Bike-commute day 69—to home

Wednesday, 17 August 2011

I had hoped to go to the gym on my way home tonight, but I left work too late (leaving my desk at 17:30 and the locker room around 17:45). Perhaps just as well, since Chuck wants me to help him prepare for his trip to the GNI gathering, for which he's leaving tomorrow morning. And to give me time to prepare a nice going-away meal for us. I think there are skinned chicken breasts thawed in the refrigerator and a package of pad thai noodles and sauce in the pantry. I'll garnish it with Italian flat-leaf parsley instead of cilantro, roasted whole peanuts, and the half-lemon still in the fridge.

I took the route that last year was my usual commute, which takes a different route from the river bikeway to my home. At my last checkpoint, I headed up the zig-zag and to the Riverside Drive bridge, then around the Veterans' Memorial Park and down to the bikeway on the right bank of the Great Miami River. I followed the river to cross Wolf Creek and then took the bikeway west from there to the gravel-grass ramp to Broadway Avenue. I took an alley and a block of ---- to reach Broadway and then crossed the Broadway Avenue bridge. I turned left on Riverview, and then right on --- to Superior Avenue. From that point, I joined what has been my typical route this past year up Bryn Mawr and to my home.

The bikeway on the right bank still suffers from inattention. A few patches of sand and gravel, a couple instances of glass debris, and the still-lousy shape of the grass-gravel ramp up to Broadway make this a problematic route for my Lotus and its skinny tires. It will be better to take this route on my Trek hybrid bike, since its tires are more impervious to the stones and litter.

Ride conditions
Temperature: 84 to 91°F at 17:05
Precipitation: none
Winds: 5 to 10 mph from the south, variable
Clothing: Skinsuit, ankle socks, open-finger gloves
Bike: Lotus Legend fixed gear
Time: 00:44:37 for 12.90 miles
Heart rate: 128 bpm HRave, 145 bpm HRmax
Bikeway users: 16 cyclists, 12 pedestrians, 4 dogs
Playback of the ride

Accessibility by bike from the Miami Valley bikeways

At the dinner meeting of Dayton Bicycle Adventures, I asked several people if they planned on commuting to work by bicycle. —Now I didn't ask everyone there, just those few sitting near me.— Most replies were along the lines of "I don't have a way to freshen up after the ride." "The distance is too far." "The bikeways don't connect directly enough." "The streets from home (or to the workplace) are too busy."

The last two reasons are a heart breaker for me, since we often celebrate the 300 miles or more of bikeways in the Miami Valley. But the reasons reveal an essential truth.

How the Bikeway System Fails the Suburbs
Here is the Dayton-Xenia bikeway system plotted over a Google Earth map. The brighter green paths are the Great Miami River Trail (GMR) and the Little Miami River Trail (LMR). The pale green paths are the Creekside Trail that connects the GMR and the LMR trails and the Ohio to Erie Trail that connects toward Columbus and northeastern Ohio. The blue paths are various trails that are presently incomplete, with plans from the MVRBC and Metroparks to complete them.

Click the image to see a larger version. Then click Back on your browser.

 With those incomplete trails, the Dayton area has these conditions.

•  Much of Kettering, Oakwood, and Centerville are cut off from the bikeways. 

• Northwest Dayton and Trotwood are effectively cut off from the fully-connected system, with the poor state of the bikeway adjacent to McGee Boulevard.

• Englewood and Union are similarly cut off, with the lack of a connector from Englewood Reserve to, for example, Sinclair Park.

• Huber Heights has access to the bikeway, but only at the extreme west edge of the city.

• Fairborn is also cut off, due to the inability to develop the right-of-way through Riverside and the Dayton well fields that otherwise would connect to the Huffman Reserve and the Huffman Prairie bikeway.

• Two of the four largest potential sources of enthusiastic, year-round bike commuters—Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and Wright State University—are poorly served by gaps in the bikeway system.

• And finishing our clockwise survey, the Iron Horse Trail edges toward The Greene, then feints westerly before it disappears in the recreational facility around Delco Park. Thus Bellbrook, once the area renowned for superb cycling roads, is left isolated, even from the Little Miami Trail.

I'm one of the very lucky cyclists, for whom home is less than two miles of quiet residential streets from a bikeway (in my case either the Wolf Creek Trail or the Great Miami River Bikeway) and work is less than a mile from another point on the bikeway (in my case Research Park from the Iron Horse Trail).

But I too look forward to the day when all the trails are contiguous. Some day the system will look like this, with the violet paths connecting the green and blue bikeways that exist now.

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How the Bikeway System Fails the Commuter
or the Errand Runner 
I'm also lucky in how well my bike commute correlates to my auto commute. My 12.5-mile commute, which has 85% of it on the bikeway, is an ideal distance for combining transportation and exercise. With very little exertion, it is a commute of an hour and 10 minutes. With a training intent, it is a commute of 45 minutes. On the other hand, my most direct commute by auto is 9.5 miles and takes about 20 minutes. The same route by bicycle takes about 30 minutes at the highest intensity. (Though that timing is from my experience of more than 15 years ago, when I was much stronger—and less cowed by auto traffic.)

I know of only one cyclist who regularly commutes between Miamisburg and the Research Park area. I see him (Jeff) only during the "rush hours" of long Summer days, since his bike commute requires more than an hour door-to-door.*Corrections at the break.* I estimate that his auto commute is 15 miles, and that his bike commute is 20 miles. He follows the auto route in outline, going north to downtown Dayton, east, and then south to Research Park. But his bike route goes to the Dayton hub on the north side of downtown, while the auto route goes to the freeway junction at the south side of downtown. That lack of correlation would dissuade most cyclists from commuting. Other cyclists consider this 20-mile distance much too far for commuting, and I believe Jeff commutes by bike frequently only during the Summer.

The regional bikeways follow a modified hub-and-spokes design. The design has two hubs: Dayton and Xenia. Each of these hubs have five spokes. The Dayton hub spokes are...

• GMR trail north to Taylorsville Reserve and on to Troy
• Mad River and Creekside Trails to Beavercreek and Xenia
• GMR trail south to Miamisburg and Franklin
• Wolf Creek trail eventually to Trotwood and Verona
• Stillwater River trail through DeWeese and Wegerzyn Parks to Sinclair Park and eventually to Englewood

The Xenia spokes are...

• LMR trail north to Yellow Springs and Springfield
• Ohio and Erie trail to Charleston and London
• Ohio Mound trail to Jamestown and eventually to Washington Court House
• LMR trail south to Waynesville and Loveland
• Creekside and Mad River trails to Dayton

The hub-spokes system works well enough if you want to ride from the periphery to the center, or from the center to one of the spoke ends. But what if you want to bicycle for an errand to a neighboring town, for example from Miamisburg to Centerville, or from Vandalia to Englewood? Then you have to bike to the hub and out on an adjacent spoke.

I'll offer an idea in another post.