Low-tech commuting starts online

True story: I’m a bicycle commuter because four or five years ago, the City of Spokane put a bike path on Cedar, right in front of the house I lived in at the time. After complaining about the lost on-street parking, I realized how convenient it looked. I used my car’s odometer to figure out how far it was to work, and started riding my big-box cheapo special, the “Iron Maiden,” a little bit and then some more.

Note that I used my car’s odometer to calculate the distance. This was before it was second nature to hop onto Mapquest, plug in a starting and ending destination, and click “avoid highways.”

Fast forward to today’s lightweight road bike, purchased locally after consulting reviews at roadbikereview.com and other sites. I can put in 10 to 20 miles a day riding from work at the Riverpoint Campus to meetings and errands, from downtown to the Spokane Valley to the North Side.

This low-tech commuting is enabled in no small part by the technology that lets me map a route and figure out if I have enough time to get from A to B to C with pedal power. I’m still hovering between Mapquest, which I’ve been using longer so it’s a habit, and Google Maps, which lets me add extra stops with a right click and easily drag the route to avoid construction and to take routes I like (i.e. past a Rocket Bakery).

I’m getting sucked into the cycling world, and the more I ride, the more resources I find on the Web. Thanks to an entry at metro(spokane) – at http://metrospokane. typepad.com/index – I found my way to Cyclingspokane.blogspot.com. There, John Speare, a member of the Bicycle Advisory Board ( www.bikespokane.org), posts information such as the effort by city planning staff to pull all the cycling references in the comprehensive plan into one document for easy review ( http://www.bikespokane.org/ docs/Comp_Plan_Bikes.pdf) to aid in the development of a Bicycle Master Plan for the city.

After reading comments at cyclingspokane on steep hills and posting my own “favorites” (south up Cowley past St. Luke’s, or up Stevens and Bernard) – darn, I forgot to mention the climb up North Monroe en route to the Rocket Bakery on Garland – I followed a link to Bikely.com.

Bikely lets you post your own routes complete with comments about road conditions, hills, traffic and the like, and people worldwide participate. A search for “Spokane” brings up 80 routes with names like “South Spokane Leg Shaper” and “Commelini’s Loop” (carbo loading en route, presumably).

More recently, I did a Google search on “bike tours Washington state” to try to plan a future vacation. This took me to resources from the Washington State Department of Transportation, including links to bike tour planners, maps and suggestions. Following those links led me to the Bicycle Alliance of Washington (Bicyclealliance.org), which I keep meaning to join, and the League of American Bicyclists (Bikeleague.org), where I signed up for alerts on federal transportation funding as it affects cycling.

The tour plan? Oh, right. A talk at Riverfront Park with the owner of a T-shirt reading “I Biked Europe” pointed me to Biketoursdirect.com, and I’m dreaming of Tuscany.

Now that I’m rereading some of these sites, I suppose I could renew that Spokane Bicycle Club membership at www.spokanebicycleclub.org since it was one of its Bike Buddies who helped me sharpen my safety skills for commuting by bike.

But wait, Baddlands.org, another local cycling club, has a group called WOWbabes, for women cyclists.

Maps, weather, gear, local planning, activism, vacations and cycling buddies: That’s where cycling took me on the Web.