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	Photo: Philip Kaake

PEDAL POWER

Your Ultimate Guide to Biking in Alameda

    The benefits of biking are undisputed. Bicyclists burn off calories; exercise their hearts, lungs and muscles; reduce their stress levels; and create less air, water and noise pollution. Alameda, moreover, is a great place for biking, thanks to flat terrain, ample bike routes and tons of biking resources. But even a biking paradise has its political and logistical bumps. Read on to learn of the good, the troubling and the downright difficult about bicycling in Alameda—i.e., have you tried to get to Oakland lately?

Top 10 Benefits of Biking in Alameda

1. You’ll strengthen your heart and lungs. Bicycling is considered one of the top ways of improving your cardiovascular fitness—and it can be done running errands or commuting to work, rather than heading to the gym. (Exercising in the course of daily life, by the way, is called “integrative fitness.” It saves time, it can save money and it’s very hip right now.)

2. You’ll tone your muscles. Bicycling is fabulous exercise for your lower body—including your quadricep, hamstring and butt muscles. Extra benefit: It’s low impact, which is great for boomers who are starting to feel pain while running or playing higher-impact sports.

3. You’ll see more sights. As you pedal along the beach or through Alameda’s residential neighborhoods, you’ll notice people, trees and beautiful houses. You may see a garden that inspires you, a cafe you had never noticed or the fog just lifting over the San Mateo Bridge. “I ride my bike around the lagoons on Bay Farm, and it’s just lovely,” says Joyce Mercado, a tech sales manager for IBM and mother of two, who lives and rides on the Island. “I see night herons, egrets, all sorts of good birds.”

4. You’ll emit less carbon. Just how much carbon your car emits depends on the make, the model and the year. But a rough guide for figuring out just how much bicycling helps the global warming situation is this: For every mile you bike instead of driving, you avoid putting 1 pound of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

5. You’ll create less air pollution. Short automobile trips (such as those we specialize in here in Alameda) cause the most pollution, because in cold engines, the catalytic converter does not function well. (The catalytic converter filters your car’s exhaust before it leaves the tailpipe.) The Worldwatch Institute estimates that a 4-mile bicycle trip prevents about 15 pounds of pollutants from pouring from your tail pipe into the air; the Clean Air Council has reported that motor vehicle emissions now represent 81 percent of the carbon monoxide and 49 percent of nitrogen oxides released in the United States. That makes using a bicycle a very green choice.

6. You’ll burn more calories. According to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, an adult burns about 350 calories while riding at an easy pace (5 mph) for an hour, or a whopping 600 calories while riding hard (13 mph).

7. You’ll have rosy cheeks. Whether it’s 40 degrees or 80 degrees, your face will have a healthy glow after even 20 minutes of riding.

8. You’ll feel young again. Go ahead and try it—it’s impossible to ride along Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach without feeling a sense of exhilaration.

9. Bike paths and bike lanes and sidewalks, oh, my! A number of major streets in Alameda have bike lanes, and fun, shortcut bike paths exist all over the Island. In fact, you can pedal all the way around Bay Farm Island—or all the way from the Bay Farm Bridge to Crab Cove—without being on a road (although the dirt path along the San Francisco Bay Trail can be a little
tough going).

10. You’ll reduce your stress levels. Joyce Mercado says that ditching her car for her bike allowed her to also ditch her Excedrin habit. “I used to get terrible headaches,” she says. “Now I hop on my bike and do a nice bike ride and feel way better. I even bike with friends to go have lunch.”

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Most Extreme Bad Places to Bike

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Bike Teams

     There are two bike organizations in Alameda. TeamAlameda, sponsored by Alameda Bicycle, is a cycling group that organizes both weekend group rides and formal races. Saturday morning rides meet at 8 a.m. at the Kaiser Permanente Alameda Medical Center at 2417 Central Ave., and then break into groups that want to ride 25, 40 or 50 miles (often up into the Oakland Hills, Orinda and beyond).
    The Sunday rides are for people who want to go shorter distances—say 10 to 15 miles. These meet at 9 a.m. on Sundays at Peet’s, 1111 Broadway. Both are “no-drop rides,” meaning no one gets left behind. And guess what? You don’t need fancy biking clothes to participate (although you do need to wear a helmet and you’ll have to sign a waiver of liability)! “All sorts of people show up on all sorts of bicycles,” says John McNulty, 63, a Kane & Associates real estate agent who grew up bicycling on the Island and started doing the TeamAlameda rides about two years ago. “I’m proud to be the slowest rider.” For more information, go to www.teamalameda.org.
    The other biking group is the nonprofit BikeAlameda, an advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage everyday use of the bicycle in and around Alameda. Instrumental in developing the Alameda Bicycle Master Plan, BikeAlameda is currently advocating for more bike racks on the Island and improvements to the Posey Tube bike lane. In addition, the group provides valet bike parking at community events, a bicycle and walking map of the Island, safety classes for adults and teens, an electronic newsletter with information on safe (and fun) biking tips, and a goldmine of a Web site (www.bikealameda.org) with information on safe bike routes, family biking safety and advocacy campaigns. For more info, check out the Web site or call (510) 595-4690.

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Bikers’ wish list

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Fun Bike Routes

    Alameda is blessed with bike lanes and bike paths. Streets with bike lanes (meaning designated lanes along streets) include Central Avenue, Broadway, Santa Clara (from Grand to Webster), Atlantic, Fernside and Encinal. For getting across town, avid cyclists recommend Pacific and San Jose avenues, where traffic tends to be light.
    For purely recreational rides, cycling around Bay Farm (about 6 miles) is gorgeous and safe, as is riding up and down Crown Beach (along the paved pathway, of course).
    Some cyclists also recommend heading over the High Street Bridge, hanging an immediate right on Tidewater, and then riding into the Martin Luther King Jr. Shoreline area.

The Master Plan

    Believe it or not, Alameda does have a Bike Master Plan; residents just haven’t heard much about it in recent years, because while it has been approved by the Alameda City Council, the Environmental Impact Report for the overall Transportation Master Plan is not yet complete. The bicycle plan, which was accepted by the city in 1999, includes the development of bike paths, bike lanes, bike boulevards (streets on which more bikes than cars travel) and bike parking. Currently the city has a full-time bicycle coordinator within the Public Works Department, and the Transportation Commission has a bicycle subcommittee that is charged with reviewing the master plan. (That commission meets on the fourth Wednesday of every monthat City Hall.)
    Right now, the master plan is sort of on hold. “We’re patiently waiting for it to be updated,” notes Lucy Gigli, president of BikeAlameda. “Since it was drafted in 1999, there has been a lot of development on the Island, and we’ve had a few new thoughts about what can be done to make the Island more bike friendly.” (For more information, including the actual bike plan, go to: www.bikealameda.org/info/bikeplan.)

The Estuary Divide

    Perhaps the biggest bike issue on the Island (and the primary problem identified in the master plan) is finding safe ways to get cyclists from Alameda to downtown Oakland, which could increase the number of people who cycle to work every day (which would lessen, in turn, the number of traffic jams and levels of air pollution here). The bike “lane” that currently goes through the Posey Tube is old and cracked; the lane is so narrow that when two cyclists pedaling in opposite directions meet, one bicyclist has to lift his or her bike up to let the other pass. Moreover, the metal railing can knock bicycle mirrors, and the traffic noise is nearly deafening.
    There is still hope, however. Starting in 2008, a pedestrian/bike shuttle will run from the Alameda Landing (behind the College of Alameda) to Jack London Square. This is a pilot program that is being launched by Alameda Landing developers Prologis/Catellus to see if this could reduce traffic generated by the new development. The pilot will run for one year, at which point the developers will decide if this is a viable and effective way to manage traffic in that area.
    At the same time, the city recently received a $100,000 grant to study what the best long-term options for getting people across the Estuary might be. Those options include modifying the Posey Tube, building a pedestrian bridge or continuing the shuttle. Results are expected in summer 2008.
    The other primary route to downtown Oakland is across the Park Street Bridge and then down along the Embarcadero, toward Jack London Square. Unfortunately, the approach to the Park Street Bridge on the Oakland side is not easy for cyclists, and getting to the Embarca­dero from the Park Street Bridge is a little hairy. Moreover, the Embarcadero itself has railroad tracks (in which bike tires can get stuck) and diagonally parked cars (which take up valuable road space and are dangerous to pass, as the drivers can’t see well while backing up).
    The Oakland-commute issue is not a minor one. During one 13-hour period last fall, 95 bicyclists crossed through the tube, and 450 used the Park Street Bridge. Improving these crossings would enable far more Alamedan cyclists to commute to work. Nor is it an issue that affects only cyclists. In addition to decreasing air, noise and water pollution (yes, car drips do eventually reach the Bay), bike lanes in communities actually help improve property values. A 2002 report by the National Association of Realtors found that homebuyers ranked bike paths as “the second most important neighborhood amenity for homebuyers.” (The first was access to highways.)

Bike To Work Day

    Getting inspired to start riding more? Each year, a mid-May week is designated as Bike Commute Week, with one day being Bike to Work Day—a day on which tens of thousands of Bay Area residents use their bike for commuting. (About one-third end up doing it regularly!) BikeAlameda sets up a number of “energizer” stations around the Island, where bicyclists can pick up information on biking, as well as snacks and other giveaways. You can also sign up to find partners with whom to bike.
    It’s well worth the effort. A 2000 study by Danish researchers that was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that people who bicycle three hours a week have a 40 percent lower mortality rate than those who don’t—even when the risk of accidents was added in.

Tips for Better Cycling

How to Make sure a kid’s helmet fits correctly:
    According to the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute, the key words are: snug, level and stable. That means that the helmet should fit the child’s head all the way around, the visor should be down across the child’s brow, and it should be stable enough that a hard blow (i.e., helmeted head hitting pavement) will not dislodge it. In addition, the front visor should be just barely visible when the child looks upward; the “y” intersection of the side straps should fall just below the child’s ear; and the chin strap should be just below the chin (not down around the child’s clavicle).
    Not sure how to do this? Any bike shop on the Island will adjust a child’s helmet. For free.

How to Get a good workout on a flat island:
    Ride in a higher (harder) gear. Ride into the headwind (e.g., ride west on Bay Farm around
5 p.m. or 6 p.m.). Do sprints. Ride back and forth across the Bay Farm Bridge (it has a slope) about
100 times. Then, when you’re all warmed up, head for the hills. “Dr. Sprocket,” the voice of collective wisdom on BikeAlameda’s Web site, recommends cycling on mixed terrain rather than only flatlands, and notes, “We’re nestled in the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area and geography that makes out-of-towners jealous of our opportunities for some of the best bicycle rides in the U.S.”

How to Ride past parallel-parked cars:
    Stay at least 3 feet away from the cars so that a swinging door doesn’t smash into you. And keep your eyes wide open.

How to Safely ride with a dog in tow:
    Three words: Don’t do it.

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