The Greatest Inventions of the Past 100 Years

Antibiotics. Solar energy. Rock 'n' roll. And, of course, urban bike trails.

I count myself a lucky man this time of year because I always take a couple of days off around my birthday and bike all over town. I feel lucky not only because I was born into the glorious warmth of June, but because I live a short ride away from one of the best network of urban bike trails in the country.

Leaving my door in Minneapolis last week, I was soon pedaling around Lake Harriet, along Minnehaha Creek, past a waterfall made famous by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and through the forested Mississippi River gorge.

In the midst of a metropolitan area of 3 million people, I felt like I was deep in the woods. Then, ready for some cosmopolitan excitement and a good lunch, I headed into the bustling downtowns of Minneapolis or St. Paul on scenic riverfront trails free of auto traffic. And when it came time for dinner with my family, I hightailed it home on one of several old railroad lines converted to bicycle expressways.

With a couple more days off I could have cruised on trails all the way to the rolling countryside of rural Minnesota -- past the suburbs sprawling far west of Minneapolis or east of St. Paul -- hardly ever mixing it up with traffic on city streets.

This stellar system of bike trails is great not just for recreational rides -- it's boosted biking so much that Minneapolis now trails only Portland in commuters who travel to work on two wheels. Since we are famous for our brutal winters, this fact surprises almost everyone. Yet I bike all winter for work and for fun, and can attest that bike paths are busy on all but the most severe below-zero days.

Building urban bike paths is becoming a trend across the continent. Indianapolis, a city most known mostly for racecars, is constructing the ambitious eight-mile Cultural Trail bike and pedestrian greenway right through the center of the city. Davis, California has been serious about bike trails and bike lanes since the 1960s, and now boasts that 17 percent of its commuters travel by bike -- a number that is certainly rising with advent of four-buck-a-gallon gas. Boulder, Colorado devotes as much as 15 percent of its transportation budget to bicycle priorities.

To learn more about urban bike trails, which also are wonderful for walkers and skaters, check out the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and Walk and Bike for Life.

Comments

[SeenItBefore]

It's a good thing - -bike trails. I used a ten-speed as principal transportation as an undergraduate in Austin and as a graduate in Los Angeles in the late sixties and early seventies. And it packed wonderful benefits - a cheeseburger and a beer provided a full gut and fuel for a couple of hours, and a complete aerobic workout every time I left the house.

Approaching retirement, I still ride, just not to work. But I think a better use of the retired rail lines would be to reclaim them and install light commuter rail. Then you could ride a bike to the station and mass commute great distances to work.

[dawlishgal]

As an ex-Minnesotan one who grew up in Minneapolis, I would be afraid to go anywhere there on a bike (even the bike trails) . I have NEVER lived in any place that was so lax about enforcing pedestrians' rights. The only (partially) SAFE way to cross a street there was against the light because at least that way one doesn't have to worry about what might be coming around the corner. But doing that was to court a ticket from the cops.

I spent some time in CA, where pedestian protection laws were actually enforced to the point that drivers were careful , and in the first weeks after my return I can't count the number of times I was almost hit., always with lights in my favor or in marked pedestrian crosswalks.

Even in small town MN (where we lived up until a year ago), marked crosswalks meant NADA. Drivers just don't stop for pedestrians because they don't have to, and they have the big dangerous vehicle, so what is a pedestrian to do?

There is a general feeling there that unless you have a car, you are expendable, and that if you don't want to be run over, then you had better stay on your own side of the street.