Tour de Ann Arbor

When I set out to bike to all five branches of the Ann Arbor District Library in one day, I didn’t realize the Tour de France was going on at the same time, but turns out it was, so that was fitting. On the very first stage of the race, a spectator managed to step too close to the course with a sign and cause basically the entire peloton to crash, which was more or less the big news of the Tour de France. Fortunately, on my journey I was not hit by anything besides a vine that scratched my arm because I biked into it.

During the summer, I normally visit all the library branches in search of summer game points, but usually just one or two at a time. After five years in Ann Arbor, I’ve biked almost everywhere in the city, so for fun I mapped out a route that would take me through all the branches in one trip and realized it was actually feasible. The way the library branches are spread out, the most efficient route roughly circles the city and is about fifteen miles long if you start downtown. Even adding the mileage to get downtown, the whole trip is about as long as some of my rides along and around the Border to Border  (B2B) trail, so I thought, why not?

Setting out, I knew it wasn’t going to be the most pleasant ride, which proved to be true. I picked a time on the weekend when there was less traffic, but the drivers seemed worse than average. Given that during the pandemic lockdowns in Michigan traffic decreased but accidents per mile travelled increased, I wouldn’t be surprised if the drivers were actually worse than usual. Because I had a lot of ground to cover, I took the shortest routes, which included a lot of not-so-great roads for biking.

Library branches, in the order visited: Top right - Downtown, center - Westgate, bottom right - Pittsfield, bottom left - Malletts Creek, top left - Traverwood

The B2B and its connections through Parker Mill County Park and to the Matthaei Botanical Garden Trail are great. There are enough pedestrians on campus and downtown to keep traffic slow and drivers aware enough to make them fairly bikeable. Residential neighborhoods are also fine, and most of the main spoke roads radiating from the center of Ann Arbor have decent bike lanes, but outside of that the biking’s not super fun. Part of the problem is that Ann Arbor has an incomplete interior ring road. It was supposed to move cars around the city quickly, but because it’s so piecemeal it has more intersections, entries and exits (to shopping centers, housing developments, churches, schools, parks, golf courses, etc.), and traffic lights than a ring road should have. This defeats the purpose of a ring road because if you have development along it, it itself becomes a destination and it’s no longer a fast way to circumscribe the city. In fact, the not-ring road makes traffic in the city very messy, leading to the conclusion that I came to after this bike ride.

My primary problem with Ann Arbor is that it can’t decide whether it wants to cater to cars (ring roads, high speed limits, four+ lanes of traffic) or encourage pedestrians and bikers (sidewalks that don’t suck, bike lanes, not almost getting run over by a car every time you cross a street). Take, for example, the not-ring road. It has posted speed limits of 35-40 mph, which is too fast for bikes to keep up with and not fun for pedestrians to walk next to. However, the not-ring road has (not great) sidewalks because of its proximity and direct access to public services like schools and grocery stores that people without cars might conceivably need to get to. So the not-ring road sucks for pedestrians/bikers that need to access things along it because it’s noisy and terrible to walk/ride along, and it sucks for drivers because it’s riddled with traffic lights, crosswalks, and turn lanes. Overall it sucks for everyone because it’s not particularly safe for anyone.

I was on Reddit awhile ago and in some post about biking (probably related to the Tour de France crash) someone posted an interesting link to a video that addresses this topic. In the video, they define a road as a “high-speed connection between two places” and a street as a “complex environment where life in the city happens.” The problem, they argue, is “stroads,” which try to combine streets and roads but don’t properly do the job of either. Sounds a bit like the not-ring road that I had to bike on to visit all my library branches. Anyway, in the end, I got my summer game points, some exercise, and only a scratched arm, so I guess it was worth it.