Category: Cycling

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Jingle Bell Jubilee Parade

Our Unicycle Support Group decided to ride in the Little Rock Christmas Parade this year.  Since we hadn’t thought to register separately, we just rode with the cyclists from BACA.  But we all wore green shirts and we made a sign.  (We forced the non-unicyling member of the Vire family to carry the sign, and he handled the task with aplomb and grace once we removed most of the tinsel.)

The parade was fun.  I rode a bike with panniers to hold the green and red beads (leftover from Mardi Gras 2010) we passed out to the people we rode past.  Mitch and his kids and Mandy and Luke did stars and hopped around and played tag and were just generally goofy.  Since we were between a float sponsored by a windshield company (complete with a grumpy-looking old lady in a plywood sleigh) and a handful of Quakers with “Peace on Earth” signs, people enjoyed having something funny to watch.  The parade was a success and we’ll do even better next year (when I can ride, too!)

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Caddo Valley Rail Line

We’re a member of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and Bryan is one of their email lists that notifies interested people when a rail company files abandonment paperwork for a section of rail line.  Thousands of miles of rail have been abandoned in the last few decades, and most have seen their rails and crossties sold for scrap and their corridors sold piecemeal to adjacent landowners.  It’s handy for farmers and businessmen to have a little extra chunk of land, I suppose, but it means that the rail line can never be used again for anything of economic benefit to the whole community.

Rails to Trails aims to prevent this from happening.  They send out a notice, along with information on how to file paperwork to preserve the rail corridor for use as a trail.  It’s called “railbanking” and it’s a low-cost way for communities or organizations to preserve the corridor for a few months, so that they can make plans to use the space for a multi-use trail of some sort.  They can use the space for a trail, with the understanding that if it’s ever needed again for rail transport, it can be easily converted back to that use. Continue reading “Caddo Valley Rail Line”

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Bike Fair 2011

So somehow, somebody got the Mayor of Little Rock to agree to leave his car at home for a week and get around by bus and bike.  He said he’d do some media stuff and really encourage people to join him in a car-free week.  Great, said the Bike Friendly Community Committee.

Somehow, somebody (I really don’t think it was me) suggested that we hold a kind of educational event to teach practical skills so that people would feel more comfortable using their bikes for transportation.  Somehow, I made suggestions about this event.  And somehow I got put in charge of it.  A Car-Free Learning Day.  A Bike Fair.  With three weeks to plan.

I made a list of twelve problems people might have when planning to ride a bike to work.  I listed things like “Won’t People Think I’m Wierd?” and  “How do I carry my stuff?” and “How do I Plan a Safe Route?” Continue reading “Bike Fair 2011”

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Bikes Vs. Zombies!

Bike culture in central Arkansas isn’t all that interesting, so when something out of the box comes along, we try to help out.  Our friend Vinny (that’s him above, in the terrible suit and the zombie makeup) put on his second alleycat race tonight, and we volunteered to help organize the event.

An alleycat race is a little like a very fast scavenger hunt on bicycles.  Participants get a list of addresses and brief instructions just before the race.  They have to plan how to reach each destination, and at each place there’s something they have to do.  This race included picking up packages, making crayon rubbings at a cemetery, and chasing zombies on rollerskates.  The first person to do all the things on the list and get to Vino’s would win. Continue reading “Bikes Vs. Zombies!”

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USGS + MUC

Four riders from the Memphis Unicycle Club joined us for a playdate in Little Rock.  We rode the Clinton Park bridge and played near the Clinton Library before heading to the Rivermarket for lunch.  From there we went to the Junction Bridge and the Peabody Park for a little trials riding.  The good riders had fun jumping on rocks (and over Mandy) and the bad-rider group had fun watching.

We made a trip to the North Little Rock skateboard park, then ate supper at Vino’s before heading west again to ride across the Big Dam Bridge and the Two Rivers Bridge.  Woodrow and Pete didn’t head back to Memphis until after ten.  Thanks for coming to play, guys!  We had tons of fun, and we hope you’ll come back soon.

 

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Arky 100 2011

We try to support the Arkansas Bicycle Club’s annual fundraising ride, the Joe Weber Arky 100, either by riding or volunteering to help.  It starts and ends in Sheridan, which is about a half hour from our house.  As we’ve done in the past, we drove down the night before, ate with cycling friends, and spent the night in tents behind the small-town community center.

Up early, we helped around the registration a bit and got Mandy started – she’d decided to ride the metric century with our friend Kathy.  Her husband left in his ‘sag wagon’ with their dog and ours.  And Bryan and I loaded up the supplies for Rest Stop 2 and headed for Poyen.

We arrived at our spot just after eight, set up to feed and provide drinks for nearly two hundred riders – fruit, cereal bars, hot and cold drinks, oatmeal, and – the crowd favorite – tiny pbj sandwiches.  By eleven we’d fed everyone, cheered up the stragglers, reloaded the Subaru, and arrived at Rest Stop 5 to visit with friends before heading to the finish line to wait for Mandy.

She bailed at the 50 mile mark and caught the sag wagon in with Jim Britt.  It was disappointing, but not too bad considering that she hadn’t ridden much at all since our summer vacation.  After a couple of finish-line hot dogs, she felt better enough to get her unicycle out of the car to entertain the people still left in the picnic shelter.

Kathy finished the 62 mile course feeling good and decided, after a bite to eat, that she’d just ride home.  The extra afternoon mileage meant that she met one of her big goals today – her first “century”, or 100-mile ride. Congratulations my friend and thanks for sending “photographic proof” as shown below!

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Traffic Safety 101

Now that I’m on the city’s Bicycle Friendly Community Committee, I’m really trying to practice what the League of American Bicyclists preaches in terms of exercising the right to ride a bike on the road, while understanding the responsibilities cyclists have to keep ourselves and others safe.  I hadn’t taken the League’s traffic safety course in quite awhile, and Mandy’s never taken it, so we decided to enroll in the September group.

Only one other student participated.  Our teachers were Tom and Brad.  Mandy learned a lot, and my memory was refreshed.  I think putting time and effort into this sort of thing is well worth it for everybody involved.

After the riding part of class concluded on Saturday, our class met up with Mitch and his kids for a bike-and-unicycle lunch at the Rivermarket, and we rode around downtown for awhile.  The area around the Rivermarket is such fun for unicycling, with lots of paths and bridges and people to look impressed by dads and their kids riding along on one wheel as if it’s the easiest thing in the world.

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Bike Commuting

I’ve been wanting to try bike commuting.  From our house to my office is about seventeen miles, none of it particularly friendly to cyclists.  I don’t have the option of using a nice separated bike lane or path – it’s either the interstate service road or a busy 2-lane highway with fairly narrow shoulders.  Could I ride the whole way?  Could I drive partway and ride the rest?  Could I combine riding a bike and riding the bus?  I’ve spent the last month or so experimenting with multi-modal commuting.  First I tried just using a bike to do errands around our non-bike-friendly town.

Then I tried part-bike commuting: I drove the car partway to work, pulled a bike off the rack, and rode the rest of the way.  It was fun and not all that much more time consuming.  But it didn’t accomplish a lot – I was still putting a lot of miles on the car.

Then I tried driving to the closest bus stop – about eleven miles from the house – and taking the bus the rest of the way to work.  I thought the bus was fun, but it wasn’t saving any money, and it was using up a lot of time.

Then I tried riding the eleven miles to the bus stop, riding the bus to work, and then reversing that to come home.  This was the cheapest, and the most fun, but also the most time consuming – I was leaving at six to be ready for work at eight.  In the evening, I’d leave work before five but wouldn’t get home until after seven.  I was having a great time, but I was never home, and the housework was behind, and Bryan and I missed each other.

So now I’m back to driving all the way to work again.  In just a few weeks of fiddling with my commute, I learned a lot – I’m stronger now, and much better at coping with traffic.  I understand how to read the city bus schedules and route maps, and how to use the bike racks on the front of each bus.  And maybe most importantly, I know I CAN commute without a car – I can get myself from home in the suburbs to work in town, every day, for several days in a row, and have fun doing it.

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2 Rivers Bridge Dedication

The bike infrastructure and culture here is very strange.  Lopsided.  Great, and also terrible.

Cycling for recreation has become an accepted thing in the Little Rock area, I think.  Mountain bikers have lots of great trails in Little Rock and the surrounding counties.  Lycra-clad pavement cyclists whiz up and down the much-celebrated River Trail,but even it isn’t really finished – the signage is unclear, and parts of the trail have cyclists traveling on busy streets, or on narrow shoulders.  Years-long calls to “close the loop” are still being met with opposition from taxpayers and businesses in the city.

Cycling for transportation and utility is viewed as the province of the drunken and/or homeless.  Not many people care about interconnected trail networks or even safe bike lanes for people who actually want to GO SOMEWHERE on bicycles. Little Rock has yet to adopt a real ‘complete streets’ policy.In a city like this, would you expect to see THREE DIFFERENT dedicated bike/pedestrian bridges?  No, you would not.  But the county government supports cycling, even if the city government is halfhearted.  And so we have the Big Dam Bridge, the longest purpose-built bike/ped bridge in the US.  After much foot-dragging, the Rock Island bridge (AKA the stupidly named “Clinton Park Bridge”) is now being repaired and adapted for dedicated bike/ped use by the Clinton Foundation, as part of the park surrounding the museum.

And this week, we attended the dedication of the Two Rivers Park Bridge, spanning the Little Maumelle River to connect the west LR River Trail to Two Rivers Park.  It’s full of deer and other wildlife, and for years has been a community garden spot as well.  From the park, cyclists can ride low-traffic, paved county roads out past Maumelle Park, Pinnacle Mountain, and the quiet highways around the lake and up into the Ouachitas.