Profiles of MSU Cyclists

Harold Beer

Chief Engineer, WKAR

I've been biking forever. I biked in the very first Ecology Center of Ann Arbor bike-a-thon in the '70's. In 2000, when we had the gas price spike, I let my staff parking sticker expire, and started biking to work regularly. I'd renew the sticker when the weather turned bad, so I drove about six months a year. It's about 4.3 miles or between 16 to 18 minutes. It was in that year that I had a brain hemorrhage while biking home.

I spent two weeks in the hospital, but I was back biking to work in about two months. In 2002, parking got very tight around the Comm. Arts building, and I elected to not renew my parking sticker again -- I thought of it as a nice pay increase! In 2003, I rode to work 200 days out of the year, which is about 90% of the workdays when you factor in holidays and such, and I'm on track to meet that in 2004.

I ride whenever it's safe -- ice, and slush or more than a couple of inches of snow, I'll hitch a ride with my wife, but rain is not an excuse. I've ridden a Miyata 310 for almost thirty years. The closest I came to serious injury was when a car turned right on red without looking right (I was on the sidewalk - I hate riding on sidewalks!). Hitting the hood and the windshield didn't hurt, but bouncing off the pavement did. My front wheel was knocked out of true, and I had a hell of a bruise on my hip, but I rode home. The next day, I got one of those loud air horns -- gets their attention by the third blast, for sure.

My pet peeves are: traffic lights that don't sense bicycles; bike lanes that are unplowed, unsalted in winter, or debris covered at any time; broken glass = flat tires; badly engineered intersections (Bogue and Shaw, Harrison and Trowbridge) without consideration to bicycle commuters.

Words of encouragement: Get your bike ready, pick a nice day, leave your car at home, and bike to work. Then do it again. The summer is the perfect time to try it out. You'd be surprised at how few days it's raining at 8am or 5pm, maybe ten out of two hundred last year. And when it's cold, like -10, you'll still get warm in a mile of so, and you'll find that cars really smell bad in the winter.