chephy

What makes it overwhelming? Distance? Traffic? Weather?

I know. The romance of it! The only thing that's prettier, to me is a bike messenger, but I'm not willing to do that for romance alone, and the pay isn't much.

I started commuting as a university student. I was a student on a fairly isolated campus on the outskirts of the city, and I lived in residence, so for the first year I hardly ever left campus. The campus itself was huge, and there was a lot to do, so I just walked. However, one day my karate instructor and the school had a disagreement, so the karate classes, my favourite extra-curriculur pursuit, moved to a different location, about 7 miles away from campus. There was a bus that would take me pretty much straight there, but it was getting stuck in traffic all the time. I didn't have a car (and it would've been stuck in traffic just the same anyway), so biking was a natural solution, especially since the whole thing was hapenning in the summer.

The challenge, in my case, was traffic. There weren't any alternative routes that did not meander a lot, so I had to travel on a really narrow and aggressive arterial with horrible pavement. I knew very little about biking on roads at the time, so I just took the sidewalk. Almost immediately had a classic sidewalk accident, running into a side of a car pulling out of a driveway (there is a long commercial/industrial section with lots of driveways there). I think eventually I would've migrated to the road for that commute, but I soon stopped going to the karate classes altogether, for unrelated reasons. I also moved off campus the following year, much closer to the city core, so I started commuting to school, 10 miles one way... At first I only rode on the nicest days, but gradually increased the acceptable weather range. I also modified my commuting route to cut out a couple of stressful high-traffic sections and replaced them with much pleasanter streets with virtually no increase in distance and commute time, which gave me further incentive to bike-commute more often. By the time I worked up to commuting every day regardless of the weather, I graduated.

Now most of my rides are around the downtown and midtown, though occasionally I travel to the 'burbs and even a bit past, to visit my parents. I ride every day, in rain, snow, slush, thunderstorms and whatever else the weather gods will throw my way. It's a lot of fun. In fact, way too much fun for something that healthy.

There are a lot of benefits to commuting by bike that get mentioned on these boards all the time: better fitness, better mood, greater connection with nature, knowing the city so much better, saving money... They all apply to me, but there was another completely unexpected and very welcome benefit: improved spatial thinking and map-reading skills. I used to suffer from a very severe case of topographic cretinism. As a Russian proverb has it, I was the type who'd get lost in a forest of three pines. I had very limited map-reading ability and almost zero spatial thinking and memory. However, having to figure out and memorize zig-zagging bike-friendly routes and shortcuts did absolute wonders for me. I couldn't've guessed something like this was possible. I'm almost average in that department now!!! Thank you, nasty cagers, for forcing me off the major road and thus making me smarter!