Tag Archives: San Francisco

August 31, 2012 · 9:28 am

Role models

On the first day of school our son asked to go by bike.

We have not been involved with family biking that long. One could argue that we make up for lost time with intensity. We have no car anymore, and we ride somewhere pretty much every day, although I know myself too well to track days or mileage, because that would inevitably lead to compulsion and madness. I learned that the hard way when my employer was handing out free pedometers. The day mine broke snapped me out of an obsession that had had me pacing around our bedroom at 11:59pm every night to break my steps record from each previous day.

Because I don’t track miles and I’m not riding a bike to get in shape, I am enjoying myself and so is everyone else. I realized that the other day when my kids found some old packing paper, spread it out into a makeshift course in the living room, and started racing each other using a ride-on hot wheels truck and a ride-on bumblebee. They called out, “I’m winning!” “No, I’m beating YOU! I turned on my electric assist!” “I’m pedaling faster than you!”

Our default rental car is now this plug-in hybrid (City Carshare is offering these at their lowest rate).

We have been in cars a lot in the last month: rides to the airport, rides to the train station, a week at my mom’s, a trip to Marin. We rented a car last week for one of our more intensive grocery runs, which involved refilling a gallon jug of olive oil and serious inroads into the bulk food bins. Altogether it’s worked to out about a dozen car days this month (although those were mostly clumped together while traveling, and astonishingly, all of them together still cost less than the lowest monthly tab of owning the minivan). This is apparently not enough driving to dislodge my kids’ new self-perception that riding a bike is what’s normal. On our trip to Marin, my daughter asked me whether it was possible to buy a car with electric assist that would make it go faster. I said that’s not really how electric cars work, and suggested that cars went fast enough already, but she remained unimpressed.

Although I’m not opposed to using a car occasionally, pretty obviously, not owning one has been liberating. When we drive I remember that being in a car kind of sucks: hello traffic, parking, and road rage. I definitely appreciate the increased range and time-savings over long distances (we won’t take BART to visit my in-laws again, it takes twice as long and is almost as expensive as renting a car), but altogether I’d rather be doing something else. My daughter’s preschool is closed this week, so on Monday we rode down to the Academy of Sciences, parked the bike at the (empty) rack by the front door, and walked right in. Watching other parents struggle out of their cars several blocks away or the subterranean parking lot, I thought, “I’m glad we’re not doing that anymore.”

Kids on bike racks: it never gets old.

But that’s just me. Our kids get to live this way because it makes our lives easier, not because they chose it, although they were the inspiration. My kids are simpatico with our vegetarianism (which I realize is hopelessly retro of us in this brave new world of “primal” eating). I wondered if they would resist life without a car. We don’t spend much time talking about more general reasons we might want to reduce driving, as our daughter is three and our son worries way too much about doing the right thing already. We do our thing, and we told them we will rent a car whenever they want. And it turns out that’s fine with them. They like riding the bike and taking the bus and walking; it means we can pay more attention to them.

I have these occasional terrifying moments as a parent when I realize that literally everything we do defines our children’s understanding of what is normal. We view life as easier and better not that we drive (much) less and so do they. I like that our transportation choices are now more closely aligned with other things we want in our lives: quieter streets, cleaner air, and streets designed for people. And we are not totally unaware of the environmental implications. Without getting too deeply into our world views here, we have a compost bin and we’ve been known to use it.

She came up with this all by herself, before I had the chance to show her Loop Frame Love, who pioneered the bike rack tunnel.

So it turns out I like being this kind of role model. I like being happy with my commute and I like that I can share it with my kids. I like saving money. I like feeling less tied to things. And I like watching my kids pretend that their toy trucks are really bicycles.

(A shout-out goes to the infinitely readable Davey Oil for inspiring some of these thoughts.)

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August 25, 2012 · 8:14 am

Our hills are bigger than your hills

I don’t know why I even bothered to write a post about the hills in our neighborhood, which top out at a pathetic 25% grade, when it turns out that someone else had already measured the grades of San Francisco for me. Down at the other end of the city, near a certain electric bike shop, there are hills that laugh at junior-league slopes like Mt. Sutro.

The steepest street in San Francisco? 41% grade. That’s right. We broke the 40% mark. Unless you live here too, your city just got pwned.

Go ahead, tell me a bicycle with electric assist is cheating. I’ll see you at the top of Bradford Street. Or rather, I’ll see you FROM the top of Bradford Street.

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August 20, 2012 · 12:58 pm

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

They’re running out of bike racks at the farmers market.

We got up on Sunday to catch a 5:30am flight from Portland to San Francisco. The kids wore their pajamas for the whole trip. When we got home, we remembered that we’d left nothing in the fridge when we left but soy sauce, lemons, and ollalieberry jam. So even before napping, we headed to the farmers market (fortunately a Sunday market) and the grocery store to buy: everything.

Staying in Portland made us want to live in Portland. Matt loved the idea that we might actually buy a house, and I loved the idea that we might actually have a yard where we could garden. And there were all those bikes. We even saw a double trail-a-bike, something I had heard existed but never spotted in the wild. And all those clearly marked bike paths, that made it possible for newbies like us to get where we were going, eventually.

San Francisco greeted us with fog and temperatures in the mid-50sF (where they have remained). It was a culture shock to return to such a dense city, in both a good and a bad way. There are no unattached houses in our neighborhood and no front yards. It is impossible to grow tomatoes on this side of the fog line, and anything metal left outside grows rust and/or moss. But having such an easy walk to the farmers market and the grocery store was so nice. We always see friends there, and Sunday was no exception. Everyone admired our bike trailer/hand cart. In California, the produce is always local. And when we couldn’t bring ourselves to actually make dinner after making the week’s lunches, we walked across the street for sushi.

The last couple of family bikes after our late departure

San Francisco has more bikes now too, it turns out. This morning was our son’s first day of second grade. I can’t believe how much he’s grown! I ruined my street cred by renting a City CarShare to carry all our gear on the first day of school (I couldn’t get both it and my daughter there on the Brompton). But Matt rode with our son to school on the MinUte, joined by at least five new biking families! Three Yuba Mundos (at least one assisted), one Trail-Gator, one trailer. One mom asked, “Are you Hum of the city?” Well, whoa. Yes I am. My name is Dorie, by the way, and I need to update that About page.

Before we left on our trip, our kids begged to plant poppies. We found some pots and bought some seeds and prepared to console them when such sun-loving plants gave up before blooming. But when we returned, we found, to our enduring surprise, the first flower. We are glad to be home.

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August 12, 2012 · 10:27 am

Homesick for the north, homesick for the south

Our first trailer ride

From Bellingham to Seattle to Portland: we have arrived, and so excited to see daddy again. I haven’t had much chance to update while gamboling around the Pacific Northwest mostly solo with two kids, but I’ve also been constrained by the constant barrage of fun. I grew up in Seattle and Bellingham and I was overwhelmed by homesickness. They are both really good places to ride bikes with kids.

So eight family bikers lock up together…

We stayed with my mom and rented a bike and trailer (the kids loved their first trailer ride). Then we stayed with the always awesome Family Ride and rode a Madsen, her pink Big Dummy, and a MinUte. We went to a Seattle Summer Streets and got to see Jen of Loop-Frame Love again. At the Seattle Cargo Bike Road Call my kids rode in a Cetma cargo bike and a Bakfiets and got chauffeured by Davey Oil around Gas Works Park in an amazing electric-assist trike. My son got to ride a handful of kids’ bikes and learned how to shift gears! Then we took an Amtrak ride south from Seattle to Portland. It is a good way to travel with kids, especially given that they seated us near the bathroom, which made it easy to clean up various spills.

Barbecue in Portland

Matt, although he is a committed Californian, loves Portland. He arrived before we did and went grocery shopping for us. Seeing the rib joint nearby, with its “Try our new vegetarian fare!” sign was almost enough by itself to convince him Portland should be our new home. We have seen many, many family bikes, mostly of the traditional variety with child seats and trailers, but I’ve always liked child seats on bikes. I’m coming around to trailers as well, at least in flat cities with limited car traffic.

My kids were the ones chanting “Amtrak! Amtrak! Amtrak! Amtrak!” in car #9 for most of the ride down from Seattle. I apologize.

We’ll be here for a week trying out even more cargo bikes, not to mention cargo trikes. The kids are so excited to see their dad again after a week away that I might even have some time to write about all that’s happened (and to answer a bunch of questions I’ve been asked in the comments).  In the meantime I hope everyone else is having a week just as awesome.

And I almost forgot: I just found out that San Francisco will be holding its first Kidical Mass on September 28th! Thanks so much, MizShan! The ride will meet at 6pm at the fountain at the southeast corner of Justin Hermann Plaza and head to Dolores Park. We will be there!

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August 9, 2012 · 8:52 am

Uphill, downhill: the limits of cargo bikes

This what hills in Bellingham look like. A 10% grade according to the signs, not too bad, especially given the killer views.

I complain a lot about going up San Francisco hills. What can I say? It often sucks. Something I’ve only mentioned in passing, but that we think about quite a lot nonetheless, is going downhill. While going uphill is literally a pain in the legs (and chest, when gasping for air) it is not as dangerous as going downhill can be.

We carry our kids on our bikes, and we go down steep hills regularly. We learned quickly that loaded cargo bikes (and trailers) need extra time and distance to stop when going downhill. It can be deeply disconcerting to brake and brake and brake, and only slowly drift to a stop. At first there were occasions that we overshot the lines at stop signs and red lights, and we are cautious riders. At times we take less steep routes on the way down than we do on the way up. We learned good braking habits very quickly and have internalized them to the point that I often forget to mention them.

Although we are scrupulous about maintaining our brakes, they occasionally fail. We replace pads on the bikes with caliper brakes on a schedule that raises eyebrows among people from outside San Francisco—roughly once a month—and that meets with knowing sighs among friends who ride in the city. The stock disc brakes on the Kona MinUte failed repeatedly and were on an every-other-week maintenance schedule until our local bike shop finally lost patience, called Kona, and asked for a credit to upgrade us to hydraulic brakes. And they got us one, which made the upgrade expensive rather than wildly expensive. The new brakes are amazing, with unbelievable stopping power, and the MinUte now only needs a brake adjustment every other month. We never, ever skip this maintenance.

The other problem that can crop up going downhill, which mercifully we have never experienced, is shimmy, aka death wobble. This is when the bike starts shaking uncontrollably and violently while going down hills, and is the kind of thing that typically only road racers experience, because it usually happens at high speeds. But some bikes can also shimmy at lower speeds, say, the kind of speed that a loaded cargo bike would approach while rolling down a steep hill. Having a top tube apparently provides stability that helps reduce the risk of shimmy, which is why I’ve been encouraged to abandon step-through frames. Better brakes help too. But the risk can only be reduced, not eliminated.

As annoying as all of this can be, we have gotten used to it. However these issues arose again when we started calling around asking about family bikes we could test ride, and why there were so few electric assist cargo bikes designed to handle steep hills in the US. There aren’t many electric assist cargo bikes anyway. When you start asking about taking them up mountains, or adding an electric assist to a bike like a Bakfiets, bike shops often get very quiet. A few shops claimed that electric assists were only designed for mild hills and to go longer distances, not to haul heavy loads up steep hills. This is clearly not true, as there are electric assist cargo bikes all over Europe designed for hills: e.g. an assisted Workcycles FR8, an iBullitt, and according to the German bakery we visited in Bellingham, every delivery bike used in Germany. The whole situation was starting to tick me off. I could get strong enough to haul my kids on long distance rides (and I have). I cannot get strong enough to haul my kids up truly steep hills as they get heavier, and even if I wanted to, putting them on the back of the bike on a steep hill has sometimes led to the front wheel lifting off the ground. They’re not strong enough to ride uphill themselves, and there’s too much traffic for them to be safe even if they could. People who want to ride an extra couple of miles don’t need an electric assist like people who live on the top of steep hills do. WTF, bike manufacturers?

I give Portland family bike shops (and a couple of San Francisco bike shops, Everybody Bikes and The New Wheel) credit here because when I asked this they gave me honest answers. It is, evidently, not a huge problem to put an electric assist on a bike to get it up a steep hill. It can, however, be a huge problem getting the bike+cargo back down that same hill safely. We rolled our eyes a little when we heard that because we’re already going down those kinds of hills fully loaded, so no new news here. But manufacturers are apparently concerned about the limits of bicycle brakes going downhill. The brakes on many cargo bikes are not up to the task; as proof, there’s our experience with the MinUte.

Evidently manufacturers are also concerned about the liability they’d face if someone who wasn’t attuned to these problems had the worst happen going downhill on an assisted cargo bike. Personally I think that’s a copout. I know parents who’ve been pulled or pushed down hills by trailers, who’ve broken spokes or had rear wheels taco or screwed up frames and gearing carrying kids up and down steep hills (cough cough… me). They don’t sue the bike or trailer or wheel manufacturers. They start looking for a better cargo bike. But there are currently very few better bikes, at least in the US, and the ones that do exist have appeared in the last year or two. So most parents in our situation have either kludged something together or started driving.

A Big Dummy in Bellingham: it is no accident that you can spot this bike all over in hilly cities

At any rate, although we’ll be trying out a lot of family bikes over the next couple of weeks, we have been told in advance that many of them aren’t going to work for us. Xtracycle and assist a commuter bike? Wobbles and fishtails when loaded on steep hills. Bakfiets and trikes? The brakes can’t handle steep downhills and can’t be upgraded, and the bikes themselves are so heavy that better brakes might not work effectively even if they could be added. And so forth. Although we’ll be riding lots of bikes for our own edification, the list of plausible candidates that we could take home to the hills of San Francisco is actually very short, at least for now. I don’t like this, but I have to live with it.

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August 1, 2012 · 7:13 am

The costs of living without a car

In brief: they are significantly less than living with one.

We don’t even need to park the bike at our son’s summer camp. Matt just rides into the middle of the field to pick him up. The other kids were so jealous.

I wrote earlier about the monthly costs of keeping our minivan ($400-$600/month), but I realized I forgot one expense: parking. Parking for one car is included in our rent at home, and although the market value of that space is ~$250/month, we’re not allowed to rent it if we don’t use it so it’s a wash. But whenever we drove the minivan anywhere else, we almost always had to pay to park. Our weekday driving primarily came when Matt drove to work because he was going out of the city for business. However, even though he’s not normally a car commuter, if he stopped at the office before or after, paying for parking was his responsibility. Because hey, it was just his normal commute, right? The same was true for me. The cost of parking where we work is $15-$20 per day. It worked out to between $50-$100 per month, conservatively. Plus on the weekends we had to feed meters. So the cost of owning the car was really somewhere between $450-$700/month, depending on how much we drove. It shocks me just writing those numbers. And we owned the minivan outright, so no car payments in that calculation. (If you ignore depreciation and only count actual out-of-pocket expenses it was still $250-$500/month.)

A portion of our newfound savings, admittedly, went to a new helmet.

This is still better than when we were car commuting and paying $140/month for a campus parking permit on top of the occasional downtown parking. My god, that car was expensive! No wonder Uber is making a killing in San Francisco. I could take daily limo rides without running up a $600-$850 monthly tab (or $400-$650 ignoring depreciation again).

Anyway, now that Matt has to rent a car for his business trips, the company pays for parking the rental car at the office, because he obviously wouldn’t be driving a rental car on his regular commute. Ha. Ha ha.

My son, passed out on my lap on Muni. (The Brompton continues to reign supreme in practicality; there was only space on the bus bike rack for one more bike–my son’s.)

In this first car-free month I was curious how much alternative transportation would cost us. It was a weird month. Matt had a series of meetings in the South Bay, so got a rental car for one week through work. By coincidence that was the same week that his mother went in for brain surgery in Redwood City, so there was a lot of extra driving to see her on top of those meetings. And we took a long BART ride one weekend to visit her in Berkeley after she went home. What can I say? We worry. We had planned to rent a car (and will next time we go; the round trip on BART is 4+ hours) but the San Francisco Marathon shut down the city. The MinUte went back to the bike shop while the N-Judah line was under construction, so we tried out ride sharing one weekend. And our son had a week of bike camp across town when Matt was away, which given the need to carry his bike implied a couple of trips using car share as well–we tried it once on Muni but (a) it’s so slow that we were late and the camp called us wondering where he was and (b) he was exhausted all day after riding over from the bus stop. And then the mamachari died.

Coming out of the tunnel on BART

I realize that every month is unique in its own way, but ironically, we drove more in July without a car than in any of the previous three months when we actually owned one. However no one else we know has brain surgery plans and the N-Judah is back in business, so this was probably an expensive month by the standards of car-free life, although having our bike collection radically thinned isn’t helping. Overall I hope that the next few months are much less exciting regardless of cost. (Matt’s mom is fine, by the way, although her surgery would have been better timed around Halloween, when she could have gotten some serious mileage out of the staples ringing her scalp. Oh well, hindsight.)

So our transportation costs for the month (rounded up to whole numbers):

  • fares for extra Muni and BART rides: $44
  • City CarShare rentals, meter parking, and Lyft ride: $48
  • maintenance on the Kona MinUte (bent derailleur repair): $24
  • rental car through work (including parking): $0 for us!

The total damage (for a very heavy month of auto  travel by our  standards even without the rental car through work): $116. Seriously? And we actually drove more than usual? Well hello, college savings. Even if we didn’t own bikes and took car share, ride share and Muni everywhere, we’d still save money by not owning a car. I am still sideswiped by disbelief. No pun intended.

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July 30, 2012 · 9:12 am

Another one bites the dust

Oh mamachari, I can’t quit you.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the battery on the mamachari was getting a lot less range per charge. I use the motor pretty sparingly, only to go uphill, and while it used to go around the city several times without needing to be recharged, now it could go only once. And it was getting worse. I fully charged the battery one morning before taking my son to summer camp. On the way home, on the first hill, the battery gave out. So I rode home, up a mountain, with 50 pounds of my son on the back of an unassisted single-speed 65 pound bicycle. It was hell.

On Friday I charged up the battery to full and went to pick up my daughter. A half-block from home, the battery gave out. The mamachari’s assist is dead. RIP. Even the backup battery doesn’t work now, because it’s wired through the factory installed battery.

RIP, Bridgestone battery, You exceeded expectations.

This wasn’t completely unexpected. The woman who sold it to me told me the mamachari was six years old with all its original parts, and the bike was really cheap. We both knew the battery was on its last legs, and I have used it a lot over the last couple of months, more than I had planned. I’m mostly impressed that it lasted this long at all. It’s been used as an almost daily commuter by three families for six years, all of whom were carrying children, in the Berkeley Hills and on really steep hills in San Francisco. Most electric assist bicycles warranty the batteries for only two years. It had an amazing run.

I started thinking about whether I wanted to try to replace the battery on this bike when the range started to drop. I decided that I like the mamachari enough that the answer was yes. How to do that was the question. It is a Japanese bike, and parts for those aren’t exactly thick on the ground in the United States.

Luckily for me, there is Mama Bicycle in Japan. I learned a lot about mamacharis from his blog, and he recently posted that he has been looking for a way to export mamacharis overseas. If he can figure out a way to do it, I’m sure he will make a fortune. I know a dozen families in our preschool alone who would buy one. However shipping a heavy bike like a mamachari is problematic. But all I needed was a battery—that could be presumably be shipped as a normal parcel, assuming he was willing. And he was! Mama Bicycle is the best! If you’re in the market for a mamachari outside of Japan, he is your guy.

When I sent a photo of my bike, he identified the model on sight. Happily, Bridgestone sells replacement batteries for its bikes in Japan, and it’s legal to ship them to the US. Mamachari batteries aren’t cheap, even in Japan. But I can’t begrudge the cost given that the bike itself was. Moreover, if this replacement battery lasts as long as the first one did, the cost per month of my new battery will be equivalent to a couple of Muni rides each month. I ride the mamachari way more often than that. (Plus we are flush because we just sold the minivan, which makes it hard to begrudge the cost of a new battery to get the mamachari back online.)

Wanted: a bike to carry these two charmers

In the short to medium term, however, we’re in a bit of a bind bicycle-wise. The Breezer has been vetoed as a child carrier by our bike shop given the strain I’ve put on it already. The mamachari is out of commission until a new battery arrives from Japan, which I imagine will take quite a while by economy shipping. That means that all our bike riding is now on the Kona MinUte and the Brompton + IT Chair. The MinUte is great but it’s primarily Matt’s bike. The Brompton is what I’m riding now, and although it is still completely awesome, riding with a kid on board gets a little cramped on rides longer than a couple of miles. And while it’s not as bad going uphill as a mamachari with a dead battery (nothing else I’ve ever ridden is that bad) it’s not the greatest bike on steep inclines either. And even though the MinUte owns the hills, it gets a little cramped for two kids at once. There has been squabbling.

What we really need for the long term is an electric assist bike that one of us can use to carry both kids. And now that we have some ready cash on hand, that’s exactly what we intend to get. When our local bike shop told us we should stop using the Breezer as a child carrier and get a real cargo bike, we realized we needed a new strategy for the next school year. Our local bike shop doesn’t sell any cargo bike other than the Kona Ute and MinUte and never will. They suggested we find someplace that did.

We spotted this bike parked in the flowers at lunch while we were in the South Bay last week. Not a family bike, but it was so pretty there.

So next week, we are headed to Seattle and Portland and their many family bike shops to try out every cargo bike we can find (and if you’re a local, we’d love to meet you while we’re there! We’ll be attending both cities’ August Cargo Bike Roll Calls and the Portland Kidical Mass.) This isn’t the only reason we’re going: we’re also visiting my mom and we have friends in the area who’ve never met our kids. However the bike issue, in combination with the tens of thousands of frequent flyer miles Matt has racked up going to China for work, made the decision to head north pretty easy. With any luck, by the time that school starts we will have a family bike that can take all of us anywhere we want to go.

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July 29, 2012 · 8:24 am

New helmet

My son likes the outdoors too. And he likes climbing up the hidden waterfalls of Golden Gate Park. With his helmet. Safety first!

I’ve been commuting more with my son on the Brompton. This raised an unexpected issue. He’s tall enough that the top of his head touches my chin. I can see over him fine, and it’s certainly easy to make conversation. All of that is good. He is taller than his sister, and that makes pedaling around his legs more of a challenge, but that’s okay. And for some reason when he’s in front he’s more supportive on the hills. “You can make it, mommy! Keep pedaling!”

But there has been an unexpected downside to our commute. His helmet is one of those aero-style Giros that bumps out in the back, and has a sharp edge where the plastic decoration stops and the uncovered foam begins. When we rode together his helmet was cutting open my chin. My chin was bleeding because of my son’s helmet. It was the world’s most implausible bike injury.

We’re taking a trip soon and mailing our helmets in advance. Having a spare helmet was starting to sound like a good idea. Shopping for a helmet with a smooth back, which was my personal goal for his new helmet, was much harder. For some reason the aero-style with the back bump is all the rage in kids’ helmets locally. I had to go online, and that raised issues with fit. My son has a giant head. I picked stores with generous return policies (Amazon and Real Cyclist) and ended up using them as we worked our way up through the sizes that were supposed to fit him based on head circumference and did not. Eventually we found a Bern helmet that fit him in blue (he really wanted a blue helmet). It was an adult size small.

I love this helmet. It has never cut my chin. It’s as smooth as glass. I kissed it while we were riding on Friday, I was so grateful not to be gouged. I liked it so much I got one just like it for my spare helmet. Matchy matchy.

My son likes both his helmets. Specifically he likes having two helmets. Sometimes he wears them both in one day (not at the same time). As long as he wears the Bern while he’s riding the Brompton, that’s just fine.

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July 27, 2012 · 9:41 am

Learning to love the outdoors

Check it out! It’s July in San Francisco! Wind and fog, check. Record low temperatures, check. We’re still having fun.

For most of my life I’ve considered myself an indoor sort of person. I viewed central heating as one of the greatest wonders of the modern age, and wished my parents used ours much more aggressively. And although I walked to school for most of my childhood, I rarely enjoyed it. In my dreams, there were enclosed, climate-controlled, clear tubes for pedestrians that would take me wherever I wanted to go.

When I moved to the Twin Cities in college I couldn’t have been more surprised to learn that such things actually existed, in the form of the Minneapolis skyway system. Who knew?

So anyway, for most of my life I enjoyed walking but hated being outdoors most of the time, which I admit is sort of schizo. This ambivalence hasn’t always led me to make the most healthful choices. When I was in the middle of writing my dissertation, I went for a few days without leaving the apartment at all, which was just as appalling as it sounds.

Last weekend we went to the coast to visit family, but forgot it would be even windier next to the Pacific Ocean. 60 degrees and a dust storm.

I’ve come around in the last few years, assisted by the resolutely temperate climate of San Francisco. It’s frequently foggy and windy, but rarely cold and never hot. Before we ever started riding bikes I walked to work through Golden Gate Park, which is time consuming but has no shortage of great views. We also live close enough to the park that I’ve often taken walks there in the evening after the kids went to bed when Matt was working late. After dark, it’s just me and the skunks.

I’ve been surprised to find that starting to ride our bikes around the city has done something I never expected: it’s made me want to be outside every day. There are days that I don’t ride a bike, often when we’re walking around the neighborhood instead. But I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel an overwhelming urge to spend some time outdoors before noon.

Exploring the mini-woods the campus planted in lieu of giving us all backyards. My kids like being outside already. (This hill drains right into our basement, incidentally.)

I started riding thinking that the freedom of riding the bike, which to me mostly meant not being dependent on the bus schedule or stuck in traffic, was worth the extra time outdoors (and that it would be good for me anyway). I couldn’t have been more surprised to learn that all that extra time outdoors made me want to be outdoors even more.

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July 25, 2012 · 9:49 am

It’s electric!

The bike in front is electric, and arrived just in time for the Electric Slide at Sunday Skate.

I’ve been seeing a lot more electric bicycles around San Francisco. I’ve been seeing a lot more bicycles, period, around San Francisco. Part of that is the season, of course, but there’s also this bicycle boom that everyone’s been talking about. San Francisco ridership has supposedly increased 71%. And every new bike lane that gets striped in this city (8th Street lanes just went in to rave reviews) makes this more likely to continue.

Just another July afternoon in San Francisco. They don’t call it Fog City for nothing.

When I look up some of the steeper hills in this town I often find the prospect of riding my bike daunting, at least when the kids are on board. Having grown up in the Seattle area, I’m rarely fazed by any local weather. (Our bike shop complains that many people give up riding at the first hint of fog. If I felt that way I’d ride maybe 15 days a year.)

Mild to moderate hills are okay too, although they grow less fun as I add live weight. But there are also the steep hills. And there are a lot of them. They are off-putting. This is especially true at the end of a long day at work, as the route home ranges from mildly uphill to steeply uphill most of the way back. On days that it feels like too much, sometimes I put the bike on the shuttle.

Occasionally I hear people say that unless you live or work on a steep hill, you can avoid riding the hills in San Francisco. My first thought is, “It’s more like live AND work on steep hills, actually.” My second thought is to wonder what they’re smoking and where I can get some. I suppose if you lived in the Mission and never went anywhere else but the Financial District that this could be true. My understanding is that this is, predictably, the chosen stomping ground of San Francisco’s fixie community. And it’s certainly possible if you drive everywhere that isn’t flat, but that isn’t really avoiding the hills, is it? If you have kids, there is the school commute unless you homeschool, and the museums and birthday parties regardless, and many people have been known to want to leave their immediate neighborhood occasionally as a matter of personal preference. Technically it’s POSSIBLE to live housebound, even with children, but it hardly seems worth it. I do not find it surprising that people who say that they avoided the hills in San Francisco are always people who used to live in San Francisco. There’s no point in paying city rents if you’re not going to go anywhere.

BionX: a handy upgrade for a pretty bike.

I now realize that I have come relatively late to the idea of electric assist in San Francisco, because I have been seeing assisted bikes everywhere this summer. Other people were smarter than we were, and simply paid upfront to enjoy the ride. On the way to work I’m sometimes passed by a relaxed gentleman in a suit and tie sitting bolt upright on his bike, peacefully meandering up the steepest part of the hill up as I turn off, panting, to take the longer, shallower incline. He confirmed when I asked, that yes, he rides a pedal-assist electric bicycle (it is silent, and he is a lot faster than I am, so it was hard to get a good look). “I love it!” he said. When I look at bikes parked at racks around the city now, there is usually at least one with a motor and battery. Some friends whose daughter attends a top-of-a-hill school recently started commuting on a trailer-bike attached to an e-bike. They plan to buy a second matched set when  their youngest starts kindergarten in August.

When we started down this road, I had little idea that there even was such a thing as an electric-assist bicycle. This is the problem with getting the inspiration to commute by bike while in Copenhagen. The more I talk to people we know, the more I realize that I am not the only one who didn’t realize there was a way to handle the steepest hills that didn’t involve being a Tour de France rider on a bike that weighs less than a newborn baby. But this is changing fast, and I suspect the realization that an electric-assist bicycle can easily move a family up to the top of Mt. Sutro or Potrero Hill will eventually become common knowledge.

I read a review of The New Wheel that said adding electric assist to a bicycle makes San Francisco as flat as Copenhagen.  I think this is true. Electric assist makes riding a bike in San Francisco accessible even to parents hauling kids, groceries, and gear. Many of the incentives to ride a bike in the city (extensive bike lanes, mild weather, a new bike share program, respectful drivers, horrific traffic, and wildly expensive auto parking) are already in hand or in progress. Even still, nearly every American city still has something missing that could turn bicycles from a lunatic fringe activity to a normal way to get around. In San Francisco, I’d put money on that something being electric assist.

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