Semester Personal Project

My baby, my road bike

I have had my own road bike for the past 3 years. It is a beautiful, classic Trek 1200 in red, white and blue. But I have only always exclusively used this bike for team rides with my Little 500 team, or for racing in triathlons and such. I have only always rode around a cinder track with a fixed gear bike, or rode up hills just to go back down again. I had never attempted riding my bike in street clothes. My bike does not have a basket, a squishy seat, or a bell. But most importantly I had never ridden my bike for the sole purpose of getting from point A to point B.

But this summer, I interned with the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability and decided to try biking to City Hall from my home on 3rd and Grant St. After realizing how much faster biking is compared to walking (crazy idea right?), I started biking to work, to the library, to the Union, all summer long. So I want to take this challenge further for the rest of the semester as my personal project. 

 

This is the kind of riding I am used to
(Little 500 Qualifications 2010)

My plan is bike/walk to wherever I am going as much as possible. I will allow myself one car trip per week for instances where it is too far/unsafe to bike. Since I will only be allowed to use my car once a week, I will have to chain trips if need be, allowing me to only use the car once (that is if I even need to). I will look into a certain mile radius around my home that will challenge me to use my bike instead of my car for all of those short trips that most Americans use their cars for. I plan on looking back into my credit card statements to see how much I have spent on gas each month and equate that to greenhouse gases and emissions, and then see how much I can save in the upcoming months. 

 Throughout the semester I plan on blogging about active transportation options in Bloomington (I worked on some with Jacqui Bauer this summer), common issues that come up with bike transportation, the best way to go grocery shopping via bike, additional bike expenses, and the best bike routes from my experiences. Overall, I want to see if I can turn myself (and my road racing bike) into a bike commuter.



The kind of cyclist I was (Little 500 2010 in the light blue)

The kind  cyclist I am right now (Chicago Triathlon 2012)









And the kind of cyclist I hope to be....
(This is obviously not an actual picture of me) 



Problems with Suburban Living: Slaves to Our Automobiles

An intersection on La Grange Road in Orland

In our first reading in "Towards Sustainable Communities" I have found that my own community fits well into what Roseland calls, "the unsustainable community." With large spacious homes, long commutes into the city, and extreme dependance on automobiles, my hometown in the Chicago suburbs fits the mold quite well. Now my actual hometown of Palos Park is quite small, with roughly 4,000 people, so I am extending my hometown to include what I consider the biggest offender of unsustainable communities, Orland Park, Illinois. With over 51,000 people, this suburb dwarfs neighboring Palos Park in size, number and offenses.



An Orland subdivision (orlandpalosrealestate.com)

Now I tried to find a good picture of the main drag, La Grange Road, but apparently photos of the sea of parking lots do not exist on the internet. So I am going to describe it to you. Picture a four lane highway, clogged with traffic from never ending construction. Look to your right you will see a Starbucks, a couple blocks down, if you look to your right, you will see yet another Starbucks. Now fill in all of these blocks with every single chain restaurant and store you could ever imagine and it is there:Whole Foods, Best Buy, Dick's Sporting Goods, The Olive Garden, Five Guys, P.F. Changs. It is disgusting. No originality what so ever. McHarg nailed everything that is Orland Park in "Plight and Prospect" by stating the visible testaments to the American mercantile creed are "the hamburger stand, gas station, diner, the ubiquitous billboards, sagging wires, the parking lot, car cemetary and that most complete conjunction of land rapacity and human disillusion, the subdivision. (39)"

Now that you can clearly see this in your mind, imagine a major lack of sidewalks or any promotion of alternative transportation. There is the occasional Pace bus stop that sits on the corner of a busy intersection that also has no sidewalks leading up to it. Any time I see a person bravely try to cross the street, (sometimes there are no cross walks) or ride their bike, I think of how crazy they must be to attempt that. But they are not crazy, certainly not every resident can afford to be reliant on a car. Maybe they are the first of Orland Park residents to think that maybe we do need bike lanes and sidewalks, but they definitely have not spoken up about it.

From Palos Park, I cannot even get to Orland without driving my car. If I wanted to walk, I'd be walking through the marshy grass along side the road. If I wanted to bike, it would be a death wish. There are no other options, and when residents are not given other options, they are going to depend on their only form of transportation: the automobile. Newman and Kenworthy (1999) refer to the most unsustainable form of human settlement as the low-density auto-mobile dependant suburb. Ding Ding Ding! Orland Park you are the winner! Want to see how far my father has to drive to work each day? He drives 28 miles one way. That's 56 miles a day and multiply that by 6 working days equals 336 miles in just one week!**

How far my dad drives to work each day.

The Roseland reading really made me see how unsustainable my hometown is and the ways in which I wish it could be. Orland Park has been stricken by the plague of "growthmania." Every time I come home, there is something new being built. This construction takes place while there are open store fronts all over the city because those businesses couldn't keep up in this economy. I really think the City should stop focusing on more more more, and pay attention to the already built areas that need some TLC.

I just wish Orland would think about some "creative development" like Yaro et al. Suburbs like Orland Park are what make me want to pursue a career in this field.



**(Disclaimer: there is a Metra rail line that runs into the city from Orland and Palos Park that is very popular with those who work downtown. It is just not very helpful for my father's location.)