If you are like me, and a HUGE number of North Americans, you live in some form of suburban area around a large city. How’s the cycling where you are? And here I am only talking indirectly about your cycling - I’m talking more about other people cycling.
There was a summit going on today that I could not attend called the York Region Bike Summit. York region is a vast area to the north of the city of Toronto that is one of the fastest growing suburban areas in Canada and North America.
I live in a suburb in a mid-size city. Trying to answer your question means trying to answer three questions to me:
How do I find other people’s cycling?
It’s not as bad as most think. There aren’t as many cyclists as you see downtown, partly because downtown is a younger and hipper crowd and cycling is eco-fashionable these days. Suburbs are middle-aged, middle class with kids and they drive more. Cyclists in the suburb are way better behaved (at least it seems to me when I’m out and about) than they are downtown: I don’t see them on the sidewalk or going against traffic quite so much (although it’s still a lot.) One thing I do notice is that few, if any, cyclists, give way to pedestrians. For some reason, cyclists really seem to think that they are THE priority on the road and on the sidewalk.
How do I find my own cycling in the suburbs?
This is really two questions because cycling has two purposes, and the answer differs depending on the purpose. I cycle around my suburb for practical reasons, usually to run errands or get to the library and back, and I cycle as part of long distance tri training.
a) for the practical, getting around cycling, the suburb is pretty decent. Because the area is pretty developed, there’s always a route I can take to avoid those four lane shopping strip monsters, and even those have bike lanes now. Locking up my bike is surprisingly hard, but I can see why - and it’s for the same reason that I hardly ever bike to do errands: because most of the time if I’m running an errand, I’m on my way to picking something up, buying stuff, etc. Kinda hard to go to Lowe’s for paint or get cat litter at Petsmart with a bike. It’s understandable that those places don’t have bike stands. That’s definitely an issue downtown where bike theft is a huge problem, but you can leave your bike in front of any store around here in this suburb and it’ll be there when you walk out. Motorists’ attitude toward cyclists is mellowing, mostly because so much attention has been paid to cycling infrastructure and the whole cycling debate in the past few years. We had a bad accident a few years ago - four cyclists were killed in an early morning accident when a van ran them over - and drivers’ attitudes changed visibly for a while after that.
There are lots and lots of cyclists on the paths. I never take paths on my bike since they tend to have lots and lots of walkers, dogs, and kids on them. I’ll take my chances with a car rather than a dog cutting across the path on a leash just as I’m passing.
b) tri / training cycling - I get the heck out of the suburb. I can’t imagine do training rides entirely in a suburb. I have no idea how triathletes who live in sprawls like Washington DC or New York do it. The first 20 minutes of my ride is the shortest line out of here and onto country roads. Every year I watch the housing developments getting built and despair, because that means that one day it’ll take too long to get out to those roads, and I’ll start thinking of moving. Country road motorists are way more aggressive than suburban drivers. I think it’s because they’re going faster and farther, so slowing down feels like a loss of momentum.
However, there’s a lot of self-righteousness going on with me as a “around town” cyclist and with others biking in my area The thinking goes something like this: “I’m on my bike and doing great things for the environment and being healthy, so I DESERVE to go the wrong way up the street / take the sidewalk / blow the stop sign.” The more we focus on car-bike war, the more that attitude creeps in.
Those are some very detailed and awesome thoughts.
I concur. Your subburban area seems perhaps more active then mine. We have a noticeable number of serious cyclists - roadies/triathletes and the like, but there is very few, bordering on almost none, of any other kind of cyclist or bike riders in our area. It’s extraordinarily rare to see someone cycling for transportation or other utilitarian reasons.