Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
A Brief History of a Car Free Life
Way back in 1999, I bought my first motorcycle. It was a BMW R65LS, a sort of Star Wars stormtrooper-looking beast, but I really liked it. In fact, I liked it so much that I went on to buy another two BMWs, a Moto Guzzi, three Kawasakis, and three Hondas, of which I still own two Hondas and a Kawasaki.
And really, that's where this all starts. I'd been more or less obsessed by cars for my adult life until that point. Cars were cool, they represented freedom, and speed, and sex appeal, the whole nine yards. I had, you might say, bought into the hype.
In my life, I've owned a variety of cars, pretty much continuously, until the last one, a 1992 Honda Civic. In about 2002, I was living with my girlfriend (who had a Jeep Wrangler), and I basically got around by motorcycle -- at the time, a 1995 BMW K75. If I was doing it by myself, I went on the motorcycle. If she and I were going somewhere together, we'd take the Jeep. My little Honda ended up sitting for months at a time.
Finally, I saw the writing on the wall, and decided it was time to sell the aging car. I liked it, it was a fine car with nothing major wrong, but it was neglected. On top of that, I was paying something like $70 a month for insurance. I listed the car on Craigslist, and it sold a week later for about my asking price. I was now, technically, car-free.
Of course, there was still the Jeep, so I wasn't actually living without access to a car. I just no longer owned one. It was a sort of technicality.
Well, that girlfriend and I parted ways, and I realized that with her Jeep went my ability to carry anything larger than a loaf of bread. I lived the single life for a while, but I also found and bought a Honda Goldwing sidecar rig. This thing was so big that it might as well have been a car. It certainly got car-like gas mileage, around 25 MPG most of the time.
Eventually, the sidecar rig had fallen into disuse due to poor mileage and the comparatively high effort to drive it. Then, in September 2006, I had an epiphany: no matter what, no matter who you believe, we are going to run out of fossil fuels. There's a finite supply. We may run out next year, or we may run out 100 years from now, but it's going to happen. In addition to that, evidence was strong (despite the Bush administration's efforts to suppress the facts) that human activity was contributing to significant changes in the world's climate. And the real nail in the coffin for me: the vast majority of the food we eat is fertilized with petrochemicals. When the gas runs out, it's not just that we're suddenly all pedestrians, it's that our food production gets slashed.
This epiphany brought home the fact that I could no longer stand by and do nothing. I pulled out my bicycle, and cleaned it up, determined to ride it to work every day. I only live 5 miles from work, and that's an easy bike ride -- I'd proved it every time (you know, once every 6 months or so) I'd ridden in previously.
So of course the first thing I discovered was that my bike had a cracked head tube. It may or may not have been under warranty. Unwilling to let this stop me, I went out and bought a new bike, figuring I could sort out the old one later. I started commuting by bicycle. Since that day, I've bicycled to work (and many other places) the vast majority of the time. I'd guess I've ridden a motorcycle to work perhaps 20 days in those nearly three years.
Now, if there's one thing that was suddenly true, it was that I'd gone from being able to carry a loaf of bread to being able to carry very little indeed. I didn't want a rack on my bike, so I was limited to what fit in my shoulder bag (in fact, I probably could carry a loaf of bread, but it might well get squished).
After some wrangling -- ok, a lot of wrangling -- I got a replacement frame for my old bike. Only, I already had my daily rider, so what was I going to do with this (incredibly stout, semi-downhill) spare frame I now had? The answer quickly became obvious: build a cargo bike. I built it up and bought an Xtracycle Free Radical subframe, which is an add-on that fits on any bicycle frame, and turns it into an ass-kicking power-house cargo bike.
Even better, after some thought (and a particularly near-disastrous trip with three cinder blocks perched on the Xtracycle's deck), I determined to build a cargo trailer for my cargo bike. With my friend Jesse's considerable assistance, we welded up a two by four foot trailer, and the Freight Train was born. The trailer's rated (by my conservative estimate) for about 100 lbs, and is large enough to carry a huge variety of things.
So, my daily life now consists of a bicycle ride to work and the theater, cargo rides to go shopping at the grocery store or Costco, motorcycle rides to places further afield, and rarely, very rarely, a rented Zipcar when there's no other way to do it. I even have studded snow tires for my commuter bike, and was perfectly able to get around last winter, even climbing a hill I wouldn't have been able to walk up, due to the packed ice.
The cargo bike now has about 1150 miles on it, and the commuter is pushing 5300. My monthly gasoline consumption (by which I mean direct consumption, unfortunately) fell from around 20 gallons a month to around 3. I still see the inside of cars to some extent, but I now spend an average of a few minutes a month inside a car, versus the hours and hours I did before motorcycles. It's not a perfect life, but it's an improvement.
Posted at 10:01 permanent link category: /misc
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater