Green Options

Bike commuting is a rewarding way to reduce your carbon footprint and save some cash at the same time. Not only is it great for your body and your mind, riding that bike to work keeps one more car off the road and means spending less money on gas.

Unfortunately, riding bikes means occasionally dealing with pitfalls like bad roads, dangerous intersections, and theft. It would be great if drivers were more bike-aware, but this just isn’t always the case. Seattle-based BikeWise is looking to take some of the unknown out of bike commuting, providing a tool to “make biking safer and more fun by gathering good data on the things that sometimes go wrong.”

So how does it work?

Would love to bike commute to work but don’t feel up to it? Wouldn’t mind an electric bike but would love one that’s as green to ride as a traditional 20th Century-style bicycle? The Cycle Sol is a concept that aims to address those concerns, making biking an ergonomic, speedy, environmentally-friendly go-go ride.

Source: The Design Blog

Flipping through pages of the Internet the other day I ran across a group in Boulder, Colo., who moved their home goods via their bikes — furniture, appliances, everything.

I know they aren’t the only ones ever to have done it. (I searched a little more.) So now I’m curious to know how common this is among the bike commuting, Earth-loving crowd.

My first thought upon seeing the string of photographs documenting the day was, “WTF?” And I mean that in the best way, because pretty soon after I thought, “That is so awesome!”

They put out the word, calling interested bike mover helpers and 11 showed up. I can only imagine the comradery, the exercise, the fun. They made four trips to get the whole apartment’s worth of life moved.

At the beginning of this year I changed jobs, trading a 35-mile one-way commute for a 2.5-mile local ride.

Living in St. Louis, where we have four distinct seasons – pretty-damn-cold, balmy-moderate, humid-and-hot-as-hell and fall – I waited out the pretty-damn-cold months to begin my life as a bike commuter during the balmy-moderate ones.

New to the game, I’m taking things a bit slowly.

My sister and I bought and assembled an electric motor for my dad’s bike this Christmas. It was the first gift he’s ever enjoyed from us.

Recently retired and now living in a suburb of St. Louis, we knew he’d never take to biking as there were a number of screw-this(!) sized hills all throughout his town. Through ten years of teaching I know that adults are far less resilient than children and often times need but one excuse to say “screw this” and go back , in this case, to a steady diet of TV watching. But we were elated to see how much he enjoyed his juiced up Electra Townie! Whether it’s riding with my mom (another proud new owner of an electric bike–she had to keep up), biking to the store for groceries, or putting it on the bike rack and hitting the Katy Trail, few days go by that he’s not on his electric bike.

This began my love affair with electric bikes.