Jonathan R. Schmidt

How far is your commute? 90km bicycle commuter in Manitoba

I just got finished reading a CBC article about a man who commutes 90km one way by bicycle! Lacking free time to increase his bicycling training he began considering cycling the 90km from Portage la Prairie to his work in Winnipeg. The article states that he began doing this last year once a week and now has bumped it up to twice a week now. This is outstanding! I wonder if he’s calculated how much gas and car emissions he’s saved already. Though one obvious question for this guy would be why he lives so far away from his workplace. It seems that the environment isn’t his first concern if he’s been living that far away from his work for so long. Then again he’s a social worker and perhaps requires the many miles between him and his work.

The story does beg a good question for those people who train long hours in either running or cycling and maintain a day job: ‘Why drive 10-30km back and forth from work and then go for a 30-40km training session when you get home from work? Last summer I was doing some heavy duty running training and I’d wake up at 6am – go out for a 10km run and then jump in my car at 7:30am and drive 35km to work. Granted the distances aren’t the same, but a 35km bike ride is about the training equivalent of 10km run in terms of conditioning. If I woke up and just cycled to work immediately I would’ve been there at the same time and saved the car. The only catch was that I would’ve had to do it again in the evening or catch a car pool to transit and leave my bike at work. In short, bicycles are extremely efficient machines and if our workplaces continue to develop facilities for bike commuters the issue of distance really isn’t the problem. The greater problem with bike commuting is weather and traffic. The man in the article, Mike Caslor, states that once he hits the city he becomes much more weary of traffic because bikes and cars simply don’t get along very well in the city. Someday we will all have to get along, but until then cyclists will rarely trust motorists and motorists will still wonder why someone would get sweaty peddling a bike when you can drive a car.