Back in Action, Again. Sort Of.

Today I woke up feeling somewhat like a human being for the first time in quite a while.

Normally, I would address this very development by jumping on my bike and riding until my legs fall off.  However, I have decided to try to treat my body a little more kindly than that.  As such, my goals for today include getting the two desert bikes tuned up and taking a little spin.  I just need to figure out what 'a little spin' actually means.

What I'd like it to mean is rolling a mile or two, grabbing a coffee at Sister Bean's, and rolling home, on pleasant, quiet streets.

Where my neighborhood is concerned, though, one of the things I'm not really keen on is the fact that to get to the pleasant riding, you first have to escape the neighborhood by traversing a number of narrow, busy roads with poor visibility on which people routinely exceed the speed limit by a significant margin .  The nearest really pleasant rides are Iroquois Park (so not doing that today) and Southern Parkway.  The nearest destinations where one can sit and have a snack (unless you count the hospital, which probably has a coffee shop of some sort) are only  mile or so away -- but it's a stressful mile, rather than a relaxing mile.

Right now, I really miss living in the Highlands, where even if I wasn't feeling too hot, I could easily go out and spend and entire day doing short flights from shop to shop, enjoying used books, ice cream, and other such pleasures.  I didn't like riding on Bardstown Road* -- and still don't -- but the Highlands offers plenty of parallel routes and is dotted with neat retail and service venues.

Here, we are not completely without neat little shops to visit, but this part of town was definitely designed around the automobile.  This 'goes double' for my neighborhood.  Even Iroquois Park, which is almost literally in my back yard, is not directly accessible from Arling Court, or from Arling Ave.  Walkscore.com rates my current address a 25/100 -- car-dependent, in their eyes, though I do fine without a car most of the time.  My old address rated an 82 -- really quite high, for any address in the United States.  The city's average stands at 48/100, almost twice as 'walkable' as Arling Court.

I don't know how or even if we could really transform my neighborhood into a truly walkable one.  The Highlands (and its sister neighborhood, the Frankfort Ave/Crescent Hill corridor) works so well for walkers and cyclists because it was built before the private auto was a primary means of transit, and is zoned accordingly.  Neighborhoods like mine, on the other hand, were deliberately designed to create a sense of separation between residential and commercial districts -- so even when they're close together as the crow flies, one can only make a direct trip by trespassing in people's yards, hopping fences, and so forth.


Across Taylor Boulevard (or New Cut), a similar neighborhood has dealt with this situation by creating easements to allow shortcuts for pedestrians and cyclists.  My guess is that the neighborhood in question had no choice; kids walking to school follow the path of least resistance, and it only makes sense to codify that path, rather than punishing the kids.  As a result, the neighborhood in question feels much more pedestrian-friendly, and if you're feeling lazy on your bike, you can use the cut-through paths to get from Point A to Point B without wandering from -4 to 4 and back to -4on the corresponding Cartesian grid in the process.

However, my neighborhood is triangular and is laid out across three rather forbidding hills.  Its design doesn't really allow for neat little commercial spaces -- to incorporate them, some of the residential-zoned area here would have to be converted to commercial, and even then, the kind of commercial venues I'd really love to see here -- quirky Mom-and-Pop businesses -- would find it difficult to survive, hidden as they would be in the hills.  Likewise, significant changes to infrastructure would have to be made to make those businesses accessible to the folks within the neighborhood: for example, sidewalks would have to be added (they should be anyway, but that's another fight), and speed limits would absolutely have to be enforced (they should be anyway, but that's also another fight).

It's not that I really believe this stuff couldn't happen -- but I live in a low-rent kind of neighborhood.  We don't add a great deal to the city's tax base.  We don't attract tourists.  We have no commercial presence to speak of outside of a couple of small places that front on Taylor or Bluegrass, and I doubt anyone associates those businesses with my neighborhood.  Technically, we don't even have a school; Hazelwood Elementary and Iroquois High School are, respectively, across Bluegrass and Taylor, and thus not really in my neighborhood, since those roads act as neighborhood boundaries.

Essentially, what I'm saying, is that while I live in the kind of neighborhood that most needs small businesses and improved infrastructure, it is also, by its nature, among those least likely to attract businesses and least likely to receive infrastructure updates from the city.

As someone who believes deeply in starting where you are and also in the power of just up and doing it, I'm not sure how to approach the problem of my neighborhood.  We have seriously discussed moving, but part of me thinks that's the wrong answer -- not to mention throwing the baby out with the bath water.

While we don't really know anyone on Arling Ave, Arling Court is a neighborly place.  It's a village-within-a-village.  I like and trust my neighbors, and we're all on friendly terms.  It's the kind of neighborhood where you could throw a picnic in the middle of the court, and everyone would come (in fact, I should really think about doing just such a thing).  Yes, there are little things we grumble about, but we also overlook most of those little things in the interest of neighborly peace.  We don't have an official neighborhood watch because we don't need one -- everyone looks out for everyone else anyway, and that's how it should be.  It is, in these ways, very much like the place where I grew up.

If we could encourage that kind of neighborly atmosphere to spread throughout the Arling Ave area in general, and add some little businesses, we would have quite a thing going, here.  That seems like a better plan than moving, especially since DD has lived here, in this house, for some twenty years.  The thing is, I don't know if we can make that happen.  I'm an optimist about many things, but not pulling the area surrounding my lovely little cul-de-sac up by its bootstraps.

Anyway, I've now spent way more time writing this than I intended to.  Basically, what I've been trying to say is something like this: being unwell, and feeling puny and weak as a result, makes it much easier for me to remember why people are afraid to try riding their bikes and walking for transportation in neighborhoods like mine.  Poor infrastructure coupled with an entrenched car-culture (which is, in part, responsible for the poor infrastructure) make for unfriendly streets, especially for people on foot (lack of sidewalks isn't a problem if you're on a bike, but is a huge problem for pedestrians and creates unfriendly-looking neighborhoods).

My goal, when I leave home, is to escape from my neighborhood to places where I can relax on the road (once I cross Taylor, or proceed up Taylor, I have achieved escape).  Normally, I rely on a combination of stupid, youthful bravado and proven physical prowess to do so; right now, I don't feel like I have either of those.

I would love to find a way to transform this neighborhood so it is no longer somewhere people want to escape, but instead a pleasant escape from the outside world, complete with pleasant places to spend time away from home.

Notes
*This is partly a lie.  There are times that I like riding B-town Road: specifically, those times when I am feeling really strong, and keeping up with traffic, and I have the legs and the lungs to sprint like a cheetah.

Right now, though, is definitely not one of those times, and the thought of riding on B-town Road  is up there with, you know, hanging from a cliff by my fingernails with a churning horde of hungry sharks a hundred feet below.

Stop. And. Go.

I left late this morning, but I was feeling quite zippy (two weeks off the bike will apparently do that to you — that and make you fatter, if you're not careful). Quicksilver seemed happy to be out and about (perhaps I'm projecting a bit?), and the weather was highly cooperative — about 70 and sunny. All told, it looked like a perfect morning for a nice, fast ride.

Except. For. The. Fact. That. I. Hit. EVERY. Stoplight. I. Could. Find.

Man! Because I was running late, I wanted to go fast, so I spent much of the ride doing what amounted to a stop-and-go interval workout. That strategy was less than successful — it still took me five minutes longer than my best time to make it to work. I did make it to work on time, though.

Likewise, I managed in several instances to time my arrival at the lights so the moment I slipped free of my toe clip, it was time to cram my foot back in ._. I can't really blame anyone but myself, though. I know how it works. Drop the hammer when the light turns green, and all you get for your trouble is another red light.

Perhaps I should revise my attitude and look at this as an opportunity to perfect my toe-clip skillz?

Late in my ride, I encountered a med student (I assume he was a med student anyway — could, for all that, have been a nurse or something) in scrubs on a fixie. He was quite fast. He got away from me at a stoplight, but that was okay. I do wish I'd taken a picture, though. I keep forgetting that I now have a phone with a real camera (OMG, 2.1 WHOLE MEGAPIXELS! lol).

Weather.com is predicting much better conditions over the next ten days than we've had for quite some time. I'm pretty excited about that, since it's been blisteringly hot and ... um ... drowningly humid lately.

In other news, I discovered some neat websites today:
APTA.com: the American Public Transportation Association (self-explanatory)

APTA's 'Telling Our Story' campaign: APTA is collecting stories — videos, pictures, and Word- or PDF-formatted texts — from public transit users. I think this is a great idea, and if anything will improve America's willingness to 'get on the bus,' stories from real transit riders are it.

Public Transportation Takes Us There: Another part of the transit industry's initiative to increase adoption and ridership. This site is devoted to helping Americans get more involved in transit advocacy.

[soapbox]
I'm a big fan of public transit. Not only does it decrease the environmental impact of our daily commutes (at least, at certain levels of adoption), it drastically increases the economic opportunities available to those who, for whatever reason, can't drive.

There's a weird misconception out there that the adoption of better public transit means people are going to be forced to give up their cars. This kind of spin and rhetoric is pretty common right now — e.g., universal health care is equated with the eradication of free choice; closer regulation of businesses that have demonstrated themselves to operate unfavorably without it it is associated, by some kind of magical thinking, with the redistribution of wealth; etc (and before anyone assumes I'm solely a left-wing wingnut, I should also state that I am strictly opposed to any increase in gun control and also to most [probably all] hate crimes legislation — IMO, a crime is a crime is a crime, and they should all be considered as such — so I assure you, while I'm definitely a wingnut, I do try to be a bipartisan, nonsectarian wingnut).

Perhaps if enough of us offer up our transit-going stories, the good people of the United States will realize that those of us who would like to see more buses and trains and so forth aren't interested in the least in taking away their cars (or guns, or Bibles). In fact, most of the people I know who ride bikes and buses and trains everywhere almost all the time like having the option of driving if they want or need to.

I'm hoping that seeing transit riders' stories might help discourage the mistaken belief that 'only poor/disabled/unemployed/underemployed/black/Latino/Asian/urban/young/old/those/other people ride the bus/train' — most people I've known who don't ride transit imagine that all transit-riders are utterly unlike themselves. In fact, public transit in Louisville, at least, is like a bird's-eye view of the community at large: on one bus ride, you can encounter a CEO, a gaggle of high-school freshmen, a disabled veteran, a doctor, a young family, some grandparents... Essentially, people from all walks of life ride TARC (our bus system). The only people who don't realize this are those who've never ridden the bus. Unfortunately, that's a lot of people.
[/soapbox]

In other, other news, my life is about to become ridiculously busy. I have Orientation on Friday, then school starts on Monday. I'm planning to get a cycling club together at IUS — the life sciences department has several bike-happy faculty, some of whom commute by bike, so I don't think I should have any trouble finding a faculty advisor. Choir rehearsal picks up again on the 26th, and of course there's cyclocross... Plus work. Work starts to get busy this time of year.

I'm really glad that I live in a place where I can get everywhere by bike (though I guess, for me, that's a lot of places — I like riding my bike enough to be willing to trek 10 or 15 miles back and forth). It makes finding time to ride pretty easy.