About Me
A Little Background
I officially began commuting by bicycle on June 19th, 2000. I haven’t kept detailed statistics, but I would estimate that >95% of my trips under 10 miles (each way) in the past eight years have been by bicycle. I can say with greater certainty that I put approximately 3000 miles per year on my bike, which is roughly the same as – or a bit more than – the total annual miles I drive in my car. (At least half of my automobile miles are for trips either out of or across town. The rest have to do with groceries or safely transporting a toddler in traffic. I sometimes do these by bike, as well.)
My bicycle usage is almost entirely pragmatic – it’s a practical way for me to get from point A to point B. I only rarely ride for purely recreational purposes. I have never done a bike tour – not even Cycle Oregon. I’ve never ridden the Seattle to Portland. I’ve never been in any sort of bicycle competition, from races to bike polo to jousting, all of which are practiced in Portland. I’ve never participated in a Critical Mass ride. I’ve never Zoobombed or gravity biked, although I was involved in the infamous Chinese Dragon pile-up during the Adult Soapbox Derby of ‘04. I haven’t done the Worst Day of the Year Ride, but I did do the Midsummer Night Ride one year. I’ve never ridden in the Providence Bridge Pedal. I’ve gone screaming down the fire lanes in Forest Park exactly once. (My heart rate still hasn’t returned to normal, and that was thirteen years ago.)
I am, at best, a mediocre athlete. I learned to ride on a BMX bike at age six. In my teens, I moved up to a ten-speed. At sixteen, I got my driver’s license and biked a lot less. (Regular – leaded – gasoline for my 1972 Volvo 144E was then 97 cents a gallon.) In college, I bought a 21-speed mountain bike. In May of 2000, in preparation for my move to bike commuting, I bought my first recumbent bicycle – a BikeE AT. That bike was destroyed in October 2004, and with the insurance settlement, I bought a Maxarya Ray-1x – the most similar new bike I could find to replace the BikeE, whose manufacturer had sadly gone out of business in 2002.
Over the last eight years, I’ve logged about 22,000 miles (that’s around 770,000 calories – more than a year’s worth of food on a typical 2000 calorie/day diet), mostly commuting between SE Portland and downtown, with occasional jaunts elsewhere in the city. I bike fifty-two weeks a year, in every type of weather except for freezing rain*, which is nature’s way of telling you to stay inside. 
Portland makes a continual effort to build bicycle-friendly infrastructure. There are many excellent organizations here that support and promote bicycling. There are only a very few days each year on which the weather makes cycling treacherous. If you live in the U.S. and you want to commute by bicycle year-round, you could hardly pick a better city to live in.
*BTW, “freezing rain” is not very, very cold rain. This refers to conditions when precipitation occurs during a temperature inversion such that the ground is below freezing but the atmosphere is above freezing. Thus, rain falls as liquid, then immediately freezes upon hitting the ground, glazing every surface with a thin, transparent layer of ice. (This is also known as an “ice storm”.) Longtime Portlanders are familiar with this phenomenon, but if you’ve moved here from an area of the world where this doesn’t happen, now you know about it. Only happens a couple times a year here in town, but when it does, it’s virtually impossible to walk on, let alone bike or drive.