National Bike to Work Day

Did you know that today is national bike to work day? For those of you who did know, how many of you actually did just that?

May is national bicycle awareness month and a concentrated effort is under way to educate people about bicycle safety as well as the benefits of riding a bicycle: both recreationally and as a means of transportation.

I must admit that up until a couple days ago, the day gas went up to a little less then $4 a gallon, I was just like all of us. I would jump in the car and turn the key over and drive away, I didn't really need to know to much about internal combustion, just needed to know that when I turned the key off I went. I would drive a half mile away to run an errand or to Holland, distance didn't matter, I would drive. On the flip side however, I was one of the biggest grumblers when it came to filling up the tank on my van, just couldn't understand why I was putting in around $50 per week to drive around town.

I've decided to do something about this dilima, I've decided to not only embrace bicycling as a recreational activity but also as a viable means of transportation. In coming to this conclusion I did a little simple math: my van tank is around 20 gallons (I think), at $4 a gallon it would take me $80 to fill it, I get around 250 miles per tank of gas, which equates to roughly 12 to 13 miles per gallon of fuel (as best as I remember). I then started looking at the time it took me to go places in a car: work= 5 minutes, grocery store= 5 minutes, softball games= 5 minutes, bank= 7 to 8 minutes, and so on. I started realizing immediately that I was spending a lot of time in the car running errands that were less then ten minutes from home. Why?

That's when I made the decision to get the bike down, dust it off, and start riding the bike to these same places. Do you know what happened; I started to immediately feel liberated and free from the handcuffs the gas pump had placed on me. Not only that, I started watching how much time it took to get to certain places and realized, more often then not that, I could actually bike to these places faster then I could drive. Did you know that it only takes, on average, five minutes to bike one mile?

No longer am I waiting in long lines at the gas station when prices drop or paying ridiculously high gas prices. You can only imagine how liberating this feels.

Am I proposing a totally car free existance, certainly not. I am merely proposing that the next time you have to run an errand that is less then ten minutes from home, why not take the bike down, dust it off, and go for a ride. You may get some strange looks, but eventually these same looks turn into someone else who is enjoying the benefits of bike riding as transportation and getting healthy because of it.

In the mean time if you see some goofy looking guy on a bright blue Schwinn carrying his loafers: pull over into the opposing lane, honk, and wave because you just passed the guy writing this article, and I know I am spending a lot less on gas then you are.

May God bless you as you have a safe enjoyable weekend, and if you get time, why not get out and ride.