Thursday, June 5, 2008

Taking it to the streets.



Now that it's not even funny to take pictures of gasoline prices, Angelica and I have taken to biking around Hemet. It's not quite as bike-friendly or picturesque as San Diego, but we're still able to get around fairly well. My dad found this tandem on Craigslist a few months ago for super-cheap. It's more like a bike-and-a-half than two bikes put together, so each person is really only riding three-quarters of a bike. It makes conversations easy, too.

Not wanting to be the punchline of a suburbia joke anymore ("Why do we drive to the gym and then park as close as possible to the entrance?"), we've been biking to the fitness center, too. It's only nine miles round-trip. By the time we get there, we're all warmed up for yoga or weights.

I was listening to a conversation about cycling on KPBS a few weeks before school let out. All we need to do, the director of the San Diego Bike Coalition insisted, is create a critical mass of cyclists. Drivers will eventually adjust, and officials will respond by creating more bike-friendly roads. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before bicycles become a legitmate form of transportation. After all, a human on a bike gets about 900 miles to the gallon.