Cass in A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend is a cyclist. Me, not so much, especially in high school. Raleigh, North Carolina, has its share of cyclists, and on weekends you can see spandex-clad packs zooming down the sides of highways. But it’s a city that’s built for cars. Big houses on big lots, strip malls, cul-de-sacs. There wasn’t so much as a gas station within two miles from my house, and it was seventeen miles to high school… seventeen miles on the bus, even when I was a senior. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 25.

The freedom that I wanted, when I was in high school, was nothing more than the freedom to go to the mall, the bookstore, the library, without waiting for a parent to be able to shuttle me around.

It wasn’t until I went to grad school in Chapel Hill, NC that I fell in love with cycling. They had a pretty good bus system, and I used it a lot… well, that was the year I broke my arm and then my ankle, so I had to. On my bike, I could get to school! I could get to the grocery store! I could get to the mall, sometimes, though it was five miles away and up a really steep hill!

There’s this new blog I’ve been reading, Amsterdamize. It’s trying to raise these questions of how we can integrate bikes into our daily lives, so that they’re not just a fun weekend toy for people who like to wear spandex, but a valid method of transportation, for running errands, for going to school, for going to work. In a lot of cities, that’s really hard to do because of the sprawl or the bad bike lanes or just the attitudes of drivers towards cyclists. But rolling down a hill with the wind in my face is one of the best things in the world. It’s good for me, it’s good for the environment… so why not try to move towards a world where that’s easier, and safer, and more convenient?