Simon’s preschool is 4 miles away. I usually take the freeway there, surface streets back, and it’s 4 miles either way. And it takes 15 minutes, door to door.
Today, Sophia was off school and we biked to the market and back. When we returned home, she said, “Let’s bike to Simon’s school!”
What an excellent idea, I thought. I’ve been wanting to do exactly that, and I wanted to know how long it took to ride there. So after we put the food away, we got back on my trusty Xtracycle and headed to Simon’s school.
It takes 19 minutes to bicycle there.
And that was with Sophia on the back. She weighs slightly more than Simon, so it would probably be faster with Simon.
It took longer to get home — about 26 minutes — probably because from school to home involves what amounts to a giant left-hand turn, which slows you down quite a bit on a bike. And, of course, I had two kids on the back.
And when I got home I was a little more tired and sweaty than perhaps most people might like to be for their day, but I was completely exhilarated — it’s mostly a car-free ride to the school, except for a stretch along Los Gatos-Almaden, which is newly paved and has a pretty good bike lane for most of it. (I’m actually not a big fan of bike lanes, because I think they encourage cars to regard bikes as a nuisance that can be kept over to the side of the road and not treat them as separate vehicles on the road, which, you know, they are. But the new paving was definitely nice.)
A mom at the school said, “Oh yes, I’d love to bike to school, but I have three kids.” I don’t know what the solution is for her, but there has to be one, doesn’t there?
A friend of mine used to have her eldest on a trail-a-bike, then attach a twin bike trailer to the trail-a-bike and put her two little ones in that. Now that she’s got four and her eldest rides independently, I’m guesssing she’ll be able to continue with the same arrangement, once the baby’s a bit older.