Do you bike in an urban locale?
I've been hamstrung (literally) since moving to Cleveland, although the hamstring is recovering nicely now that I'm finally seeing a physical therapist. I probably should have done that months ago, but the deductible on my medical plan isn't that low and I'd been postponing it hoping things would heal on their own. Darn medical system. Thus I haven't biked a lot in my current city.
But I have a little bit. There's a nice arts-and-entertainment area about 40 blocks west (blocks are small here, also about 40 minutes' walk) that I can get to on residential and low-traffic streets, or via a significantly hillier and longer-distance bike path. Both are pretty safe and easy routes (when not injured). I've walked there and I've biked there. Even hamstrung, it felt safe on both routes, though I preferred the flat street route while injured.
The next neighborhood southeast is also best accessed by bike, with bike lanes along the route. Its parking is limited, there's a bus but you have to pay attention to the route timings if you don't want to be waiting for it, and it's about a half-hour-to-forty-minute walk one way - doable, but biking makes the distance much more reasonable. I plan to visit there much more next year when my knee is healthy.
Downtown is easily accessed by public transit. I usually take the train, sometimes I take the bus home. Once a week or so I walk home. It's also bikeable though, there are bike lanes on the bridges to downtown, although bike parking once you get downtown is not necessarily as plentiful as one would hope. Still, I hope to occasionally bike to work next year. Our new office will have on-site bike parking, unlike our current one, which will help.
My bike is a manual hybrid bike. I bought it for recreational purposes, and biked over 1000 miles per year on it, recreationally, form 2021 through 2023. I can see the benefit of e-bikes on those rides where I misoverestimated my stamina or in a hilly urban setting, but for what I bought it for, the exercise is one of the main side benefits (the exploration and the endorphins are the main benefits).
A road bike would be more practical in the city, but for fun I prefer trail riding, including unpaved trails, mainly crushed limestone. I even take my bike on mountain bike trails from time to time, and while it can't handle the really gnarly ones, it is passable on a fair number of them. And for that mixed use case (and without storage space for multiple bikes), a hybrid is the perfect jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none.
In Cleveland, at least on the near west side and downtown where I am the most? Actually yes. You don't want to be on the main throughfares, but there are plenty of much lower-traffic side streets that are good, safe alternatives, and there are decent-size bike lanes on the main throughfares that are occasionally required, like the bridges across the river.
In Columbus? No, unless you can get where you're going via one of the recreational trails (which is a pretty decent network but not focused on practical destinations). They did finally add one protected bike lane, many years after the much smaller nearby town of Xenia, Ohio, but too many practical routes depend on travel along highly trafficked roads. I'll explore downtown Columbus by bike in the middle of the workday when traffic volumes are low, but close to rush hour or when events are going on? Forget about it.
You also have to watch out for the urban deer in Columbus. They like the bike trails, especially near the river on the north side of town, but I've seen a few on the south side too. They're friendly but if anything a bit overly trusting.
The safest city I've experienced for urban biking is New York City. I didn't expect that at all but I felt about 50 times as safe while biking there, as a newcomer to the city, as I had in Columbus. The dedicated infrastructure and the fact that motorists are familiar with bicycles makes a
huge difference.
Is your city working to accommodate bikes and buses as many US cities are finally starting to do?
Cleveland is doing a pretty decent job of it. They've built out a workable system of bike lanes and made sure they're wide enough that you aren't afraid you'll be clipped. They've also built out a decent network of recreational trails (some of which take you places that are practical as well as recreational), and are exploring two different "midway" bike routes that would add dedicated two-way bike lanes in under-utilized roads, similar to what New York City has done on some streets. They've done a respectable job for a city that until recently was facing continually-shrinking population and economic resources. In a way that lower-urban-density situation has helped them by letting some side streets by good alternatives even without dedicated infrastructure investment.
Columbus passed a levy last month that includes hundreds of millions of dollars for bike trails and lanes and sidewalks (and even more than that for busses). So yes, they are finally taking multi-modal transit seriously. But that only takes them to on-par-with-Cleveland multi-modal transit funding after decades of being behind, so it'll take years, probably decades, for the infrastructure to close the gap.
Thus, in the meantime, Cleveland also has a major advantage in that it's pretty realistic to bike for part of your route somewhere and take the bus or train for another part of it. I saw someone doing that this morning, biking to the train station, hopping on the train with her bike, and possibly biking to her final destination after departing the train. A lot of U.S. cities don't have good enough public transit for that sort of multi-modal trip to be feasible, but in a lot of areas in Cleveland proper, that is feasible.
Could you outrun police if you assassinated a morally bankrupt CEO?
Oddly, that is a question that I'd never considered before today.
Can you go faster than local car drivers?
After a baseball game, probably.
The funny thing is since I have only driven to work once since I moved here (on the day my car was at the mechanic), I don't have a good sense for how fast local cars travel at rush hour. But perhaps because public transit is fairly good, with busses and trains, my impression is that traffic is fairly light for a city of Cleveland's size. Thus I doubt I could outpace the typical driver leaving downtown after rush hour.
