Last year my new year’s resolution was to do 10,000 pull ups. I bought a little notebook to keep track of my progress in, writing down every pull up I did as a tally mark, adding up totals for each day and each month. I got a little ways past 1,000 before the chaos of 2022, along with some elbow tendinitis, sank my lat dreams.
When 2023 rolled around, I briefly considered revisiting the pull up goal. But I was, if anything, in weaker shape than I was at the beginning of 2022. So I went looking for something else.
For a long time, I’ve thought of my bicycle as my primary form of transportation. When I was in undergrad, and for the first two years of grad school, I didn’t own a car. While I was commuting to the University of Arizona in the pre-COVID days, I always biked. But since the pandemic started, I found myself leaning more on my car. As I stopped commuting to campus, and no longer went out to destinations I’d normally ride to, my bike gradually lost some of its primary transport role, even as I continued to think of myself as a commuter cyclist.
In 2022, I started venturing back out into the world, and I also started watching videos from creators like Not Just Bikes and CityNerd. So I’ve been thinking more about cities and transportation infrastructure, and how Tucson could be a better place if it were easier to get around without driving. But in order to be an effective advocate, I feel I need to reclaim my identity as a bike-first commuter. So, I decided to make that the focus of my 2022 resolution.
Here are the rules I’m holding myself to:
- The goal is for at least 50% of my trips within the city to be taken by any means other than driving. For me, this will almost always mean cycling, but I will give myself credit for walking and transit.
- My unit of measure is trips, not miles, but I will keep track of mileage. Naturally, I’m more likely to choose to drive on a longer trip, so I don’t expect 50% of trips by bike to include 50% of miles by bike.
- I’ll keep track of all my trips in a spreadsheet, and periodically go through the data to see where I’m at.
As I’m writing this, we’re a quarter into the year and I’ve already taken a brief look at the Q1 data. In a future post, I’ll take a look at how well I’ve been doing so far, and what the rest of the year holds.