Two-wheeled crusader making streets safer

He’s not a stalker, and he’s not “some kind of freaky pain junky.”

He just wants to follow you around – and up hills and through traffic – on his bike.

“I try to keep it as non-creepy as possible,” says John Speare, 36, a South Hill husband, father and technical writer who happens to be very much into bikes and the people who ride them.

He has other reasons for wanting to follow you around, too. As a member of the city’s Bicycle Advisory Board, Speare’s goal is to collect data on bike commuters’ routes as part of a larger effort to make Spokane a better place to pedal. The board will use the data to make recommendations to the city on improving the most-used routes with amenities like bike lanes and signs.

Speare’s commuter routes project started last spring, and now he’s looking for more people to follow around in a non-creepy way.

Volunteers who contact Speare can decide where to meet him – probably at an intersection near their house. From there, volunteers simply set out on their normal commutes with Speare close behind. Speare carries a GPS unit and downloads their routes to a map in hopes that patterns will emerge.

He’s followed about 15 bikers on their rides to work. So far, Speare said, bike commuters have demonstrated diverse strategies.

Some plan ahead for speed, aiming for stoplights instead of stop signs, because with stoplights there’s at least a chance of hitting green. Some weave around to avoid traffic. Some bikers only ride in designated bike lanes. Others are comfortable riding in the flow of cars and trucks.

Being followed to work last fall made Ben Stuckart, 35, a little self-conscious. It made him look closely at whether he was taking the best and safest route from his home on 19th Avenue near Lincoln Park to the Spokane Arena, a 5-mile commute one way.

Stuckart, who bikes to work about four days a week, didn’t end up changing his route, but he did change how he acts in traffic. Now he follows the rules of the road, pretending he’s a car and taking his place among vehicles instead of shying off to the side.

But Speare is not there to judge.

“I show up, and I try not to interfere,” he said. “I don’t push them, I don’t press them to follow one way or another.”

He also tries not to be too chatty while following people around, which can be hard when he meets someone who feels the way he does about bikes. He really likes bikes. No, “I love riding bikes,” he declares on his Web site. “I love looking at bikes and thinking about bikes and working on bikes and talking about bikes.”

He loves fenders and big tires and comfortable seats and steel frames.

He loves the thrill of the road. Saving gas and cutting pollution and losing weight (Speare has lost 85 pounds since becoming a bike commuter) are nice and all that, but for him, the best reason to ride his bike on the hard streets of Spokane is adventure. “Especially in winter,” he says.

Speare grew up in Spokane, graduating from Lewis and Clark High School and Eastern Washington University, and his parents would not drive him anywhere. They did buy him a BMX, and that’s how he got around the city.

After living in Portland and Seattle, Speare moved with his wife, Liza, a bike mechanic, back to Spokane three years ago to be near family after their daughter was born, but also because of Speare’s low threshold for traffic.

“Traffic was killing me,” he said.

Most recently, the family lived in one Seattle suburb, and Speare commuted to another Seattle suburb for work. It took at least an hour each way. He figured out a way to cut that by biking partway and taking public transportation partway, but the commute still frustrated him.

Spokane, to Speare, is already a good bike town. There’s the relatively easy traffic and the “big, huge roads” – plenty of room for Speare and his wife and daughter, a 4-year-old who pulls her own weight on a tandem.

To be a better bike town, Speare said, Spokane needs more bike parking downtown and more bike lanes and better signs. He described a fantasy commuting center at Riverfront Park where cyclists could rent lockers and take showers.

The routes project is just one step of many toward making Spokane’s roads friendlier toward bikers, said the advisory board’s chairman, Bob Lutz.

“The mindset historically with respect to roads is that they are there for cars, and they are there to move cars quickly,” he said, and that mindset needs to be adjusted.

The board touts healthier citizens, a better quality of life, and offers a richer economic foundation for businesses that within urban “bikeable” areas as reasons to promote biking.

For Speare, it’s mostly that he loves bikes and his biker’s life. He does his technical writing from home, which he knows is a luxury. He and his wife also deliberately keep their lives flexible, resisting packed schedules in favor of an easy-going days.

It allows them time for the important things, like riding their bikes when it’s time to pick up their daughter from preschool or shop for groceries.

“If you have the time, I don’t know why you’d ever drive a car,” he said.