loan, since rates were low, and I had steady income. $220 a month or whatever wasn't that big of a deal. Dropping $13-15k for a car was no brainer when rates were low.

Now, not so much. When my wife started hinting, months ago, that she was tired of sharing a car with me, we were in the doldrums between the halvening and the sure-to-come bull run. I couldn't bring myself to part with my coins. Of course, I could have gotten a job, but I've been forever ruined by my last tech job, and couldn't bring myself to jump through those hoops. Plus, the idea of putting another car back on the road was complete anathema to me. A hybrid might be more appealing, but without a large buffer of cash on hand at the time, I was in a weak position. I certainly didn't want to sell twenty grand of crypto to buy something as basic as a car, not with the inevitable bull around the corner.

The main conflicts that we've run into with the car was mainly on the few days that my wife was obligated to go to her job. That, and the kids. Our oldest takes the bus, but has numerous after school activities that she needs picking up from, while our youngest has to be dropped off on time and picked up. It's about a three mile ride to each of their schools, which is no problem for me, but turns into a good 15 or 30 minute trek for their little legs. We'd taken the trip on our bikes before, but it was usually a one-way trip where I would come back with the car to get them. Very inconvenient all around.

Somehow I got the idea that I could get an electric bike and get the youngest to school on it. I started looking around online, doing research on the brands and models available and looking for deals on Craigslist. I got lucky, and found two for the price of one. I had narrowed my choices down to a Lectric Expedition, a $1600 cargo bike that could fit two small children on the back, or some 350lbs of groceries. I pined over buying one during the Labor day holiday, as their sales plays offered varying amounts of accessories, sometimes hundreds of dollars worth. Then I found a pair online. The seller was in a affluent area, retirement age. He'd bought the pair for him and his wife, bought them while she was out of town. She'd taken one ride and decided that it was too much bike for her. Now he was selling them, along with his other toys, motorcycles and kayaks. The bikes had less than 100 miles on them, were less than a year old, and were almost half price. I jumped on the deal.

I have not regretted it since. One bike is a step-over with cargo carriers, I regularly ride it everywhere I can for errands: grocery, hardware, or automotive stores, the library, or to pickup takeout. The other is a step through that I purchased a passenger seat for, I put my youngest on the back and take her to school. My eldest can ride one of them herself, and although she had a rough spill her first time out, has slowly started warming up to the idea of riding it. My youngest loves riding it to school, and seems to actually prefer it to taking the car. It's fun and a blast to joyride it.

Even the missus has finally come around. I can't tell you how annoyed she was when I got them, and wanted nothing to do with them, but I managed to get her on it the other day for a lunchtime ride to one of our parks on the bay. It took forever for her to get up to speed, literally, but I think she's convinced now. And practically speaking, I think she's going to find a bike a luxury when she gets called back to work. The parking situation near her office is horrendous, as her office is at the last exit to the tunnel, and regularly gets deadlocked. They're squished back in the same lot as a college, and the entire street system for a mile in any direction gets gummed up with assholes trying to skip traffic by exiting the freeway and getting right back on, or doing late merges like a real jerk. It's ridiculous. Some people will cut through the main road circling her office, and on those days no one goes anywhere.

I've been telling her for some time that she ought to get a bike, and do away with the whole problem. Even on a good day, she has to hike from the parking lot at work to her building, which is a good walk. It's seven miles from our house, which is too far for her, and there's inclement weather, but she could save so much headache if she drove to a nearby shopping mall, or downtown, and rode the last five minute or half mile. I wish she would just imagine the sense of satisfaction as she blows by the people stuck in their autos on her wheels. I think she'll come around.

Of course there are public policies that need to be enacted to make my city truly bike friendly. Everything is still built around cars, while we've got bike lanes on some of the touristy routes, it's not everywhere. My wife doesn't feel comfortable taking some of the roads, nor do I like taking my youngest on the main thoroughfares, there are areas where there are only sidewalks on one side of the street. We've got a good public transportation system here, from what I can tell -- I've never used it -- but I'm going to have to do some lobbying to really make it happen here. Trust me, I've got notes.

Around the time I'd first gotten the bikes and started seeing how far I could go on it (pretty far), there was a fatal accident on our main boulevard. A bicyclist was hit by a car and died, I drove by it and saw the officers holding up the sheet. A few days later I saw mourners and a wreath at the same spot. It was a sobering reminder of the danger. It's not just cyclists, I've seen mothers trying to rush across the same road with kids in hand, scurrying across six lanes of divided road. The stop lights are too far out of the way, and there's no pedestrian walkway. It's just dangerous. And I know changing perspectives among auto drives towards pedestrians and cyclists is going to be a hard sell.

Once I got the bikes and alleviated some of the near term pain in our household, I've started looking for my own car. It's been a long and tortured process, as I've been looking at the lowliest of the low, trying to balance being a cheapskate with finding a quality automobile. I hope that search will be over by the end of the month, and I'll have plenty more to say about that next time.