The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 4/11/08 Section: Commentary

Roberta Singer [Click to enlarge]

Bicycle trails knit this place together. Forest Park and the Central West End have a lifeline to Grand Center on the Bike St. Louis arrows that shoot down the side of Lindell Boule-vard. When Lindell merges with Olive Boulevard after Compton Avenue, those same arrows carry you downtown, along Washing-ton Avenue or the southern route by the riverfront that winds back up through Soulard and Lafayette and eventually to Tower Grove, Grand Boulevard and a slew of southeast-Asian restaurants.

Bike St. Louis carries you other places: up the Riverfront Trail, its head just north of Laclede's Landing and its route driving north through the bowels of industry, the sometimes-toxic junkyard fumes, with the constant churning of the Mississippi by your side. The river eggs you on, all the way to the Chain of Rocks Bridge 12 miles up and across into Illinois, if desired.

But biking goes beyond trails, and it isn't just for the elite with a Trek racer. Any Schwinn from St. Vincent DePaul's and an assertive pavement-claiming attitude will put you on any road, at any time, to any place your legs can pedal you.

Maybe this means forfeiting a weekly migration to a South County mall, one that unleashes clouds of carbon dioxide into the air. A huge part of sustainability is staying local.

Americans spend more time than any other people in their cars: The drive of sprawling capitalism has us fleeing to suburban oases far from where we actually work and play; strips of dead commerce line the drive out to the county, where families huddle in uninspired homes and warn their children of the dread city that lies at the terminus of Highway 40.

We've been getting away-from people, from real urban centers, isolating ourselves in communities that spring up overnight with a cheap, uniform bigness that tackles the once-fresh earth.

We are not local people anymore. We are a people that barely feel the sun's warmth on our way from our homes to our cars, from our cars to our schools. Our communities are online, our connections not bound to trees and people around us but to buildings and shops miles away.

We are scattered; we are stealing fuel from the planet so that we can be as far from each other as possible, so that we can drive our big cars to our distant jobs. And it is obvious that the world is paying for this frantic expansion with pollution clouds and rising waters and snowstorms on Easter.

I see biking as a way to get local. I see it as redemptive. For me, biking is openness. It is being exposed to the buildings and neighborhoods that make up St. Louis. Biking is freedom: It is feeling the wind of the streets and actually getting outside, under the real earth's sky and not the claustrophobic shade of a car roof. It is feeling your heart beat as you race down the pavement, light without the burden of pollution coughing out behind you.

Existing solely on campus without ever venturing out, except to more remote places via car and fossil fuel, breeds ignorance and disconnection. We will never feel obligated to the well being of our immediate environment if we blind ourselves to it. Biking is a way to release our tenuous grasp on Iggy's, the Billiken Club and dorm rooms and become connected with the city that we are a part of. It helps foster an appreciation of where we are, and helps us develop a greater consciousness of how we fit into our surroundings.

This is something integral, I believe, to staying human in this ever-fragmenting place. The road toward sustainability will be a long one.

I, for one, will be traveling it by bicycle.


Roberta Singer is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.

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