Case in point: earlier this year I vowed to start using my bike more for utilitarian purposes. To date, I believe I’ve gone for coffee on it twice. Appalling as that is, it became even more so when I pulled up a map of everything within a two-mile radius of my Cary house and discovered my bank, Starbucks, REI, Performance, Harris Teeter, Home Depot, the Galaxy Cinema, two malls and a Taco Bell. My basic needs, all within two miles.

That’s why I just signed up for the Clif Bar 2 Mile Challenge, the challenge being this: ride your bike on as many errands under 2 miles from home as possible. According to the Challenge Web site, 40 percent of all trips by folks in the U.S. are under 2 miles, and 90 percent of those are taken by car. Clif gives some good reasons to take the Challenge, most of them environmental and involving the amount of carbon dioxide your internal combustion engine pumps into the atmosphere. Check out the Web site for details; In short, if you truly are concerned about global warming, the 2 Mile Challenge is something you can do about it.

I was more motivated by another stat: It costs $5.17 per gallon to operate a car; it costs $120 a year to maintain a bike (that’s slightly more than 23 gallons of gas, btw). I’m cheap, I signed up.

I like the accountability aspect of the 2 Mile Challenge. Every time I need to run a 2-mile errand, if I take my bike I can log in and earn points for it. If I take the car, I’ll just feel guilty. And I like logs; for reasons I probably don’t want to explore, they validate whatever it was I did that I desperately seek validation for. With my Clif Bar 2 Mile Challenge Web log I can confidently claim I did four errands this week on my bike! I try simply telling someone that and I’ll get that cocked-eyebrow-”Sure” response. Enough about my issues.

More importantly, my logged rides earn points for a good cause. In the 2 Mile Challenge, you can sign up to ride for one of three teams: The Blue Team rides for 350.org, which advocates cycling for environmental reasons; the Gold Team rides for the Alliance for Biking & Walking, a coalition of 160 grassroots bike and pedestrian groups advocating for more bike-and-foot-friendly communities; or the Red Team, which rides for Safe Routes to School, which is working to restore the lost art of walking or riding your bike to school without getting run over. Good causes all; I opted for the Red Team because of everything I kvetch about in this blog, the lack of opportunities kids have for getting exercise is near the top of the list. Clif Bar will divvy up $100,000 to the three, based on who gets the most points.

Speaking of safe routes, that may preclude me from making certain trips. The bank, the grocery store, Starbucks, the book store, the movie theater — I have safe ways to reach them all. But to reach REI and Home Depot, for instance, requires riding down five-lane Walnut Street in Cary. I like living in Cary, in part, because it largely deserves its Bike Friendly status. But Walnut is not Bike Friendly, it is Bike Nasty; not even Volcano Nachos justify tangling with it. (What I will do, though, is reduce the number of trips I take in that direction by piggybacking visits. I reduce emissions and, more importantly, guilt.)

If you like the idea of the challenge but don’t have a bike, the Clif Bar 2 Mile Challenge Web site has a feature that helps you figure out what kind of ride best suits you. If you do have a bike but are baffled by how you can pull off errands on it, the site can help with that, too.

That’s another think I like about the Challenge: It gave me permission to go out and buy a set of new grocery-toting, environment-saving panniers.

Panniers I’ll be obliged to go and get on my bike.

The post Clif Bar 2 Mile Challenge: Another reason to ride appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

That’s just one of the services provided in this space by GetGoingNC: sitting through five-hour meetings of city planners, DOT engineers, committee members and elected officials to sift out the nuggets of information useful to you, the recreating public. In this case, the bike riding public.

Friday, I spent the morning with the braintrust of Triangle cycling at the fourth ever Triangle Bicycle & Pedestrian Workshop held at RDU. Representatives from most of the local municipal bicycle and pedestrian advisory committees were in attendance (Cary was absent; oddly, this Bike Friendly Community doesn’t have such a citizen advisory group), as were NCDOT engineers, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization Bicycle & Pedestrian Stakeholders Group, Triangle J Council Of Governments, the Chapel Hill-based Highway Safety Research Center, the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition.

Here are the highlights of the five-hour gathering:

* The American Tobacco Trail bridge over I-40 This is the most anticipated bike/ped project in the Triangle, especially among cyclists. Once complete, the bridge and about a mile and a half of connecting greenway will link the 7 miles of ATT finished north of I-40 (from NC 54 north into downtown) and 13.5 miles finished to the south (south from Massey Chapel Road to near New Hill Hill in Wake County). Completion of the bridge and adjoining greenway will create, at 22 miles, the longest multi-use trail in the Triangle. When will that happen? Drum roll please: Bidding goes out in February, contract should be awarded in March, construction begins April/May, the whole shebang could be completed by year’s end, though winter 2012 is more likely. That according to Dale McKeel, Durham’s Bicycle and Pedestrian coordinator.

* Durham, in fact, was full of good news. In addition, according to the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Committee’s Scott Carter:

• Durham’s recently revised (summer 2010) Bike/Hike map went through its initial printing of 2,500 lickity split, prompting a second printing of another 2,500. (It’s available online as well.)

• 

  Last summer, Durham held its first “ciclovia,” closing off a section of off-downtown to all but bikes and pedestrians; this year, a total of four ciclovias are planned. (Carrboro reported it likely will hold a ciclovia as well.)

• In case you missed it, Durham earned bronze status last year as a Bike Friendly Community from the League of American Bicyclists.
• This is a bit of a bummer, but Durham has compiled a map showing where most bike accidents occur in town. The upside: With the map, planners can look at the why and hopefully make these hot spots bike friendlier.

* In Carborro, according to Heidi Perry of that town’s Transportation Advisory Committee (Carrboro includes its bike issues in its overall transportation plan), in addition to the aforementioned ciclovia, the town has, after nearly three decades, achieved a bike- and pedestrian-friendly plan for Smith Level Road. Initially, the plan was for a five-lane road from the Morgan Creek bridge to Woodcrest Street. The approved, $3.5 million project will instead have two lanes, a median, bike lanes and sidewalks.

* Raleigh announced it plans to apply for LAB Bike Friendly Community status. As  Spongebob Squarepants said to Plankton upon the latter’s declaration that he planned to take over the world: “Well, good luck with that.”

* Chapel Hill reported that last week it adopted a “Complete Streets” policy, meaning that from now on they will take into account more than four-wheel-and-up motor vehicles in its transportation planning. (The NCDOT adopted a Complete Streets policy in July 2009, according to NCDOT engineer and workshop presenter Joey Hopkins.)

* John Hodges-Copple, Regional Planning Director for the Triangle J Council of Governments, suggested the audience Google “Ronald Reagan” and “bicycle” when they get a chance. He especially liked the photo of the former president and Dorothy Lamour on a tandem.

* Jennifer Baldwin, senior transportation analyst with City of Raleigh, said to expect a more helpful Google Maps when plotting bike routes through Raleigh. (When Google first announced its bike route mapping feature, intended to take you on the bike-friendliest route possible from Point A to Point B, I entered a crosstown trip from my house in Cary to northeast Raleigh; Google had me taking Capital Boulevard a fair bit of the way). “We’ve been working with them to improve their database,” Baldwin, whose been on the job less than a year, told me during a break.

* In one of the more curious developments announced, Hopkins, the NCDOT engineer, talked about the Triangle Commuter Bicycle Initiative. General goal: to create several transportation routes friendly to bike commuters in the Triangle. Specific goal: to build the initial commuter route from Chapel Hill to Research Triangle Park. This is the curious part: This particular stretch would be underwritten, to the tune of $1 million from the Davis Wealth Management Foundation of Chapel Hill. DWM is the doing of Joe Davis, chairman of Davis Wealth Management Advisors. Joe Davis is also an avid cyclist.

Anyone who’s ever made the ride from Chapel Hill to RTP (I did it — once) will appreciate the TCBI. Under Phase I of the program, 5-foot-wide shoulders would be added to 4.6 miles of roadway — Barbee Chapel, Stagecoach and Massey Chapel roads — from Chapel Hill to the American Tobacco Trail. That project would cost $3.3 million, 60 percent of which has been raised. Phase II is still in the works, but simply getting to the American Tobacco Trail would be a big step: Go north on the ATT to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, which has bike lanes, hang a right and you’re almost to RTP. (And, as mentioned earlier, the 1.5-mile missing link of ATT over I-40 should be done within the year.)

* News that the DWM Foundation is prepared to fund bike-specific transportation programs helped cushion the blow when Julie White took the podium. White is the director of the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition. As such, she represents 27 of the largest cities in the state, and one of her biggest roles right now is representing them to the N.C. State Legislature, which reconvened in Raleigh last Wednesday. One of her biggest challenges is trying to make sure those 27 municipalities fare as well as possible in light of the state’s projected $3.7 billion budget shortfall. At stake, she says, will be money to fund even the most basic of municipal services. As for leftover money to fund bike projects in the coming year, she was blunt: “The news is not so good.”

Fortunately, she was preceded by plenty that was.

Photo at top: The American Tobacco Trail bridge over I-40 could go from artist’s rendering to reality by year’s end.

The post A workshop full of news for Triangle cyclists appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

That’s according to the League of American Bicyclists, which bestows its BFC honor on communities that have made an effort to make cycling safe, not suicidal. Chapel Hill and Durham made the list for the first time this fall, earning Bronze status (out of a possible Silver, Gold, and the coveted Platinum, of which there are only three designated communities: Boulder, Colo.; Davis, Calif.; Portland, Ore.). In the Triangle, they join Carrboro, which has been on the list since 2004 and is one of only 28 Silver communities nationwide, and Bronze Cary, a 2003 inductee. Elsewhere in North Carolina, Charlotte, Davidson and Greensboro are all Bronze BFCs.

What makes a community bike friendly?

Well, there’s the official criteria, which you can read about here. But you get a better sense of what makes a place good for biking straight from someone who rides the unmean streets regularly. Durham resident Jack Warman writes a thoughtful piece about Bull City biking in the latest entry on his blog, the intriguingly named “Bing’s Haus of Soft, Creative Non-Violent Playthings.” Writes Warman, “Durham has made great strides in the last several years and is very actively becoming more and more bicycle (and pedestrian) friendly all the time. To those folks who may not see why the League honored Durham as it did, I urge you to consider the following aspects of Durham that make me think Durham is bike friendly … .”

Read, enjoy and, if you’ve ridden a bike in Durham, Warman encourages you to comment.

Photo: One reason Durham is bike friendly: The American Tobacco Trail, which currently runs nearly seven miles from downtown Durham south to N.C. 54.

The post Chapel Hill, Durham make Bike Friendly list appeared first on GetGoing NC!.