If you think riding a bike is slow...

 A transportation cyclist in an urban setting can often travel faster than a motor vehicle. Prudent riders have learned not to go absolutely as much faster as they possibly can, because the trapped audience would love to see you brought down in your arrogance, but even at a sedate pace a rider can thread the jam and take advantage of some shortcuts denied to the prisoners of car culture.

That advantage disappears when the commute gets longer, over open highway. During driving season, if I get lucky with traffic, I can get to work in a little over 20 minutes. If I get stuck behind an obstruction, it could be half an hour or longer. But on the bike these days it's solidly the better part of an hour inbound. Even at my best it was a big day when I made it in 50 to 55 minutes.  What is that in metric time?

Going slower than a motorist doesn't feel slow. I know I'm doing the best I can. A rider acclimates to the pace. You know how you feel, and how the bike feels, rolling over the terrain. I have written before about how the variations in my time on the bike are a much smaller percentage -- barring mechanical or medical crises -- than the variations I routinely encounter in a car. You get a rhythm and flow.

Following my successful ride in the rain and chill on a Sunday, I went out on the same route the next day, under similar but slightly less cold conditions. Eight miles out, I felt the unmistakable squish and waggle of a punctured rear tire. It went down gradually as I looked for a good place to pull well off the road to put in my spare tube.

Find a spot, dismount, remove the wheel, start to work the tire off... damn, this is a tighter fit than I remember. Put my gloves back on to enhance grip on the wet, gritty tire casing. Still not good enough. Try barehanding it again. Nope. Shit. Dig around for tools. All I could find was a 6mm hex key left over from when my seatpost clamp kept loosening up for some reason. Well, the tube was already punctured... I jammed it under the beads and pried. I tried to keep the tube out of the way, but it still made two more holes.

Once the tube was out I used the 30-year-old Silca frame pump to try to put enough air into it to locate the original puncture.

Tech tip: always put the tire label at the valve -- or vice versa -- so that you have a known reference point to help you zero in on where a sharp object might still be in the tire. I mean, feel around the whole casing, but it really speeds things along if you have a rough idea where you're looking.

Two problems frustrated me. Three, really. One, the tube had two significant holes from the hex key. Two, passing vehicles on the wet road made constant hissing noises. Three, I only had my distance glasses with me, so I couldn't see detail up close. And there was another problem I hadn't noticed yet.

Unable to narrow my search area, I felt around the entire casing with bare fingers until I felt the sharp end of a common culprit: a tiny, eyelash-size piece of wire. With wet fingers, I had to use my teeth to pull it out. I deposited it down the hollow center of a rotted fence post. Not as satisfying as dropping the little fucker into Mt. Doom, but then it was hardly as significant an artifact.

The spare tube had been in the pack with no valve cap. It had also been in contact with the rusty old hex key. It had only been in there since a flat I'd had back in April or May, but I worried that it might have chafed through where it vibrated against the metal objects. Oh well. Let's pump it up.

As often happens, the tire went back on somewhat more easily than it came off. I put the old Silca onto the valve and started pumping. I'd tried to put a few breaths into the tube before I stuck it into the casing and had been unable to round it out, but I'd gone ahead because I had no other option. Everything was wet, so even if I had a patch kit and had been able to locate holes in the tube, nothing would stick. I had one shot.

Nothing. The tire remained flaccid. Hissing vehicles paraded past. I hoped that someone I knew might happen by, but if they did they slipped past while I was looking down. I don't know that many people, and the odds of seeing one right there were slim on a day when normal people are at their jobs.

The good news was that my route home would only be seven miles. The bad news was that I had no choice but to walk, pushing the bike. I estimated my time in transit would be an hour and 45 minutes. Best get at it.

Crap like this is why I haven't ridden with cleated shoes in years. Once in a while I'll risk it for the fun of feeling full power, but with stiff-soled touring shoes and toestraps I do well enough.

Funny thing is, this was my second hike home in just a couple of months. On one of my last commutes of the season, I was coming down a fun descent on Route 28 on my way home in the gathering twilight, when passing cars herded me too far to the right. I went through a shoal of gravel that had been kicked out from Old 28, which was being repaved. Pow! Hisssssss. My rear tire, a Gravel King, had taken a terminal hit. Gravel's Bitch, more like.

I pulled off at the bottom of the dip, where I could get well off the road, the usual precautions. In that instance, the spare tube was just plain rotten, because literally years had passed since I had a flat on that bike. With no one at home but a couple of cats, and no one I cared to call, I started trudging. That one was only about 4 miles and change. I put all the bike lights on as night settled on the landscape.

Elm Street is hilly, curvy, and narrow. I veered off into the weeds numerous times on that plod. Finally, when I was a quarter-mile from home, someone in a pickup truck stopped to ask if I needed a ride. Just about the bendiest, narrowest bit lay between me and the relatively wider Green Mountain Road, and I could see the lights of a lot of vehicles slaloming through those bends, so I took him up on it. When I told him where to turn in, he said, "Well, that wasn't much!" I assured him that after my long day at work, a cumulative 26 miles of riding, and a somewhat anxious trudge in my fatigue and hunger for supper it was still welcome, but I got the feeling he thought I was a wimp.

With that in mind, I set very strict limits on the type of aid I would accept this time. I generally do not like to burden anyone with the unfortunate consequences of my stupid decisions.  I wish I could say that was a lifelong habit, but in my adolescence and young adulthood I definitely burdened people with my stupid decisions.

At least the dry slot that I'd seen on the weather radar when I prepared to ride that morning was still holding, although a hypothermic downpour would have put the chef's kiss on the whole fiasco.

After only about a mile, a driver did pull up, in a large gray SUV -- not a windowless white van with a mysteriously stained mattress in the back -- and asked if I need a pump. I assumed tire pump... I reported that both my available tubes were NFG, but thanks. He then offered a lift, but I was just settling into a good swamp of penitent meditation. I thanked him again and excused him. I just wasn't in the mood to make a new friend. Or to drag some stranger 12 miles out of their way, because he had been driving the other way when he looped around to check on me. Was it a lovely gesture of generosity, or did I narrowly escape ending up cut up into several garbage bags distributed across 50 square miles of Maine? Either one is possible.

As I walked, I thought about how the bike manufacturers of the 1880s and '90s found a surprising customer base among working people who scraped up the coin to buy what was at the time an expensive item. From the point of view of someone who had to walk everywhere, the bicycle was a miracle. Sometimes when I ride I think about how I'm flying along above the ground, the "stride" of a pedal stroke multiplied by the gear ratio and laid out on the road by the circumference of the tire according to the result. Steps become circles feeding bigger circles, devouring distance. Even on the fixed gear, where I'm unable to coast, I get to rest on the stretches where the bike drives me. The magic of the gear ratio still works. Until it doesn't, because the cushion of air fails. Fsst!

Looking at the bike computer as I pushed along, I could see that I averaged either side of four miles per hour, usually slightly below. On easy downgrades I could lope along at five-plus. Pushing a bike turns into work really quickly. I considered burying it in the woods somewhere and loping home a little faster, but in the shoes I was wearing it wouldn't have been that much faster. And I would have had to drive back out to retrieve the bike. Keep walking.

No one else even slowed down to look at me for the rest of the seven miles. That's cool. I wasn't looking at them, either. I was just experiencing these roads at this laborious pace and comparing it to the slowest I'd ever felt when riding it. Even when I was "almost there," I had to take every single step to get there. I got my 10,000, I can tell you. Actually the phone says 15,333.

Once I got cleaned up and fed, I put the bike in the work stand to put in a good tube. While I was at it, I checked out the ancient Silca and discovered that the dried out rubber grommet in the pump head didn't come close to sealing on the valve stem. So a tire pump would have gotten me going after all. Of course if what he had was one of those Schrader-only electric compressors I still would've been screwed, because I didn't have a Presta adapter.

The next day, in dry weather, I set out with a significantly beefed-up tool kit and the Lezyne pump off my road bike. All went well, but I assume nothing. Changing a flat in the rain or in a snowbank is still a pain in the ass. We won't see snowbanks for a while, but rain, sleet, and assorted semi-frozen splather are traditional elements of November's repertoire.

Support your local pedestrian

 On my bike commutes I was seeing a moderately tall, bearded young man walking toward Wolfeboro along Route 28. Usually I would see him somewhere along the north slope between Route 171 and the crossroads at North Wolfeboro Road and Pork Hill Road, but it might be further north before 171 or a little further along, past North Wolfeboro. It took me a while to notice that he was walking all the way into the town of Wolfeboro and walking to various destinations while he was there. If he also walked back out the way he came in, he had to be logging well over 20 miles a day on foot.

I never saw him hitching a ride. He walked on the correct side, facing traffic. I can't recall if I ever saw him walking back northward toward Ossipee, but I might have forgotten it. Whether you see someone along a route depends entirely on your schedules. Our mornings coincided regularly. In bike season I might be starting toward home anywhere within a span of an hour or more. Going in was much more consistent.

The walker wasn't sauntering, but he wasn't speed-walking or jogging, either. When I would see him through the workshop windows, it was generally a couple of hours after I had arrived. The transportation pedestrian maintains a cruising pace, not a racing pace.

Because I hate driving, particularly with other drivers on the road, I have considered various ways to cover the distance to work in the seasons of darkness and frozen precipitation. The obvious first choice would be cross-country skiing. That depends on snow that will provide grip for the skis and smooth running. In New Hampshire, especially with the changing climate, ungroomed snow is often like soapy porcelain or wet concrete. And the skier would have to stay out of the travel lanes, probably outside of the plow drift.

Native Americans in New England invented the snowshoe, not the ski, because terrain and snow conditions here made the short, wide flotation more practical. I do not know if they experimented with some form of traction device lashed to the bottom of it, for the hard, refrozen conditions. However, when snowshoe hiking was the only way to get around, trails would get packed down to a smooth surface. The system worked for a few thousand years.

That was before cars and snowplows. In our modern world, a transportation snowshoe hiker is rare to nonexistent. I have not seen the summer pedestrian pushing into darkness and snow.

On snowshoes, the pedestrian would not be able to maintain more than about 3 miles per hour at best. Skis glide, but snowshoes give nothing away. Plod, plod, plod, you have to take every step. Along the highway, a walker might consider bare-booting it on the pavement when no vehicles were passing, hopping out of the way as necessary. On the stretches with a guardrail, that would require vaulting over the rail and whatever plow-piled snow was in the way. You wouldn't want to chew up the snowshoes on the pavement. Good luck leaping over the guardrail with them on your feet, too. Because a commuting pedestrian is on the road with commuting drivers, traffic will be heavy, requiring frequent leaps out of the way. Or you square your shoulders and forge ahead, leaving it to drivers to do the right thing.

A skier wouldn't be able to match bike pace. Skiing is generally faster than walking, but even on the downhills you won't hit the speeds that a bike can reach. Uphill skiing speeds are totally comparable to walking. So the trip to work and back would take much longer than a bike commute.

Winter rain screws everything up. Especially now, when torrential rains have become more frequent, crossing ten or fifteen miles without a vehicle, along routes designed for vehicles, would take many dangerous hours. Warmer than average temperatures are still much colder than your body temperature. Wetness saps your heat. You can dress for it, but things still have to go smoothly for you to arrive at a safe, warm destination where you can strip off your wet clothes. Arriving at work, that can be awkward. If you have no place to dry the clothes you wore to hike to work, you'll be putting on that clammy mess to head home.

On my particular route, there is a path option for the last three miles into town. The Cotton Valley Trail follows the old rail line, so it is basically straight and level. But you have to survive to get there. Homebound it only covers the first three miles, leaving you to navigate the highway after that. The trail is used by snow machines, bikes, dog walkers, skiers, and the rail car drivers who have demanded that the rails remain in place. They don't specifically clear the rails for winter use, but if the snow and ice cover is low enough I suppose one of them might give it a try. So, depending on surface conditions and time of day (or night) you might be completely alone or in the middle of a bustling winter scene like Currier and Ives only with more dog poop and attitude.

If I lived close enough to work I would definitely walk most of the time. I lived for nine years without using a car to get to my various jobs in the Annapolis area. Only when I moved to a place with snowier roads and a much longer commute did I get a car and start acting somewhat normal for at least part of the year. I like my spot here, so I can't reduce or alter my commuting route to make human-powered methods work safely for the entire year. Maybe if civilization collapses before the climate does I'll be able to ski the abandoned roads to get to work. Someone will have to start making wooden skis for the winter travelers, while we nurse along the simple bikes that survived from the 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st for the summer travelers.

Like all post-apocalyptic fantasies, that one glosses over the violence and destruction that would precede it. We'll never just flip a switch to the post-apocalyptic utopia. Then again, with consensus, we could flip the switch without the apocalypse. Add a human-powered travel corridor to all travel ways. Not everyone can do without a motor vehicle, but the ones who could do it would be more likely to try it if they had a guaranteed route.

The best thing about a snow-based winter system is that you don't have to pay to plow it down to a bare surface. Grooming snow requires machinery and skilled drivers, but it still takes less time and brute force than pushing snow out of the way. Along my route, a human-powered commuter or transportation cyclist could revert to the regular road when snow season ended. The side path would not have to be maintained for summer use. Most likely, the majority of users would like it year-round. That's a fine option. But a ski and walking path could have somewhat steeper climbs, requiring less massive re-grading to establish the route.

Here I am, planning the practicalities of something that isn't going to happen. I did want to be a fiction writer...