Here are a couple more commuting videos. In the first, I show the bike lane on Lincoln Street here in Bloomington. This is really a poorly-designed bike lane. Here are some problems:

• Throughout – Bike lane is situated in the door zone. Riding on the left edge of it helps, but I still don’t feel 100% safe with it. Sometimes I have to ride in the traffic lane to avoid the door zone.
• 0:22 -  Weird dividers between the bike lane and traffic lane. Not sure if these are really problematic but they seem odd and make me a little nervous.
• 0:34 – Hazard in bike lane (manhole cover, slippery when wet)
• 0:50 – Starting at this point, the street gets wider and the bike lane moves to the far right of the street, which soon becomes a right-turn-only lane. I avoid this by staying in the main traffic lane to go straight. After the intersection, the bike lane continues on the far right, which once again becomes a right-turn-only lane. I suppose you could go straight from the right lane, but this seems like you’d be setting yourself up for a right hook.
• 1:39 – The bike lane continues on the far right, but this is a one-way street. State law permits riding on either side. If you want to turn left (as I did), you have to maneuver across the traffic lane anyway.

In my view, this road is good for biking, and would be even better *without* the bike lanes. They encourage/force unsafe riding practices — riding in the door zone, going straight from a turn lane.

Here’s another video, in which I go through part of downtown Bloomington. I had previously been taking a route that missed the square entirely, but I’ve discovered it’s actually very pleasant riding by the square.

My new bicycle commute is longer (10 miles round trip versus 6) and hillier than my old one. There are no major climbs, but there are some mild-to-moderate rolling hills, some long, gradual ones and a few short steep ones.

Here are a few other features of my new bicycle commute.

• Parks
• Wooded area
• Residential areas — some nice, some not-so-nice
• A few commercial/industrial buildings
• Downtown Bloomington
• Signed bike routes (very nice) and bike lanes (mostly poorly designed). More about this in a future post.
• A headwind every morning, so far

I’m surprised by how much longer the five-mile trip each way feels compared with three miles before.

I also feel the extra weight I’m lugging around a lot more than I did with my old commute … both in my panniers and around my waist. The solution to the waistline problem is obvious … now, I really need to streamline my commute strategy. Here are some things I’m doing.

• Leaving shoes at work, rather than lugging them back and forth every day. With the longer commute, I don’t think riding in the same shoes I’ll wear all day is a good idea.
• Figuring out the water situation. I have been using an insulated water bottle which I carry everywhere. But it doesn’t fit in a water bottle cage, so at first I was bringing a bicycle water bottle too. Solution: bought a second insulated water bottle to leave at work. Now I only carry the bike one back and forth.

Also, I’ve been riding the Long Haul Trucker every day. It is just such a wonderful bicycle … and it handles well with a load, too. I don’t know if I can ever go back to commuting on The Beast, especially with a more challenging commute than before. The Trucker really needs a tune-up, and I hope to have some work done on it while I’m recovering from my surgery. This is convenient, because I don’t like to be without the Trucker, even just for a day or two.

We are on the cusp of spring. It’s warming up, slightly, and I hear birds chirping every morning. It’s going to be very frustrating not being able to ride for a couple of weeks, after my surgery on Friday.

We are in the midst of moving to our new house. So, I’m more or less just going to be posting a video from a recent commute. I was going to post it in its entirety, but YouTube has a 10-minute limit, so I had to edit some parts out. I removed 4-5 minutes to make it fit in the allotted time. Like the previous video, there’s nothing particularly interesting about this ride, except this one is the commute I ride every day (or I *did* ride every day — my commute will be completely different now that we are moving).

When I posted the test video, I was surprised at how much attention people were paying to various details, and some of the comments talked about my riding style and traffic controls in the brief ride. So, I’m curious what people will see here.

Before I post the video, I have a few unrelated comments.

1. For quite a while now, I have been having some problems with my little toe on my left foot. Nothing has worked to get it to heal on its own, so I will be having surgery next Friday. It’s fairly minor and routine, or so I’m told, but I’m very much not looking forward to it. I will be off the bike for at least two weeks. After two weeks, the stitches come out and I can do whatever I’m comfortable with.
2. Moving, and doing some work in the new house, is proving to be very time-consuming. So I have not done much riding. We also don’t have Internet access in the new place yet, so it’s proving difficult to blog much.
3. My new commute will be close to twice as long as the old one, so things are going to get more interesting on the commuting front. I already started riding the Trucker when the weather isn’t too bad, and I have to say, it makes my commute much more enjoyable.
4. I tried to make a video of a fantastic night ride I did with my friend Dave. It was cold, dark, snowing, windy, and we were riding on hilly gravel roads. It was phenomenal! Unfortunately, the helmet cam does not handle darkness very well. I’m not sure yet if any of the footage will be salvageable.

Anyway, back to the commute video: I hope you enjoy it!