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Bike Commuting: Day in the Life of a Devout Bike Commuter
Bike Commuting
For Dave Kingsbury, the trip to the office is as much a reason to work as the paycheck.
ByJoe Lindsey
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Most people judge a good commute by how smoothly it passes. My friend Dave Kingsbury uses different measures: seeing the pasqueflowers bloom one switchback higher on the trail each day in the spring, or having calm water for the canoe portion of the trip. Colorado's Front Range has long been home to people who, like Dave, choose to live in the natural beauty of the foothills. But the price they pay for living in paradise is a hideous commute to work in Denver or Boulder. Dave's 26-mile drive involves a precipitous descent on partly unpaved mountain roads, and then a crawl across Boulder in heavy traffic to nearby Gunbarrel, where he's a cognitive anthropologist for advertising firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky. One way, it's easily 45 minutes in good weather and more than an hour of white-knuckle driving in bad. But Dave doesn't drive; at least, not often.

Instead of drudgery, each commute is an adventure. He's linked together dozens of routes to and from work, all the while relishing the way clouds get bright, puffy edges on cold mornings or the sight of 70 elk running through a field, moments he chronicles in a blog ( "It brings a level of intimacy I'm not sure how you'd get otherwise," he says. Last year, to capture spring, he took a photo every morning in May of the same meadow.
Dave's been commuting by bike (or skis) at least three days a week, year-round, since he moved to the foothills west of Boulder in 1990. And while advocates love to make the case for bike commuting by listing its many benefits--improving health, saving money and helping the environment, for example--those weren't the reasons Dave decided to start commuting by bike. "It was a sanity thing," he says. Eighteen years and four jobs later, it still is.

Life at CP+B is the typical big-agency routine: long hours, lots of stress. Shimano is a client, as are Volkswagen North America and Burger King. "This place is insane," Dave says. "It goes 24/7." Ad agency work, like most jobs, involves frustrating setbacks: plans change, projects get killed, months of hard work are lost. "You can work your ass off on something and there are a hundred factors you can't control," he says. Riding's simplicity counters that: "You pedal and you get there."

Commuting, for Dave, is a filter that diffuses life's trials, large and small. "I'll go through 12 different states of mind on the ride," he says. "By the time I get home, I'm in a very different place." One night, he arrived home to find his wife, Shenna, "ready to kill someone" after an afternoon of watching two neighbor kids and their own two-year-old, Quinn. "I walked in, cracked a beer and took Quinn up to the bath for an hour," he says. "That's heaven. If I'd driven, I couldn't do that. I'd still be stressed from work."

Sometimes, the commute dispels stress through sheer effort. After particularly rough days, Dave often finds himself charging across town at top speed for no reason; he has plenty of time to catch the bus he uses for part of his ride home. Most of the time, though, the trip is slower paced, with deliberate meanders--to a meadow filled with flowers, or a rocky outcrop where he can watch the sunset. He also devises more creative journeys, like the canoe-and-bike commute he calls the Canute.

Dave admits that his commute can be a source of stress sometimes--dressing properly for subzero days, for example--but even these experiences give him perspective. Office politics, a challenge at many workplaces, are "just annoying," he says. "But double flatting and pushing my bike home through 5 inches of snow, that's hard."



Banish boredom by taking the long way home.

The Canute is a hybrid commute—Dave Kingsbury rides to Gross Reservoir, paddles his bike across in a canoe and then descends Flagstaff Mountain to Boulder. It started as a lark with a friend who lives on the other side of the reservoir. "Christian can get lost in a paper bag, so I'd describe a place to meet for the ride and he wouldn't show up," says Dave. But Christian owned a canoe (the S.S. Bottomrider, which nearly sank on its maiden Canute) and they could meet at water's edge. It's now a treasured routine, with a new boat (the Winona Ride-her).

One day last July, I joined Dave for the return leg of the Canute. We rode through Boulder, chatting. Conversation turned sparse on the 45-minute climb up Flagstaff Mountain. Just past the summit, a summer squall dumped rain. We took shelter in a thicket of brush as Dave snapped photos of the water cascading down the road. When the rain lightened, we continued on to the water, packed the bikes in the canoe, a disassembly that Dave now has down to a science, and paddled off. At the center of the reservoir, we took a break and I pulled two bottles of beer out of my pack. He produced a sandwich he'd brought as a similar surprise. We were alone on the lake; the only sound was a distant airliner passing overhead. We finished the beer and picked up our paddles. It would be getting dark soon.

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You forgot to mention what I think is one of the most important safety devices in traffic: a rear-view mirror, preferably helmet-mounted. When you hear that dump truck lumbering up behind you, you can instantly see what's going on with just a slight motion of the head. Handlebar-mounted mirrors are better than nothing, but I find they jiggle around too much, and don't give you the same view as a helmet-mounted mirror. I always ride with my mirror. If I don't I feel half blind,directorul and that makes me very nervous in traffic. And while the Madison maneuver mentioned in the article might work for the pros, I've found in over 25 years of riding that it's dangerous because many riders, even some experienced ones, simply can't hold a line. The bike goes where their head goes, and in traffic that can be fatal.