Observations, lessons and incidents from biking 50 percent of Columbus, Ohio

You'll learn things about your city on a bike that you wouldn't in a car.

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Observations, incidents and injuries from biking 50 percent of Columbus, Ohio

Roughly what biking 50 percent of Columbus looks like, with included stolen valor from Upper Arlington, Grandview, Whitehall and Bexley.

Three years ago, I downloaded Wandrer, a supplemental Strava app that maintains a database of every road I’ve biked down at least once.

Like most hobbies in my life, for better or worse, it spun out of control. Last Saturday, I surpassed a long-term goal: I biked on 50 percent of the roads inside Columbus proper.

Even the notorious conman Vivek Ramaswamy applauded my effort, which was kind of him, considering that one time I tricked him. But that’s the bipartisan power of the bicycle, folks.

I knew Columbus had the same square mileage as New York City. I knew it was the combined size of Cincinnati and Cleveland. But I had never grasped the size until I biked 1,553.33 miles inside Columbus and had barely conquered half the city.

You realize how much money we spend on the idea that any American motorist has the god-given right to travel from A to B as fast as possible, with a parking space waiting next to the door at their destination.

It’s an idea that has guided the ethos of Columbus for the last 100 years. A wise man once remarked that we’re so generic we should be called “City.” When you bike half of Columbus, it’s easy to see how Columbus lacks a central idea. It’s haphazard and oftentimes clashing sub-division after sub-division, in every direction.

It makes you realize how daunting the idea of adequate public transportation is, even in the light of the LinkUs package, which has been thrown into flux due to the Republican Party’s never-ending war on mass transit.

The city was built to serve the car, and 50 years later, we don’t have anywhere near the required density for federal light rail matching funds anywhere but the Short North corridor to Clintonville.

We built the city wrong, and it’s going to take decades to undo that and infill our urban core properly. Because, brother, if Columbus ever stops growing, there is no way we’ll be able to maintain our overpaved city while residents continue to drive bigger and heavier cars.

Coincidentally, an oversized SUV wasn’t to blame for my only injury in this saga. I can thank a fellow dipshit bicyclist who came around a blind turn on the Scioto Trail in the middle of the lane.

I went down and broke my tibia on the same leg on which I broke my fibula in 2020. That bicyclist left me for dead, presumably because he had beers to drink while looking like an asshole playing sand volleyball at Woodland’s. I biked the three miles home on one leg.

I had two dangerous “incidents,” and they occurred within a week of each other inside a 1-mile radius on the East Side.

The first came a block off Fifth Avenue, when a surly Latino man, who was standing in the middle of the road, accosted me for attempting to break into his garage.

Mind you, I’m in full bike pedophile regalia, right down to the high-vis jersey. Not exactly an appropriate crime-doing costume.

But the man convicted me on the spot. He charged me, and though he wasn’t fast enough to put his hands on me, he kicked my spokes and threw a water bottle at my head, which didn’t come close to contact.

The other incident occurred a couple of days later, off Johnstown Road, when these two unleashed dogs ganked me and mauled my front tire of my bike:

I know it was these two dogs because they’re in the CashApp avatar of the woman who sent me $250 as an apology for her aggressive dogs trashing my front wheel while she stood there aghast.

Despite those two incidents, which occurred over 1,200 rides and 17,000 total miles, Columbus could be a bike utopia. But most residents will never understand that because, like most sane people, they aren’t stupid enough to ride a bike alongside car traffic.

Still, it’s a struggle worth undertaking. Biking half of Columbus has introduced me to neighborhoods and parks that I never would have encountered if I had only traveled the city in a car.

Just do what I did: Buy a bike for trips to the gym, the grocery, or maybe even work. Learn to navigate your neighborhood if nothing else. You’d be surprised how easily courage can come to take on roads you only recently deemed to be unpassable.

You’ll be healthier, and your neighbors will thank you because everyone hates cars in their neighborhoods, even if they drive them through everybody else’s.

Our first chance to ask the Republican junta not to gerrymander our Congressional map

Ohio Republicans are deadset on producing a Congressional map that will kick Congresswomen Marcy Kaptur and Emilia Sykes to the curb.

The Ohio Joint Committee of Congressional Redistricting will kick off its first meeting today at the Ohio Statehouse in the Senate Finance Room at 11 a.m.