OPINION
Eco Man
By Richard M. Stowe
Gas prices too high? Take a ‘bike-cation’ this summer
On Thursday May 29, Henry Stowe finished breakfast at H&M restaurant in Sanford, Florida. In between jobs, he would return to work on Monday June 2, but at that very moment he was about to transform a stay-cation, in which one remains within 50 miles of one’s home, to his very first bike-cation, riding 215-miles in three days.
A bike-cation is travel by bicycle to and from your vacation destination. A bike-cation is an antidote to escalating summer gas prices. On bike-cations, you burn carbs, not carbon.
Five years earlier in 2003, Mr. Stowe, my younger brother and a life-long subscriber to Car and Driver, accepted my challenge to ride in the 42-mile Bike New York. Riding a total of 57 miles by bicycle that day was a watershed event for him.
By 2006, he had relocated to Sanford, Fla., and bicycle-commuted eight miles round-trip per day.
After breakfast, Mr. Stowe embarked on a 55-mile bicycle ride to Ormond-by-the Sea that included an ocean swim break in Daytona Beach. The next day he blazed into uncharted territory on A1A, riding 95 miles, a personal best. That ride took him to St. Augustine, where he lunched at Blue Planet on organic fare, a hummus wrap with ginger dressing, salad and berry smoothie, before heading back down A1A to bed at a motel in Flagler Beach.
An ocean swim at Flagler Beach commenced day three; at Daytona Beach, Mr. Stowe put the wind to his back by cycling due west easing the 65-mile push back home.
My first bike-cation this summer began on June 27. The trip from New Canaan ended at the Flagpole on the Green in New Haven, where I addressed a hundred-plus cyclists about a June 6 letter from Governor Rell to Mayor DeStefano in which she expressed concern “that the new rail cars provide adequate bicycle storage” adding that “there is sufficient time to modify the design without delaying scheduled delivery.”
The cyclists had gathered for a June critical mass first in New Haven in which police corked intersections for participating cyclists.
Saturday, I rode in the New Haven Century, one of the free Arts & Ideas festival rides organized by Elm City Cycling, which passes through West Haven, Milford, Orange, Woodbridge, Bethany, Hamden, Wallingford, Durham, Killingworth, Madison, Guilford, Branford and East Haven.
About 70 miles into the ride, I bicycled into the Boston Post Road entrance to Hammonassett Beach State Park in Madison.
Cyclists experienced beautiful stretches of Connecticut back roads,
passing nearby West Rock Ridge and Sleeping Giant State Parks in Hamden, a picturesque farm in Durham and classic Connecticut shoreline in Madison, Guilford and Branford.
Bicycling 160 miles in two days, I was spent at the end of the century. I stretched and showered before a salad, soup and pizza dinner and walk down to Firehouse 12, an upscale lower Crown Street subterranean pub that draws Yale grad students and cyclists.
I re-fueled at Claire¹s, a vegetarian eatery, with a whole-wheat blueberry pancake Sunday brunch for the 40-mile ride back to New Canaan. I powered by the Boston Post Road malls in Orange and Milford and a Connecticut Avenue neighborhood in Bridgeport before watching a few minutes of Bridgeport Bluefish baseball from the right field fence at Harbor Yard Ballpark.
Calories burned: Countless. CO2 emitted by fossil fuel on these bike-cations: Zero!
Cycling for a purpose. Riding back into town from a short-lived party during the Sunday, June 8, heat wave, I reversed direction upon randomly sighting six touring cyclists featured in the Darien Times and rode with them up Oenoke Ridge. They were cycling across the America to advocate an end to extreme poverty through microfinance.
Not primed for a bike-cation, or cycling coast-to-coast?
Consider the two-mile challenge (http://www.2milechallenge.com/)* that substitutes short car trips with bike trips (http://www.1world2wheels.org/.)
Why not ride? After all, the number one contributor to carbon dioxide emissions in New England is the automobile-and truck-dependent transportation sector. New England’s transportation produces more CO2 than direct use of fossil fuels in New England’s homes, businesses and industrial buildings combined. In fact, the region¹s transportation sector alone emits more CO2 than the aggregate economies of Austria, Portugal, Israel and 150 more nations. And 74 percent of those emissions are gasoline-driven, fuel burning to move cars, light trucks and our “High and Mighty” SUVs.
Forty percent of all automobile trips are less than two miles and account for 60 percent of automobile-created pollution. At eight miles per hour, a two-mile bicycle trip takes 15 minutes.
No bicycle? Why not bike sharing? A town bicycle fleet could be located at Mead Park, for example, and be administered through recreation department employees.
Links to information about safety, the beneficial cultural values that cycling and being green impart on a community, and a two-mile route in New Canaan can be found by clicking on this column under the opinion tab at ncadvertiser.com.
Richard Stowe is president of the New Canaan Environmental Group and founder and director of Rail*Trains*Ecology*Cycling.
Below are links to information about safety, the beneficial cultural values that cycling and being green impart on a community, and a two-mile loop in New Canaan:
• Bike New York http://www.bikenewyork.org/rides/fbbt/history.html
• New Haven Century http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2014408 • Microbike USA|Accion http://www.microbikeusa.com/home.html • The End of Poverty http://www.earth.columbia.edu/pages/endofpoverty/index • Two-mile New Canaan route** http://www.2milechallenge.com/map.php?address=198%20Elm%20Street,%20New%20Canaan,%20CT%2006840 • Streetfilms: Return of the Bike Box! http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/06/27/streetfilms-return-of-bike-box/ • How to Not Get Hit by Cars http://www.bicyclesafe.com/ • Two wheels http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/wellbeing/story/0,,2287337,00.html • Streetstyle & Bike Advocacy from the World’s Cycling Capital (Normal people in normal clothes on normal bikes http://www.copenhagencyclechic.com/ • Copenhagenize [the planet] – LIFE IN THE WORLD’S CYCLING CAPITAL (Debunking the flat country myth) http://www.copenhagenize.com/2007/11/debunking-flat-countrybike-country-myth.html • The New Yorker – A Reporter at Large (The Island in the Wind: A Danish community’s victory over carbon emissions) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_kolbert/?currentPage=all) * Enter your home address into this site & find out what locations are within a 2-mile bicycle ride of your home! ** This shaded area in this map represents a two mile radius from the New Canaan Metro-North RR station at 198 Elm Street
