Nice rack.

Although I haven’t made any public statements before now, it’s been my intention to reduce my gasoline usage this summer. This was, as you may have guessed, one of several ulterior motives behind my bike purchase a few weeks back. The decision was based primarily on an overall desire to be more environmentally conscious about the things I do and the way I live my life – money did play a small role, but considering how much I spent on the bike it’s unlikely that I’ll see a net savings for quite some time.

In any case, I’ve been doing a pretty good job so far. Being a suburb, Novi definitely doesn’t go out of its way to be bike (or pedestrian, for that matter) friendly. Sidewalks are spotty at best…most streets simply don’t have them at all, and those that do rarely have them along the entirety of the street. This isn’t such a big deal, though, because there are generally ample (if heavily graveled) shoulders when there aren’t any proper sidewalks. The real problem actually stems from a critical lack of bike parking. That probably doesn’t seem like an issue until you remember that suburbs are made entirely of quarter-acre subdivisions and strip malls.

I have the advantage of living very near the “center” of Novi, which means that most of the places I want to go on any given day are within two or three miles (let’s ignore, for a moment, the fact that Novi itself is only twenty-five square miles). Unfortunately, like all the suburbs around here, it’s composed entirely of varying sorts of malls, be they strip or otherwise. Last week I took a ride around almost all of these places looking for potential bike parking and came up largely empty-handed. In aggregate, all of downtown Novi has approximately eight bike racks, all of which are on the small side.

Of these eight, six are located in the Novi Town Center, a single strip mall-type location. The other two are at Fountain Walk, the formerly pedestrian-friendly outdoor mall a half mile away. What this means is that none of the dozen or so other commercial centers have any bike racks whatsoever. The degree to which this is a problem varies somewhat – for example, Twelve Oaks mall has light poles along most of the entranceways which I’ve been using to lock up. However, I’m betting that they don’t actually want me to do that, and I imagine that one of these days I’ll come out to find a ticket and a note that my bike has been impounded.

As a result of all this, I’ve been working on a proposal for the city council. I understand that suburbanites love their SUVs and are unlikely to give them up for any reason, but I don’t think that means wealthy suburbs like Novi and Farmington can’t attempt to make themselves more bike-friendly. Perhaps I’m being naïve, but I like to think that suburbanites would use their cars less if their cities were designed to make bike and foot travel easier, safer and more…well, expected. I don’t think that making sure all the downtown shopping areas have a couple of bike racks would be a bad start.