A bicycle-friendly city needs to have fun rides and convenience in using a bicycle for utility purposes. The nice thing about Casa Solana, on the north side of Santa Fe, is you can ride a city bike half a mile in street clothing and do one's shopping in a bike basket at La Montanita or Albertson's. One can also hightail it outa town in two minutes on the road racer (not that I can even outsprint a jelly donut any more) and have some awesome riding north of town, which is one of the things I have been doing some rubber to the road research on lately.
Where Los Alamos excels is that one can ride a bike on any of our streets and not be in mortal danger. That is due to low traffic, generally high levels of motorist compliance (when half the town has a security clearance, there is less overt violence), and adequate capacity even at rush hour. Where it has shortcomings is that due to the topography (narrow mesas with deep canyons in between), the food co-op that is a mile from my house as the crow flies is on the other side of a deep canyon, and is seven and a half miles by bike or car. Short of a multi-million dollar suspension bridge or a catapult, it is a serious haul on the utility bike. Santa Fe is more compact, as I said above. Furthermore, it is working madly to create bypass urban trails for bikes because many of its roads do put one in real and perceived mortal danger, thanks to bad "stroad" design (well, that is redundant: is there such a thing as "good" stroad design?) by the State Dept. of Transportation and its car-centric friends in the City Not All That Different.
When designing a bike friendly community, one has to play the cards one is dealt and I think both Bombtown and The City Sorta Different are trying to do that, given that politics constrains the options. But the bottom line is that the riding, as well as utility bicycling, don't get much better than this, as shown in the pics below.
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| Looking west towards the Rio Grande Rift on Tano West Road I suspect these rollers are downdropped fault blocks |
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| Looking kinda north on Tano Norte road, riding into rift features |
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| Riding the half mile to the La Montanita food co-op by way of Rio Vista. Helmet optional |
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