Where the Rubber meets the Road

By Peter Alstone

This is a short story about riding bikes with kids, and more specifically about the challenges of making good transportation decisions as a parent.

Being a professional energy geek makes me acutely aware of the resource implications of personal choices, and one of the most important is how you decide to travel around town.  Over half the greenhouse gas emissions in Berkeley are from cars and trucks.  We all want to do the right thing and for me this means riding bikes and buses as much as possible.  But what happens when you have a kid who needs to travel with you?

As a parent of a preschooler and an infant, I can attest that first of all, my car gets a lot more use than it otherwise would.  When we need to make a quick trip somewhere beyond walking distance as a family the car is really the only way to go.  The bus can work sometimes but it takes longer in almost every case, and time is a very precious commodity for any graduate student, and particularly parents.  It turns out little kids can be impatient too...imagine that. 

Luckily, having a good bike setup can really help us get back on two wheels.  We use a trailer to haul around our son (the preschooler).  As a bonus, the trailer is a trunk for grocery runs and provides great resistance training.  I tend to agree with people who think trailers are good from a safety perspective too (at least compared to seats on the back of bikes).  That said, it is sometimes harrowing to dive into rush hour traffic with my kid in tow.  The bus is better this way (or back to the car). 

A hipster station wagon

Soon though, our son will be too big for the trailer and not big enough to keep up (or watch out for traffic).  As the late cycling luminary Sheldon Brown describes it, an awkward phase for family biking.  Maybe we'll try a follow-along type contraption. 

Why go through all this headache?  The fun answer is that riding bikes and buses is a much more fulfilling way to get around town than a car and my kids like it to boot.  We stop to check things out on the side of the road (like construction equipment) and take new routes to our destinations when it strikes us.  Parking is never a problem.  When we ride the bus or BART (public train), it is an opportunity to sit and talk about whatever is going on without worrying about traffic and speed limits.  Plus, our son has an ongoing obsession with the different varieties of buses and enjoys pointing out the subtle differences between them (his categories: "New" Gillig Buses, Hydrogen buses, "long" buses—those with a bend in the middle, "line" buses—the old style that have lines painted on the sides, and "normal" buses—the most common Van Hool buses that AC Transit runs). 

The more serious answer about why to bother with bikes and kids comes in two parts.  First goes back to the drive to make good personal choices when it comes to resources and transportation. Second is setting the right kind of example for my children.  Having them grow up with bikes and buses can't hurt when it comes to the way they choose to travel later in life.

I know that adding two folks to the population of our planet will lead to some incremental increase in consumption, and some of my environmentalist friends have chosen to drop out of the reproduction business altogether for that reason.  To me that line of thinking doesn't jive (a cartoon version of the implications were hilariously presented in Idiocracy).  I'm an optimist about the future and instead of using birth control to completely eliminate my families future environmental impact, I'll make sure they know how to ride their bikes.  Instead of rubbers, meet the road. 

Cross-posted on Peter's site.