I’m a member of the Parents Panel of The Albany Times-Union newspaper. That means I write a little piece for the print edition of the paper each month, and it also means I contrbute to the “Parent To Parent” blog. Recently, they asked me to write about our family’s plan to go car-free. Here’s what I’ve written so far:

• Living car-free (Part 1)
• Living car-free (Part 2)

Appropriated lock, stock and downtube from the wonderful blog Bike, Chicago! A few of these are Chicago-centric, so substitute your own appropriate local geography. Enjoy!

50 Ways To Leave Your Car

1. Ride anywhere within 2 miles: grocery, post office, library, coffee shop, friend’s house (click here for more)
2. Take you child to school (check out some options)
3. Ride to work
4. Ride to the train if your commute is long
5. Ride to work on casual Friday
6. Pick one car-free day a month, and have your whole household use bikes instead
7. Teach your kids the rules of the road by bike
8. Work at home? Spend your lunch hour riding a bike
9. Run your weekend errands by bike
10. Recycle by bike
11. Ride to your kids’ games by bike
12. Take the kids to the park by bike
13. Bike to your workout
14. Skip your workout and ride your bike instead
15. Ride a bike on a date with your spouse or significant other; the further the restaurant, the more you can eat!
16. Bike to the movies
17. Bike to get bagels for your Sunday brunch
18. Visiting open houses? Ride a bike
19. Ride a bike to garage sales
20. Ride a bike to the farmers market
21. New mom? Get a baby seat and ride off the baby weight (baby has to be able to sit unassisted)
22. Traffic averse? Figure out places you can ride without going on a major thoroughfare
23. Ride to you hair appointment (caution: avoid updo’s since they won’t fit under a helmet)
24. Use your bike to get home after you’ve dropped your car off for maintenance
25. Ride to the Lake (there are many ways to do this while avoiding major streets; visit the Chicago Bike Map)
26. Out of cream for the morning coffee? Take a quick ride to the store
27. Bike to street and arts festivals
28. Explore some of Chicagoland’s bike paths and trails (click here)
29. Ride the lakefront path on cool spring day (you’ll have little competition)
30. Try a social ride to meet new people (click here)
31. Pick a day of the week to substitute biking for driving
32. Pick an errand you usually do by car, and switch to biking
33. Commit to a number of miles to ride each week or month
34. Show your kids it’s possible to get places without a car
35. Ride to a natural area, then relax and enjoy your surroundings
36. Park you car along the bike path, and ride bikes to Navy Pier, museums and other downtown attractions
37. Park you car along the bike path, and ride to the Botanic Garden
38. Ride your bike to an evening class or workshop
39. If you participate in community gardening, ride your bike there
40. Never learned to bike? Consider an adult tricycle
41. Looking for a new home? Get a friend, and explore new neighborhoods by bike
42. Ride a bike to get ice cream or other indulgences
43. Combine biking and walking: bike to a shopping area or other attractions, lock you bike, and continue on foot
44. Keep your bike accessible, so you can get on at a moment’s notice
45. Keep a pump handy, in case your tires get a little soft
46. Keep all your bike gear in one place to avoid running around at the last minute
47. Carry a backpack in case you find anything you want t carry home with you
48. Stash a packable windbreaker in case the weather turns cool
49. Carry a little cash for emergencies
50. Learn some basic things about your bike, so you don’t have to depend on others: how to lock up, how to fill the tires, how to remove front wheel.

Here’s a wonderful video of a family camping by Xtracycle(s). Now that’s living!

Chronogram Editor Brian K. Mahoney

The regional arts and culture magazine Chronogram has this to say in celebration of Capital Bike Month:

It’s Bike Month once again, and I am reminded of certain realities regarding our lifestyle in this country:

As of April 25 gas is $3.65 a gallon and shows no sign of downward movement. This is no Seventies-style “oil crisis,” no geopoliticking by the members of OPEC. This is no market fluctuation while we find untapped new reserves lurking in some heretofore unexplored locale, like beneath the Vatican. This is the last slow sip on the oil straw. And no admixture of biodiesel, solar, wind, ethanol, nuclear, or hydrogen is going to replace the dead dinosaurs we pour into our automobiles once their tombs are fully looted. (Unless we can figure a way to turn our own ancestors into black gold, and right quick. Soylent Gas is people!) When the oil dries up, human arrangements as they’re currently configured are going to change. We will drive our cars less. Not because gas is $10 a gallon—that won’t stop us—but because there won’t be any of it to be had by guns or money. (James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency is a good primer on this topic).

• Read the rest of the article.

…is on the way!

Jen bought a Trek 7000WSD today at The Down Tube bike shop in Albany. It looks like this, or at least it will when it’s built:

We ordered the 700cc Xtracycle kit tonight, and they’ll be building her bike when the kit arrives. Huzzah!

Fittingly, we loaded almost the entire family onto The Packet Boat, our current Xtracycle, to make the purchase. Jen and John rode on the Snapdeck. I pedaled. Bernie rode his own bike. It was great! Our helper at the bike shop? None other than the NYBC’s Executive Director, Joshua Poppel. How can you lose?

Car-free, here we come!

Riding the same route to work every can become dull, I like to spice it up every once in a while with a alternative route. From my apartment, there are really only a couple of roads that go to my company campus, but I have found a couple of off-road options that are pretty fun, and gives me a reason to ride the mountain bike to work. I found this one a while back (while there was still snow on the ground!):

I start off by going east down pine, past this park with this pond. Back in those trees there is an adventure trail complex that is accessible from Birch street.

I guess youth groups come here in the summer for team building exercises. There were things like wooden walls to climb and rails to walk across (I didn’t get pics of that stuff).

This bridge crosses a narrow point in the pond, and leads to more adventure (trails). The other side comes out on a soccer complex on the main road I normally go to work. I can go that way or back through the trails and get to work down birch.

Another route:

These power lines run along the crest of the hill behind campus. I tried riding there from this point near my house (after a healthy climb up the hill). This part of the trail is pretty rough, so I gave up and looked for a different point to jump on. I found it on Redstone Hill Road:

This isn’t some sort of public multi-use path or anything, it’s obviously a service path for the powerlines, but I could tell that people had brought bikes and atv’s through here before.

Eventually, I emerged from the trail, behind campus, next to the satellite farm. But there’s a fence there!

To keep me out or to keep the satellites in? I guess I could have assumed I couldn’t get through this way, but wanted to try. I ended up going around the satellite farm.

I found a weird little trail that cuts off from the powerline trail through the woods next to the satellite farm, with religious markers nailed to the trees, as well as a statue and big cross in a clearing…

The trail took me out to the main road, right next to campus. I couldn’t find anything there that marked it or gave any indication that there was a trail there. Weird.

on campus, the other side of the satellite farm, they look so little from down here. Campus is actually pretty nice to ride around.

I work on the 3rd floor of the building you can see over the parking lot. And here is a legless coyote:

They’ve installed a few of these around campus to help scare away the geese that take over campus every summer. I don’t think the geese are fooled though, there were definitely still some geese hanging around about 20 feet away.

A bike rack conveniently located right outside my building. The Univega road bike on the left and the Roadmaster mtb on the right have not moved since I started three months ago, and probably several months before that. The wheels are flat and the chains are rusty. But that Trek just started showing up in the last couple of weeks since it got nice. I am no longer the only bike commuter on campus! Hopefully more soon, with bike-to-work week coming up, I have a friend who is helping to push it as a company-wide initiative.

Anyway, I hope that if you ride to work every day, you can find at least one or two fun alternative routes to get there, and live it up!

Here in Albany, our local transportation authority is running a cool promotion for Earth Day today:

CDTA offers a special deal for Earth Day
Passes that contain seeds get holder a free ride, chance to grow something

By CATHY WOODRUFF, Staff writer
First published: Tuesday, April 22, 2008

ALBANY — Ride a bus. Plant some seeds. Keep your money.

That’s the Earth Day celebration plan set to unfold today on Capital District Transportation Authority routes around the region.

CDTA and other participants, including downtown business associations and Capital District Community Gardens, have distributed close to 5,000 free day passes to encourage people to take the bus instead of driving.

The biodegradable passes, made of recycled paper, are infused with wildflower seeds. Riders may keep the passes and plant them at their own homes or turn them in for use in beautification programs sponsored by the business associations and Capital District Community Gardens.

The CDTA made the passes available at its offices, and more were distributed by the business groups and the Community Gardens Veggie Mobile, which sells fresh produce to residents of low-income neighborhoods.

• Read the rest of the story.

I don’t really have a “commute” because I don’t have an office that I go to each day. Instead, my day is a combination of work from home and travel to the hotels and other sites where our UNITE HERE union members work. Most of the sites I represent are in downtown Albany, but two of my hotels are in Schenectady. Up until today, I’ve driven to Schenectady for site visits, but today I decided to ride.

I’ve been down Central Avenue enough to know that if I can avoid it, I will. It’s congested, there are no shoulders, and it’s just not that nice to look at, either. If you start at my house and take Central all the way to Schenectady, it’s a shade over 14 miles one way. I plotted out a different course, though, and it turned out to be a lovely ride.

Rather than Central, I started out on Sand Creek Road, which goes from Albany to Colonie, past Colonie High School and the Colonie Center Mall. I stayed on Sand Creek until it ended at Watervliet Shaker Road, which is also Routes 155 and 157. I stayed on that road until it became Consaul Road, and that took me right to State Street in Schenectady. It was a beautiful ride. Lots of trees, a fair amount of open farmland, wide shoulders most of the way and relatively few cars. And it’s just over a mile further than the direct route down Central Ave. I made the 15-ish miles in an hour and 20 minutes on the Packet Boat (Xtracycle). The temperature was perfect for the ride — just below 70 degrees by the time I arrived in Schenectady. I wasn’t really even sweating, which was nice, because I did the ride in my work clothes.

After the site visit, I cycled down to Schenectady’s Little Italy, where a co-worker had recommended Perreca’s Bakery. I got some capicola, salami and turket, fresh bread and two slices of delicious homemade pizza. I ate the pizza at the outdoor tables next to the bakery, basking in the sun and the light breeze, then loaded up the goodies in the Packet Boat and set off along the reverse route back to Albany. It was another peaceful and exhilarating ride — if you can describe something as both “peaceful” and “exhilarating.”

Jen and the boys are visiting from Rochester. We had lunch at Richfield Park today, and all four of us got there on two bikes. Bernie rode on the deck of the Packet Boat (Xtracycle), and John was strapped into one of the Freeloader bags. Jen rode my Raleigh Sprite, because her new bike is still in Rochester. It was a gorgeous day — over 70 degrees, a light breeze, blue sky. We took a picnic lunch with us and enjoyed every minute of the ride and the lunchtime.

We also rode over to the Down Tube bike shop on Madison and got a new Trek bike for Bernie. His old bike was falling apart, and he needed to step up to something a bit older. His Trek is a 20″ bike with both a coaster break and a rear brake on the handlebar. We all rode home through Washington Park. A cyclist named Casey rode up beside us and said, “Nice trailer. Hey wait, that’s not a trailer, is it? That’s awesome.”

When we got home, Jen asked Bernie if he liked his new bike. “I don’t like it,” he said. “I love it.”

Even better, John actually fell asleep while strapped into the Packet Boat. He slept most of the way home from the bike shop, still holding onto one of the straps with one hand. It was just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Maybe he’ll be a sailor. I’ve heard they can sleep while holding onto the rigging.

I had a nice chat with a guy named Jim who cycles as his main transportation. He rides a Bridgestone MB1 from about 20 years ago. He was admiring the Packet Boat outside my “satellite office,” the Muddy Cup on Madison. I also ran into Fred at the Down Tube. He was the guy I met at the end of my driveway last night while I was taking my inaugural GlowMotion 08 ride. “Nice to see you in daylight,” he said.

Jen commented last night that people are quite friendly here. As far as the cycling community is concerned, I’ve got to say I agree.