ChiWhoBike #73
I’ve been biking my entire life. I grew up in small towns in Colorado and Oregon, and biking was sort of the thing that I wanted to do most of the time, and I actually don’t have a driver’s license. And I moved to Chicago primarily because I knew I could cycle year round and, if need be, get around on public transportation. So coming from Colorado and Oregon, Chicago is very, very different in the sense where it’s all flat, so you’re not worrying about hills and other elements. But you make up for it with the fact that there’s ice, snow, wind, and aggressive car drivers. But I cycle year-round in this with our kids and it works really well for us.
My bike, we call her Polly. When we got the bike, our son said it looked like a pelican, so this is the pelican and the mouth, and you sit in the mouth of the pelican. So we’re a big fan of it. But this is an Urban Arrow, and we got this from JC Lind who’s in Old Town. We’ve had it for almost six years now. And we have two children now, an 11-year-old and a 4-year-old. But when the 4-year-old was very, very little, we had a little clip that the car seat could sit in. So we had one in there when he was six or seven and then the baby in the seat as well, which is really fun.
I think if you look at roads that have been particularly dangerous, like Milwaukee for example, where there has been a lot of cyclist deaths, I think having these very designated protected lanes for cyclists is really, really important. I know for drivers, having one lane is really inconvenient, but having that sort of cement area where people can’t park, where you have a bike lane, which is really, really protected, I think that’s great. It’s a good step. I know in some cities, like Minneapolis and in Portland, there are almost designated routes where cyclists can get on a side street and you can ride, you’re not gonna hit a stop sign, you’re not gonna hit a stoplight. And it allows for a cyclist to say, great, we’re going to almost go to this cyclist-bound artery, which is gonna allow for cyclists to ride that way. Then cars understand cyclists are gonna be permanently in this sort of street, so they can sort of stay away from that.
