Feature: Challenge accepted!
The Marin County Bicycle Coalition is daring commuters to get out of their cars

by Jason Walsh
Pacific Sun, December 10, 2010

It was a sunny morning in New York City on the day of May 29, 1896, when a young woman, pedaling happily on her state-of-the-art Columbia Racer penny-farthing, was mowed down by an out-of-control Duryea Motor Wagon at the corner of West 74th St. and Broadway—giving her a concussion, breaking her femur and sending the hoop-skirted maiden straight to the infirmary.

It was more than just another bang-up on the mean streets of the city that never sleeps—it was history.

It was the world's first recorded automobile accident, earning driver Henry Wells, of Springfield, Massachusetts, a prominent place in the annals of the Industrial Age—a seat behind the wheel at the symbolically significant moment when the era of the automobile zoomed wantonly ahead, no matter who or what was in the way.

What seems to have been forgotten by history is the other "first" involved that day—the first cyclist plowed into by a car. For some reason that part didn't elicit much reaction from the press. "Monstrous Horseless Carriage New, Deadly Scourge of Streets," declared the New York Times the following day. The name Henry Wells became synonymous with the dangers of the horseless carriage—his name today pops up on any number of lists of history's important "firsts."

As usual, when it comes to "great moments in transportation," the focus was all on car and driver; history has very little to say about the poor woman knocked into next week by the four-wheeled chariot. No one put her at the top of a list as the first bicyclist hit by a car—that list doesn't exist. Only details from the standpoint of the car seem to matter, then and now.

What's worse, the first-ever-auto-accident storyline didn't even get the type of placement in the Times you'd expect a headline about a "deadly scourge of the streets" would deserve—it received second billing on the page to the plight of a St. Louis butcher and his wife who, while entertaining dinner guests, were caught off guard by the Great Tornado of '96 and saved themselves when their roof caved in by hiding in an icebox. ("Their four companions were killed outright," observed the Times.)

A week later, when the newspaper celebrated the debut of the inaugural Ford Motor Company car—the Ford Quadricycle—the message was as loud and clear as an 8-cylinder engine: Any news about cars is going to be good news about cars. At least until the Edsel.

Slowly but surely, times have changed since the "monstrous horseless carriage" nudged the innocuous velocipede from the national dialogue. Even in modern-day Marin, where bike culture is as in your face as neon-purple Lycra, the sociocultural schism between unapologetic driver and avowed cyclist is often as wide as I imagine I look in spandex.

But one organization in Marin has made it its mission to bridge the divide between bike path and carpool lane—and one dedicated bike fanatic helped develop a crafty scheme to get a handful of county lead-foots to step up to a different pedal.

• • • •

TOM BOSS KNEW that 2010 would be an important year for cycling in Marin. With the completion of such long-awaited county commuter-cycling projects as the Lincoln Avenue Pathway and the Cal Park Tunnel on the horizon, there was never a better time to get people thinking about curbing their Michelins and hauling the Schwinn out of storage. Meanwhile, a sour economy has left the Sonoma-Marin Area Rapid Transit project facing money hurdles—a call by the Marin Grand Jury for SMART to defer the $91 million pedestrian-bike pathway has put nonmotorized transportation on the funding defensive.

Boss, the 46-year-old "membership director" for the Marin County Bicycle Coalition, recognized 2010 as a key moment for the Marin cars-to-bikes movement. The SMART pedestrian-bike pathway—which would connect to all 14 stations and serve an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 people a day—was an essential element of the project; there's a likelihood the narrowly passed Measure Q wouldn't have received its required two-thirds approval without the support of the cycling community. And the soon-to-be-opened Lincoln Avenue Pathway is a prime link between Terra Linda and downtown San Rafael, while the Cal Park Tunnel—a decade in the works and recently named the Bay Area's "outstanding small project of 2010" by the American Society of Civil Engineers—will finally provide riders a safe path from east San Rafael to the Larkspur ferry.

In the two years Boss has been with the MCBC, the longtime San Anselmo resident (and mastermind behind Film Night in the Park) has seen membership grow by 800 riders—but as a marketer and fundraiser for the coalition he needed a big idea to raise cycling awareness in 2010. And he had one:

Give away brand-new bikes.

• • • •

"ARE YOU BIKE CURIOUS?" read the flier Pacific Sun ad director Linda Black left on my desk one Friday last April. It was from the Bicycle Coalition—I'd received the same flier in my email. Typically with story pitches and press releases, we tend to do one of three things with them: put them aside if, for instance, they're not of local interest or we've already covered them; plan for brief coverage; or plan for broader coverage of what seems to warrant a larger story.

But this press release did what few do—it hit me on a personal level.

Why... yes, I am "bike curious," I thought.

Our 7-year-old, Jack, had newly joined the ranks of the two-wheeled thrasher and, sadly, he had no one in the family with whom to thrash. Three-year-old Sam was still on a velocity-challenged tricycle and my wife and I were a nuclear family of two cars, double commutes, no bikes.

We'd last had bikes briefly as newlyweds about a decade ago—bought them from Trips for Kids Re-Cyclery shop in San Rafael and had even sweated through a couple of extended tours of the San Geronimo Valley. Bikes had changed our lives! That is, until one morning when we peered outside our Novato condo to find them curiously missing, with only our bike chains remaining around the pole from where the wretched thieves had swiped them. (We'd locked them up good and safe—with the chain around the handlebars... all the reprobates had to do was lift the chains off the bikes and ride away.) Soon the pitter-patter of little feet—and the incessant wail of sleepless nights—came along and our brief foray into cycling culture was over quicker than a Lance Armstrong steroid denial.

Like most people, I loved riding my bike as a kid. But as American youth inch toward that magic driving age of 16, a bike can quickly go the way of the Happy Meal and pre-Revolver Beatles: strictly kids' stuff.

But now here I was, 38, and I hadn't experienced the joys of bikes since 1988 when I left the Corte Madera DMV with license in one hand, keys to a bright orange Pontiac Ventura in the other—and side two of "Hysteria" in the tape deck. Two decades later, my bike curiosity was back.

The flier from the bike coalition was announcing the inaugural session of the Bike Locally Challenge, a throwing down of the gauntlet for six Marinites to make the leap from driver's seat to pear seat.

"Have you considered riding a bike to work, or for local errands, but haven't tried it yet?" queried the flier. "The Marin County Bicycle Coalition is launching a Bike Locally Challenge this May in an effort to get more people on bikes and to highlight the many new bicycle facilities opening in Marin County in 2010. MCBC is looking for six Marin residents to take the challenge!"

Here was the deal: Six people would be chosen based on a 500-word application essay; if selected, riders would be supplied a new Globe bicycle (a brand of urban-commuter bike), with accessories, for six months. Each participant would earn "points" by riding an average of 12.5 miles per week, and documenting the experience mostly through a Facebook page set up for the Bike Locally Challenge by MCBC. The folks who have at least 500 points at the end of the six months get to keep the bike.

"With all the new facilities coming online in 2010," says Boss, "MCBC wanted to have a campaign that would encourage people to try biking for local trips to work, school and errands. We wanted to select a diverse group of novice cyclists and help them to overcome their obstacles... [and] at the same time we would document their progress in the hopes of inspiring many more people to give biking a try for local trips."

Boss says the coalition looked at similar efforts across the country and created a sort of hybrid based on the most successful programs—the key addition to MCBC's program, says Boss, is the requirement to earn the bikes. "No 500 points, no free bike!" he says.

The 500-word essays were essentially intended for applicants to demonstrate why they were a worthy candidate to enter the contest and have a chance at earning the free bike.

So I pounded out a 499-word sob story about father-son bonding, our burgled bikes from Trips for Kids, nostalgia for the lost innocence of my pre-auto youth and the need to confront climate change at even the smallest level in order to preserve the earth for future generations.

But mostly I just wanted the free bike.

Lo and behold, they fell for it. MCBC dug my essay and before I could say "Hello, Velo," I was at Mike's Bikes in San Rafael to pick up my Globe, helmet and Garmin satellite-tracking device. Challenge accepted!

My plan was simple. Aside from short rides around the block with the kid, the bulk of my miles would be a once-a-week Novato to San Rafael round-trip commute—from our home on San Marin Drive to the Pac Sun offices on Fourth Street. It would clear about 30 points per week (one mile equals a point) in one fell swoop and, coupled with a few Facebook posts for good measure, I'd coast all the way to the freebie wheels.

• • • •

IT WAS ABOUT halfway through my sweat-soaked ascent up the hill at Alameda del Prado that I realized there'd be very little "coasting" involved in this bike challenge. Marin's pretty hilly, and even the residential neighborhoods bend and gradate in ways you haven't seen since the last time you played Twister.

Not only that, but there's very little Highway 101 room for cyclists up the vaunted Highway 101 transportation corridor—aside from a nice (and steep) bike path near the Marin IJ building, a bike ride from northern Novato to central San Rafael is in essence a ride through the streets of Novato, down Ignacio Boulevard, over Alameda del Prado, through Marinwood, past Lucas Valley, around the Northgate Mall, up Los Ranchitos, and then down into San Rafael. The only 101 corridor usage was, quite literally, smack dab on Highway 101—where cyclists are allowed to ride the shoulder southbound from the Novato Boulevard on-ramp to the exit at Ignacio. To put it mildly, one becomes a very alert cyclist when SUVs are whizzing by at 65mph a mere eight feet to your left.

Other points of interest included a daily zephyr blowing south through Novato every evening on my northbound journey home, and a game I invented called "Who Will Door Me Next?" played with frequent swerves into traffic along the apartment-heavy portion of Lincoln Avenue, where everyone parks on the street. (The Lincoln Avenue Pathway will serve as a bike-friendly parallel to this hair-raising leg of the journey.)

My inaugural bike-challenge commute took me a total of three-and-a-half hours to and from work. This challenge was proving to be unexpectedly challenging.

After a somewhat chastening opening ride, I decided to psyche myself up with some inspiring cycling entertainment—and few things can fire up an athlete like a classic sports movie from Hollywood's golden era. That being said, cinema history isn't teeming with a lot of great bicycle-commuting movies. From the Fairfax Library I found Vittorio De Sica's Academy Award-winning 1948 film, The Bicycle Thief, and from the Point Reyes Station branch I took home Juan Antonio Bardem's 1955 Spanish drama Death of a Cyclist.

As it turned out, "inspiring" wasn't exactly how you'd describe my impromptu bike-commute film fest. It was all I could do to keep from plummeting into abject despair after this double feature. To its credit, The Bicycle Thief is very much about the value of biking to work. Sadly, it's also about a bike-commuting dad exposing himself as a degenerate thief before the eyes of his until-then hero-worshipping young son—crushing all respect the boy held for the old man, and destroying any delusions he may have had toward the existence of honor and justice in the world. Good grief!

But at least The Bicycle Thief was about bikes. Death of a Cyclist is the story of a pair of illicit lovers who, in the opening scene, run their car over a peasant cyclist—leaving him to die painfully on a cold country road—and spend the rest of the movie worrying how the tragedy will affect their social standing among the intelligentsia of Franco-era Spain.

It seemed I would have to look beyond the era of post-World War II neo-realism to find support for my novice-cycling endeavors.

• • • •

LUCKILY, BOSS AND the MCBC had already considered that we bike-challenge participants might need a sympathetic ear or two with whom we could detail our triumphs, obstacles and complaints about clueless drivers, wind-chill factor and the various aching cycling muscles we previously didn't know we'd been saddled with.

As part of the program, Boss arranged various "group rides" and other get-togethers with the six contestants—points were earned through attendance, but mostly it was a chance to hang out with the other novice riders and swap stories about drivers' blind spots. Such outings included our initial meet-up at Mike's Bikes in Sausalito, a ride from Moylan's to the Novato Farmers Market (and then back to Moylan's for beer) and an evening at Fairfax biker-hangout Iron Springs Pub. (Note recurring theme: beer.)

Through these outings I got to know a little about my fellow bike-mentally challenged:

• Delanie Kern, 27, is a San Anselmo resident who applied for the bike challenge after realizing that, among her three New Year's resolutions—to reduce her carbon footprint, lose 20 pounds and floss regularly—the only headway she'd made by the spring of 2010 was in the fight against gingivitis.
  
  Delanie figured that if she had a proper bike she could commute as often as possible from San Anselmo to her job in Novato—losing weight and lowering her carbon footprint in the process. "Over the past few years I have become increasingly aware of my impact on the planet," explains Delanie, who says that she considers herself an environmentalist. "But if I am 100 percent honest," she admits, "it has been mostly talk."
  
  Delanie may talk the talk, but by the middle of summer she was walking the walk (cycling the cycle?)—she led all Bike Locally Challenge participants in points earned and miles rode.

• Peter Meringolo describes himself as a "normal guy." And by that the Larkspur resident means, "40-year-old, out-of-shape, gray hair and a father of three young boys." Of all the "challenge" participants, he started out as the most active biker in the group, riding with his kids to Little League games and occasionally to the Larkspur ferry en route to work in the city. All the same, Peter felt like a complete fraud.
  
  "I don't wear bike shorts and a Lance Armstrong jersey. I don't have mirror glasses. I don't have clip-in shoes," lamented Peter in his application essay. "Rather, I wear sneakers, some workout shorts and, usually, a ratty Notre Dame T-shirt. I do not consider myself a cyclist."
  
  Peter confessed that watching the hordes of daily riders through Larkspur—with their "colorful jerseys and tight-fitting clothes"—gave him a serious case of Lycra envy. "Frankly, I am just jealous and intimidated," he said. "Those people are the cyclists."

• "Riding a bike is like having sex," began the application essay of 70-year-old Novato resident Lea Snowden—and if it were up to me she should have been awarded her 500 points just for that lead sentence alone. But the other reason Lea wanted to start riding again was to relive her days as a kid growing up in the Sunset District careening down the avenues on the blue Schwinn she got from Santa.
  
  "Once my friends and I got going we would ride for what seemed like forever," recalls Lea. "We loved to feel the wind blowing through our hair as we rode toward the beach. If we went fast enough we could let go of the handlebars. Pure control. Big stuff."
  
  Lea also wanted to set an example for people her age and to "feel the same confidence I felt when I was a kid." With determination, commitment and "a note from my doctor," joked Lea, "my new memories will be created."

• Anjuli Elias longs for her UC Santa Barbara days when she'd ride her trusty bike "Rusty Ruby" to class twice a day and then to the beach "in a bikini and without a helmet" (we assume that was the "beach" portion of the journey). Now 28 and teaching middle school in Mill Valley, Anjuli was spurred to apply for the bike challenge last Earth Day after encouraging her students to bike to school that day—while she zoomed up 101 from Corte Madera by car. "I wasn't practicing what I preach," she admits.
  
  Comparing her yearning to get back on a bike to memories of an old love affair (the one that got away was a turquoise Jazz Voltage made by Trek), Anjuli saw the bike challenge as "a fantastic excuse to start a new bike-riding love affair."

• Nakiesha Koss, of Kentfield, had been riding a bike semi-regularly for more than a year prior to applying for the bike locally challenge—it was one of the few physical activities she could do that didn't add to the chronic pain that still lingered from injuries she'd suffered from a fall down a stairwell that severed tendons in her foot. "The day I figured out that I could ride a bike without keeling over," says Nakiesha, "I cried for the intense sense of liberation that came from being able to propel myself forward again."
  
  Nakiesha, 30, liked the idea of the bike challenge because it emphasized cycling in lieu of one's car, which, she thought, "seemed like a very noble concept that I could embrace wholeheartedly."

• • • •

EACH OF US in the "challenge" was also paired up with a cycling "mentor"—a coalition member whom we could turn to for advice about things—like what's the ideal gear for ascending a 4-degree incline? Or where on the wheel do I stick the baseball card so as to give my bike a "motorcycle engine" sound?

As it happened, my mentor was Kristin Drumm, one of the more accomplished riders on the Marin County cycling scene; the Pac Sun has even featured her in various bike stories over the years.

One evening, as I was panting up a small hill near San Jose Middle School in Ignacio, a cyclist blew past me so fast that I spun around several times like Wile E. Coyote does when the Roadrunner zips by. Sure enough it was Kristin, who pulled up at a stop sign ahead and waited for me to gingerly ride my brakes down the other side of the hill to meet her. We both live in Novato, so we continued on together—Kristin boldly leading the way, me mentally calculating at what speed I'd be able to survive a bad crash. Not only was it a treat to ride with a true pro like Kristin, but this would definitely earn me some brownie points with the Bicycle Coalition for going on a ride with my mentor.

Kristin works for Marin's planning department and had just ridden from the Civic Center over some really gnarly hills (cyclists say "gnarly," right?) through Lucas Valley and Marinwood. (My daring maneuver that day had been not coming to a complete stop at a four-way crossing on Las Gallinas Road.)

Kristin rides a Trek bike—and I asked her if that was a good brand. "It's good enough for Lance Armstrong," she replied in a tone that led me to believe I'd just asked the cycling equivalent of "So, what team did Joe Montana play for?"

My mentor didn't have all the answers—she didn't know why my brakes squeaked or whether Lance Armstrong is a raging steroid freak—but she offered helpful advice when she could.

"Don't worry about falling," she suggested after watching me teeter down a slope on Hill Road.

"Why, because bikes don't really fall over that much?" I asked hopefully.

"No, I've had some really bad falls," she replied forebodingly—with big, wide eyes in case I didn't completely grasp how really bad falling can be.

I guess it's like death and taxes, it just didn't do any good to worry about the inevitable.

• • • •

IT'S BEEN SIX months now and we all seem to have answered the "challenge" (and get to keep the bikes!). It turns dark at 5pm these days, so my bike commutes from Novato to San Rafael and back are on temporary hold (plus, it's friggin' freezing out there this December). I plan on resurrecting my weekly rides once the rainy weather dries out and the daylight hours draw longer.

I never did fall, so Kristin's advice proved prophetic, as any good mentor's should.

Lea wasn't so lucky. In September she badly bruised her leg while attempting what she describes as "an Evel Knievel maneuver" over a speed bump—her nostalgic recollections of cruising Ocean Beach no doubt suppressed these types of memories. The accident put her out of commission for about six weeks—and way behind pace on her mileage totals. Tom Boss and MCBC say they'll extend her time to complete the challenge by however long her doctor kept her grounded.

For Nakiesha and her still-painful foot tendons, the Bike Locally campaign posed both a physical challenge and a psychological one. With all her plans to ride to the store, her office, run errands and meet up with friends, she says she became "overwhelmed" when confronted with so many time-consuming rides. "Argh! It's too much," she recalls thinking. "I'll just take the car." But when her car went kaput for a couple of weeks the Bike Locally Challenge "really clicked."

"One morning, riding to the Larkspur Landing ferry, I looked behind me at the line of cars stretching all the way to Fairfax," says Nakiesha. "Even at my casual pace I was dusting the commuters! I noticed this, too, at the grocery store amid the cacophony of horns and agitated drivers vying for parking spots. Not me!"

I imagine all six of us can attest to smugly coasting past commuters in stop-and-go traffic, or zipping straight up to a shop door while drivers circle in vain for a decent parking spot.

Hopefully, we six motorists-turned-bikers can also retain our semblance of empathy for drivers who find themselves stuck going 4 mph behind an out-of-shape Schwinn jockey struggling up Los Ranchitos Road against the wind.

Because there's no denying that even in Marin the relationship between motorist and cyclist can be at times uneasy.

"I have been yelled at, thrown dirty looks, thanked and reprimanded for using my bike bell," says Anjuli. "If there is one thing about riding that I have learned, it's the importance of proper bell etiquette—that, and padded riding shorts."

But if there's one of us who has changed the most during the Bike Locally Challenge, it's certainly 70-year-old Lea, who's used her alone time on the bike paths of Marin to completely rethink how she wants to spend the rest of her life.

In fact, she's decided to leave her partner of 20 years and relocate to her second home in the Sierra foothills—a snowy little town called Pollock Pines. She says the move has been exciting, "except when the power goes out." She gives no small amount of credit to her new life on two wheels for the decision to free herself from the shackles of Novato.

"I ask myself," writes Lea from her snowed-in El Dorado County cabin, "was it winning the challenge that gave me the confidence to leave? I don't know. Was it going to the orthopedic surgeon and feeling like a real jock that made me re-evaluate my life? I don't know."

Adds Lea: "By the way, I do not hold the MCBC responsible in any way for my life change... that is, unless they want to be."

• • • •

IN SOME SMALL way, I'm sure the MCBC is responsible for a life change in all six of us bike-locally challenged. This may simply be from the health and environmental benefits of riding instead of driving, or having a better understanding of how bikes and cars share the commute—from the point of view of the commuter not protected by two tons of steel.

Or perhaps we've come to the realization that we need an entirely new life itself—and moved to Pollock Pines.

I imagine we've all gained some amount of perspective from our seats atop the Gutter Bunny Express—and we'll never drive past a cyclist or cycle near a driver the same way again.

There's an old Sugarcubes song in which Bjork sings, "That girl on the bicycle showed great interest in all the motor crashes in the neighborhood—she looked quite innocent, she showed great interest—after she got that bicycle."

By the way, that cyclist Henry Wells nailed with his Duryea Motor Wagon in 1896 was named Evylyn Thomas.

History may have forgotten you, Evylyn. But I know six people who never will.

Tom Boss says the success of the Bike Locally Challenge has spurred the MCBC to make it an annual contest. Visit www.marinbike.org next spring for a chance to enter the 2011 'challenge.''

Cal Park Tunnel Grand Opening

The Marin County Bicycle Coalition invites the public to join in the celebration of the completion of the Cal Park Tunnel, a $27 million alternative transportation facility. A ribbon-cutting ceremony hosted by the county of Marin and SMART will take place at the south portal (near the Century Larkspur Landing movie theater) at 3pm Friday, Dec. 10, followed by bike rides through the tunnel and a post-event gathering at Marin Brewing Company. MCBC will lead rides to the event starting at 1:30 pm from Novato, Mill Valley, Fairfax and San Francisco to the south portal; visit www.marinbike.org for times and locations or call 415/272-2756.

 

Cal Park Tunnel Fun Facts!

• Bicyclists and pedestrians access the tunnel pathway from Andersen Drive in San Rafael, just across the street from Office Depot (869 W. Francisco Blvd., San Rafael) and from the access near the Century Larkspur Landing Theater (500 Larkspur Landing Circle, Larkspur).
• The tunnel and its approaches are 1.2 miles long and took just over two years to construct. The tunnel is approximately 1,100 feet long. It originally housed two sets of train tracks. Today it is split into two sections, a larger tunnel for the SMART train and a smaller tunnel for bicycles and pedestrians.
• The tunnel shaves 15 minutes off a trip between the Larkspur Ferry Terminal and the San Rafael Transportation Center and gets bicyclists off a dangerous section of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard as motorists come off Highway 580.
• The tunnel reconstruction was made possible due to a partnership between the county of Marin and SMART, and federal, state and local grants. It is state-of-the-art, with cell phone coverage throughout, graffiti-proof walls, surveillance cameras, fire suppression and ventilation systems.