Sports

For a Cheap and Calm Commute, Bicycling Works

National Bike to Work Week, which ran from May 16 to 20, celebrates a fun, eco-friendly and wallet-friendly approach for getting to the nine-to-five.

Rising gasoline prices and energy-draining cubicles have many locals opting for pedal-powered transportation to work.

“As gas goes up, more people come in,” says Greg Ciocci of Zanes Cycles in Branford. “It’s easier to justify spending $500 on a bike with gas prices as high as they are.”

On Friday -  the last day of National Bike to Work Week - the cheapest gallon in Branford went for $4.13.

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Ciocci says people come in and say they are thinking about biking to work and making it part of an exercise regiment. People like Lauren Swartz and Peter Cortland, for example.

Swartz, a nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, says she started taking the 10-minute bike ride from her New Haven apartment to the hospital last August.  

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“I feel like it’s a good way to get started in the morning,” she says. “It gets the blood moving and it’s less frustrating than driving.”

Cortland is an associate professor of English at Quinnipiac University and has been making the four-mile bike trip from his Wallingford home to the Hamden campus since 1990.

“Emotionally, you sort of bike off your problems,” he says, adding that the 40-minute bike ride home is more stress-relieving than the 20-minute cruise in, which is mostly downhill.  

Unlike Swartz, who uses her car for the commute in the winter, Cortland is a year-round rider and he admits it can get pretty messy at times. Often the Quinnipiac professor arrives at his office sweaty and it takes a while to cool off. On other rare occasions over the last couple decades – two to be exact – Cortland’s cycle in has been complicated by a collision with a car.

Although Cortland’s injuries were minor, the potential for car and bicycle clashes is due in part to the scarcity of bike lanes.

“A lot of people say, ‘We need more bike lanes,’” says Sara Kirschner of The Devil’s Gear Bike Shop in New Haven. She says some of today’s bikers are stressed out and feel riding on the street puts their lives in danger.

The Zanes Cycles employee agrees.

“I have friends who look at riding a bike down the street as dangerous,” says Ciocci. “But if there’s bike lanes they’d be more apt to do it.”

“I’m more scared of parked cars opening a door than traffic,” says Swartz, whose ride to work does not include any marked bike lanes. Swartz says she shifts onto the sidewalk when she is uncomfortable riding on the road, which is actually against the law.

“They only seem to be on Orange [Street] so I don’t really use it,” she says of bike lanes.

Kirschner says that the Orange Street bike lane [see photos] is a step in the right direction but still needs improvement; namely, a wider lane. When doors swing open on the driver side they do so right into the bike lane, she says. Bicyclists are instructed to ride at least three feet from parked cars, according to “Smart Cycling: a handbook for New Haven bicyclists.” But that would place bikers outside of the bike lane.

The handbook was put together by the city’s Department of Transportation, Traffic & Parking. Smart Cycling is a biker’s bible that, among other things, outlines the rules of the road, provides maps for biking in the city and offers ways to get involved in local biking communities, such as Elm City Cycling, a nonprofit that aims to make New Haven streets safer for walkers and bikers alike. 

In a perfect world, Kirschner says she would like to see traffic slow down and an integration of bikes, cars, pedestrians and nature form in her city. Biker-friendly communities are part of a larger concept called New Urbanism, which focuses on sustainability and neighborhood connectivity, she says.

“In the end we all put our pants on one leg at a time,” says Kirschner.


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