Instead of biking TO work, then, today I tossed the bike in the back of my car and took it with me. There’s a Subway about a mile and a half away from the office that we go to at least twice a week, and sometimes three times a week. Why drive? Today, I biked to lunch instead of driving. It only takes about 10 minutes longer than driving, and while it’s not exactly a massive undertaking, any little bit helps. Three miles of exercise is certainly greater than the zero exercise I was averaging before.

Now the task shifts into finding restaurants that are the optimal distance away. Google doesn’t really have the capacity to give you search results for “restaurants at least three miles away from point XYZ,” so it took a bit of creative guesswork to find some likely candidates. Unless I remember to lug the bike home on Fridays, this means I won’t be able to do any recreational rides on the weekend–but considering I’ve only done two of those in the last 5 months, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

In my mind, practically all the reasons you’d want to own a house instead of rent an apartment lie in the back yard: a grill, a small garden, and space for a dog to run around during the day. With it being Memorial Day weekend, I couldn’t wait any longer to knock item #1 off my list. I’m from Atlanta, birthplace of the Big Green Egg–and my dad has had one for probably 10 years now. They’re expensive, but they pretty much blow all the other grills I’ve seen out of the water. I was lucky to find a BGE store locally (the aptly named Eggs by the Bay). The BGE corporate website listed a few distributors that were closer to my new house in Redwood City, but for me it was worth it to drive a little further to give a sale to a small business. The extra driving was rewarded, incidentally. The owner had the large Egg I wanted, but but not the large-sized table for it. He was nice enough to loan me a nest (basically metal legs for the grill) until he could get the table in–plus a few days to allow me to paint and lacquer the new table. I sincerely doubt that any large specialty retailer would’ve been willing to do the same. The Eggs by the Bay store is actually having a sale later in the summer for gently used demo eggs (basically used for their one-day barbecue festival), but forgoing any grilling for an entire month+ just to save $100 or so wasn’t quite worth it for me. Besides, my economic stimulus check was burning a hole in my pocket (though that only covered about half of it…).

Though I keep telling myself not to make frivolous purchases, this is a product I’m so familiar with that it’s a necessary luxury. While I don’t like gas grills at all, I probably could’ve made do for the first summer with just a little Weber for $100 or so. Those tiny little grills are best suited for hamburgers and hotdogs, though, and having a real cooker out back sort of opens up the arsenal of what I can grill. At least that’s what I’ll be telling myself all summer long. I did a Boston Butt on it the night we got it home, then hotdogs + burgers + corn for a crowd of around twenty on Memorial Day.
With around $1300 worth of grill/table sitting on my back patio now, though, talking myself into my next big purchase is going to be an even tougher sell. When I first moved to California and started my new job, my apartment was 4 miles from my office. I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was around eight years old, so four miles seemed pretty intimidating at the time. In the end, though, I talked myself out of an electric (it was ONLY 4 miles…), grabbed a cheapo off of craigs list, and dove right in. It was such a success that I upgraded bikes in a few weeks and continued biking in to work a few times a week… until I busted my ankle back in January. The ankle was just getting healed enough to ride in again (okay, it was probably good enough about a month before that) for me to bike in to work one last time before moving. I’ve done some weekend biking since we moved, but the commute (now 9 miles, with a few fairly steep grades) is just a little too intimidating. Even at four miles, I’d come in drenched in sweat. If only there were a way to take that 9 mile one-way commute and shrink it down…

The first thing I did was check out CalTrain. The Redwood City station is around 3 miles from the house, and the San Antonio station is around three miles from the office. Six miles each way isn’t so bad–especially with an 18 minute break in between. Solid plan, then… but wait. Though the two stations are only two stops apart, they cross zones… which means it’s a $4 ticket each way. So instead of an 18-mile round trip by car (just under one gallon of gas at around $4) which takes around 15 minutes each way, the commute is now a multi-leg affair which costs twice as much, takes around three times as long, and makes me a slave to the Caltrain schedules. I’m a big fan of public transportation, but clearly this wasn’t the solution in my particular case.

And that’s where all my prior research into electric bikes really came in handy. Having already invested $600 or so into a bike and getting very comfy with it, I wasn’t super-keen on buying a second bike just for commuting. My girlfriend and I go on weekend bike rides when possible, so I wanted to be able to use the bike as a normal bike without having 50 lbs of electronics all over it. After re-reading all the stuff I read when I first decided NOT to buy an electric, I think I’ve settled on the bionX kit, which a local eBike evangelist sells through his shop just a little ways down the bay. It’s pricey (~$1500 for the PL350), but it’s incredibly light (~15 lbs.) and has regenerative breaking. When looking at the stats on these things, I have to pretty much throw all the distance metrics out the window. I’m pretty sure they do their “performance” testing with guys who are 5′8 and 150 lbs riding a performance bike with slick tires on flat terraion, while I’m closer to 6′3 and 235 lbs riding a not-aerodynamic cruising bike with fat tires on hilly terrain. They claim 28 miles on the greatest assistance level, but I’d be thrilled with half that (I could always recharge at work if I had to). The bionX kit also has a regenerative training feature, which means you can actually crank the friction up and recharge the battery while getting a better workout. This seems ideal for commuting–I can crank up the pedal-assist as high as it will go for the commute TO work, which will hopefully keep me mostly stink-free (if not, I’m going to bug the gym down the street for a shower-only membership). After work, I can not only pedal unassisted the whole way home… I can actually crank up the difficulty to make it as much of a workout as I want. The best thing about it, basically, is how many options you have. I used to average around 10 mph based on my own output, so if this thing can effectively double that I should be able to get to work in about the same amount of time I was doing before.
I guess it’s pretty obvious that I’ve already sold myself on getting one. My inner financier will probably be successful in holding my inner gadget-nerd off for another month or so, though, just so I can really decide if I’m buying it because I really want to bike to work or if the purchase of the Big Green Egg has kicked off some sort of crazy high-dollar spending spree.

Once we got there, though, we found that we could’ve started working on it weeks ahead of time. Whoops. Undeterred, we stayed up all night programming Bike vs Car. This was an idea that I had a couple of weeks ago (after riding my bike for a couple of weeks). I’d like to ride even more than I have been, but motivation has been a little lacking (some days). When I do ride, though, I tend to hop on Facebook to update my status to something like: “I just biked to work!”

I figured I might not be the only one to do that sort of thing (and since FB is still mostly colege students, biking to class is certainly an option), so it might make a great application. I went ahead and registered the bikevscar domain and then just put it on the list of things I wanted to do. The BarCamp seemed like the perfect excuse.

After we got back from the speakers, we spent a few hours reading up on the Facebook API. Eventually we decided to create our app as a standalone, get it working decently, and then integrate with facebook afterwards. I talked my friend into trying out Ruby on Rails, so I spent a little while configuring the server while she did a couple of tutorials. At around 1 a.m, we actually started programming. I did most of the database and backend stuff while she did most of the HTML and CSS (thank goodness… I hate CSS). We got a reasonable facsimile of a social network put together by presentation time (2:00 p.m.), but didn’t actually get any of the facebook integration done (other than loading a splash screen).

The judging was completely crowd-based, and I think we did a pretty good job of selling not just we’d completed–but where the app could go. We won 1st place. The prize was basically a lot of Java merchandise, a bunch of free programming books, and a few other cool things. The fact that we were able to sell a bunch of people on the app tells me it might have some potential if we ever finish it.

Basically, Bike vs Car is a personal tracking application. Rather than focus on other users, our target user is someone who wants to motivate themselves to ride their bike more often. This isn’t necessarily targeted to the spandex-clad guys on $2000 bikes you see riding to work (motivation doesn’t seem to be a problem with them). This will be a tool for the rest of us. There are several major components to the application:

USERS. We allow users to upload a picture, but we don’t really get any info other than their zip code (which we can then use to calculate average gas prices). Because we’re targeting the site for Facebook, we can just graft our functionality into their already robust inter-user network… and we get to focus on just the functionality we want.

VEHICLES. Though there are many types of vehicles, we’re only supporting the two namesakes for now: bikes and cars. Users can upload a picture of their vehicle, list the make and model, give it a name, and (if applicable) enter what kind of gas mileage they get.

ROUTES. Google maps recently added a great feature. You can get directions from one place to another, alter the route as you wish, and then hit “Save this Route.” Rather than just giving you a link (which has been around forever), they now offer you several different sizes of pre-configured embed code to place the map on your own site. So, rather than scrape Google maps ourselves, we just allow the users to post in the embed code for their route, then give the route a name/description and list the mileage.

Users, Vehicles, and Routes. These are the three essential “nouns” for Bike vs Car. The majority of interaction, though, will come from keeping track of which vehicles you take on which routes. To be fair, not every trip you make is a good candidate for a bike ride. We’re encouraging people to only keep track of trips they make that are ~3-5 miles (or less), with only the driver in the car, and where it’s not going to make much of a difference if they show up a little sweaty.

Once you make one of these trips (on a bike or in a car), the users would then log in to our site (or Facebook, which most of them do already). They would be presented with a list of their most common routes (Work, School, Grocery Store) with bike and car icons next to each. Clicking on one will add a tally-mark for that week. The goal (which will likely be rewarded with some sort of token) will be to choose the bike more often than the car (>50%) for a given week. Based on the MPG of your car, the length of your routes, and the area where you live, we’ll be able to generate an estimate of both how much money you’ve saved by biking and how much carbon you’ve spared the environment.

This is something I would find valuable as a standalone application, but making it a Facebook application is even better. Not only would a user be able to track their own bike usage, they’d be able to track how their group of friends are doing. Or how their network is doing. Or how the entire facebook community is doing. Furthermore, instead of logging in to Facebook to update my status, Bike vs Car could automagically create feed events whenever I bike to work (or let me enter an excuse for why I didn’t).

After spending almost 12 hours straight on it, we’ve got a pretty decent prototype in place. The 1st finish place sort of vets the fact people might go for this, so now it’s just a matter of finding some more time to work on it.

I’ll make sure to bring my sunglasses next time, though.

1. I needed to drop my girlfriend off at the train station (at least one of us took eco-friendly transportation to work).
2. My legs were pretty tired last night.
3. I wanted to have enough energy to go rock climbing after work.

Even 3/5 (not sure what I’m going to be doing Friday) seems like an awfully good start, though.

So after trudging home a mile and a half (thank goodness I wore real shoes!), I was already half an hour later to work than I intended to be.  After dropping off the remains of my poor bike, grabbing some Gatorade, and switching into comfier shoes (yay flip flops), I was off to work.  I got it at around 10:40… and was still the first one here.  My lone co-worker arrived 10 minutes later.

I think $30 investment in the decade-old bike has paid all its going to pay.  This weekend I think I’ll hit the bike shop and get a real bike–and one that’s more comfortable and specifically fitted to me.

There were a couple of almost-wobble-into-traffic incidents, a couple of almost-fall-over incidents, and a somewhat frightening 4-way-stop-with-turn-lanes incident. I didn’t bike the whole way. I probably walked 1/3 to 1/2 of the distance where the bike lanes were non-existent, but that ratio will probably shift more towards the bike front as I gain more confidence. I’m still pretty wobbly, but it’s kind of like kayaking or driving. If you focus too much on what’s right in front of you, you’re going to wobble a lot more. If you focus a hundred feet in front of you, it’s a lot easier to go straight.

The bike I got off craigslist is a road bike, and it’s got some kind of abrasive grip tape wrapped all around the handel-bars. Leaning on that for as long as I did, my hands are by far the sorest thing on me. Followed closely by my poor ass. Third would be the feet–the new shoes are great for biking, but not made for walking. On my right calf, I’ve got a nasty scrape from where I rammed the left pedal into the back of my leg while walking the bike through some construction. And, to top it off, is the general fatigue from biking 7.2 miles when I haven’t exercised in a couple of months.

All in all, I’d call the bike-to-work experiment a rousing success!

The first thing I did to it (last week) was take off the little foot holsters. I’m prooobably not going to ride it with flip flops on, but those things bug the heck out of me anyway. I had to go to Gilroy over the weekend to do some outlet mall shopping (I got to watch college football all day Saturday, so in return I agreed to take The Girlfriend to Gilroy). While there, I got a new pair of slip-on shoes from Bass. They’re amphibious, too, which is a good perk for when I go kayaking. Mostly, though, I figured they’d be easier to put on than tennis shoes… and more safe to ride a bike with than my flip flops.
Since its purchase and foot-holster-removal, though, the bike has been sitting on the back porch. I was too busy to give it a test-spin over the weekend, and I haven’t been getting home until after dark. I leave for Greece next Thursday morning, and after that my plan is to bike to work every day (well, every day that it’s not pouring down rain–which hasn’t happened yet). So that leaves me with seven days (counting today) to practice. Yikes!

I took the thing out to the parking lot this morning, debating whether I wanted to do a trial-by-fire or practice a bit first. Let’s just say I was… shaky. Way shaky. It came back a little bit, but I was never exactly Lance Armstrong (or even that kid down the street who rides around while saying “Look ma, no hands!”) in the first place. After doing a few laps around the lot, I was starting to feel a little bit better–but still skeptical of making it the 3.5 miles to work. Yes, I know…3.5 miles is super easy… when I use the exercise bike I routinely hit 8-10 miles in half an hour. But the exercise bike doesn’t wobble. And you don’t have to worry about getting hit by a bread truck. And–most surprisingly–you don’t need any arm strength. After doing laps around the parking lot for 15 minutes, the thing I found most shocking was just how much I had to support myself with my arms. To be fair, this is probably due to the fact that (1) it’s a road bike, which means it has the weird horseshoe handelbars, and (2) it’s probably a little too small for me, as the seat is jacked up quite a bit higher than the handlebars (and the all-important breaks).

I was saved from making my do-or-die ride-to-work choice by the fact that the seat was so old it had rotted through and the leather broke. So I’ll be heading back to the bike shop after work for a new seat… or maybe a cheapy from WalMart.