Another bicycle convert

Slate magazine's senior editor Andy Bowers wrote just before the holiday about switching his four-mile commute to two wheels. It confirmed his bias that Los Angeles is "an almost pathologically bike-unfriendly city," but he's hooked nonetheless.

I am a fourth-generation Southern Californian. I was weaned on exhaust fumes and the eye-searing smog of the 1970s. I grew up in a hilly area of the city where it was impossible to ride my bike to school or a store without risking real harm. For my entire childhood I never went anywhere without being chauffeured by my parents. My 16th birthday was Liberation Day. My first driver's license picture, taken on my birthday, shows me looking completely bleary-eyed—I had slept in the used VW Beetle my parents bought me for the occasion and presented myself at the DMV an hour before it opened. Driving in L.A. feels as natural to me as walking in Manhattan.

Although I had actually been a bike commuter in other cities (most notably during three years in London), it never occurred to me to try it when I returned to L.A. (this despite the fact that there may be no major city in the world with a climate as perfect for bike commuting as ours—warm winters; moderate, dry summers; alarmingly little rain). Since cycling to work is such an aberration here, I found the idea both exhilarating and pleasingly subversive.

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One day, I found myself biking down an empty little access road next to the notorious 405 freeway during the evening commute. The freeway, as usual, was paralyzed, and I noticed I was actually moving faster than the cars. That's when the revelation hit: Over the past few months, I had discovered a different Los Angeles....

Not only has riding my bike enabled me to glide past all this gridlock (in fact, I'm often not even aware it's happening), but it has made me realize that it's an illusion. The city itself is not gridlocked—merely the narrow asphalt ribbons onto which we squeeze all our single-occupant cars. On the back streets I now take, everything is quiet and serene. The main roads may mimic Times Square on New Year's Eve, but the areas between L.A.'s clogged arteries comprise mile after square mile of low-density, low-stress residential bliss (the same is true, I suspect, of most American cities).

I suspect the fraternity of L.A. biker-bloggers will be more welcoming to Andy's account than they were to Chris Ayres' Times of London report last month.