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Old 05-23-14, 04:33 AM
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GriddleCakes
Tawp Dawg
 
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Anchorage, AK
Posts: 1,221

Bikes: '06 Surly Pugsley, '14 Surly Straggler, '88 Kuwahara Xtracycle, '10 Motobecane Outcast 29er, '?? Surly Cross Check (wife's), '00 Trek 4500 (wife's), '12 Windsor Oxford 3-speed (dogs')

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Originally Posted by MyBikeGotStolen
Haha thanks. I have a few pretty bikes, but this one is always the go-to bike. The frame bag is a Nashbar. The panniers are the Nashbar Daytrekker panniers.

Btw, how is the commuting up there in Anchorage? The company I work for has an office in Anchorage and I believe they have a few commuters!
I think it's great, but I lack a frame of reference; I've only ever bike commuted here, South Lake Tahoe, CA, and Bend, OR (which is the gold standard of the three). I've been commuting here on and off (being that I've moved away and then back again) since 2001, and I can definitely say that it's better than it ever was. We have almost no bike lanes, and the city is criss-crossed by 45 mph 5-lane boulevards where the average speed is 55 mph. We have just under 300,000 people in Anch, but we're pretty spread out, so road speeds stay high outside of rush hour, and cyclists on high speed throughways are almost unheard of here. There are more cyclists every year, it seems, so motorists are getting used to seeing us.

On the upside, we have greenbelts with MUPs that cross the city several ways, and outside of those a savvy commuter can learn to link together slower speed neighborhoods, MUPs, and sidewalks to get where s/he's going with minimal motorist conflict. Sidewalk riding is legal in Anch (albeit risky, know what you're getting into) outside of downtown, and even in downtown there's zero enforcement (a common summer sight is the summer-only bike cops trying to weave through the crowds of tourist on the downtown sidewalks). Downtown is one of the areas where street riding is safe, though; low speed with lots of stops to keep motorist speed down. Between that and the high level of pedestrians, there's no reason to ride on the sidewalks downtown (unless you're a cop who doesn't know better ).

And then there's winter...

Very few of us ride all winter. Streets stay icy all winter, sidewalks become gigantic snow berms as the street plows bury them under (always after the sidewalk plows have cleared them, at taxpayer expense), the MUPs are groomed for skiing instead of plowed so they're frequently too soft to cycle on. In the past, when my commute was short, I would ski to work during winter storm cycles. Now that I've moved across town from work, I bought a fat bike to ride during storm cycles. Even if you don't ride on snow days, studded tires are a must, unless you like crashing a few times a winter.

I'm lucky in that I live at one end of an MUP that spits me out into downtown, where I work and where street cycling is easy. For several years I commuted solely on surface streets, summer and winter, all the way across the most motorized parts of town, and it was harrowing. I got to where I was going, and it was generally fun like riding a bike is fun, mixed with regular moments of extreme stress.

Long story short, I like it now better than I ever did. It used to be terrible, now it's less so, and you can mitigate that further depending on where you live and where you work.
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