ChiWhoBike #64
Biking to work takes me about the same amount of time, and I get the benefit of having a workout. It’s a great way to wake up, and I like the ease of it. You can get places really quickly, move around fast, get where you need to go, explore nooks and crannies, and it’s a different way to see the city. To me it’s a wonderful way to sort of explore. And when I travel in new cities I try to rent a bike because you get a whole different feel for the city and it gets your heart pumping.
It’s getting stressful to just be in traffic. I feel like drivers are a little more emboldened and cops are a little more lax with their enforcement and there’s a lot more reckless drivers because they’re not being held accountable to their actions, to their bad driving. And I think getting a driver’s license in the United States is very easy compared to other parts of the world. For example, I’m Palestinian, and I remember my cousin telling me when he was trying to get a license, it was very costly, and he had to do the test in stick shift. And when I took my test here, it was like five minutes tops, while his test was 45 minutes. And how can you really measure somebody’s driving capacity like that? And I feel like as we get older and renew our license, maybe you should do a dust up on your driving test.
Once you get to really explore the city on a bike, you really get to fall in love with the city and biking, and it’s just a constant love that keeps growing. You get to see all these little nooks and crannies and sometimes you go the same route several times and notice things that you didn’t last time. And you can change it up, like if you’re commuting three days a week, maybe go for a leisurely ride, hit the lakefront path, do something a little bit different and just cruise around and chill. I think that’s the beauty of it. You can take your bike on the train, on the bus, it doesn’t get any better than that.
