A Quick But Necessary Discussion About Bicycling In Dallas and Other Parts North Texas, Part 1
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Every spring, it’s the same thing, and I can’t blame anybody for it. For those of you who have never been to Dallas, our lives are dinner theater adaptations of the Ray Bradbury novella “Frost and Fire,” where we tragically short-lived people skitter outside in the few hours where the night cold doesn’t freeze us solid and the rising sun doesn’t turn us into charcoal. The people in Bradbury’s story only live a total of seven days, but the analogy still works: rush out and do whatever you can in the few weeks or months between brutal heat and cloying cold, and one of the things everyone thinks they can do here is bicycle. Compared to where it was back in the 1980s, this is a very reasonable assumption, to an extent. The question that should be asked before “how do I start” is “when do I start?”
Right now, with the price of gasoline, that call of spring is particularly eloquent and insistent. When fuel prices hit this level, bicycles go from being solely the province of pre-teens and masochists to being a potentially attainable goal. Even people who otherwise would never leave their mobile metal wombs now think “You know, getting out on the road with nothing between me and the outside air but a T-shirt sounds like a lot of fun,” which it can be and it is. The trick, of course, is whether or not they’re willing to be prepared.
Now, I come to relative expertise in Dallas bicycling via a long, hard road. In some cases, literally. I’ve been biking in the area since 1980, originally because this was the only way to escape the suburban hell in which I was trapped through high school, and later because bikes were much cheaper forms of transport than cars or motorcycles, a vital consideration through the 1980s where most jobs in the wake of the famed Texas oil bust of 1986 paid just enough to cover rent or insurance but not both. In as autocentric a society as Dallas was back then, biking to work and events was also a major act of rebellion: bikes were okay for those too young for a driver’s license, but once passing the magic age of 16, anyone still on a bicycle was either a mutant or a hippie, and local motorists took great pains to run them off the road, run them down, fire shotguns over their heads, and pull up alongside and bop the cyclist with baseball bats. Sometimes, very occasionally, the people doing this weren’t small-town cops and other fortysomething delinquents, either.
Well, that’s changed, to the point where I barely recognize portions of Dallas and cheer the new attitudes. If I get cars pulling alongside, it’s not to scream “GET OFF THE ROAD” before peeling off. (Oh, that happens occasionally in certain areas, with drivers who get very offended when they yell in broad daylight “I can’t see you on the road” and I yell back “Maybe if you took your grandson’s penis out of your mouth…” In those areas, a crack like that tends to hit a very tender nerve, especially with the gentlemen.) Whenever gas goes above $3 a gallon, it’s more either to ask about where I purchased my bike or to give me a phone number. (I’m very flattered, but I’m very dedicated to my fiance Sarah, Zarozinia to my Elric, so I turn those down…and promptly send them to nearby bike shops.) In return, the drivers here are more likely to see cyclists who pay attention to traffic laws, who don’t go whipping the wrong way in one-way traffic and flip off the frantically swerving drivers, who avoid crowded sidewalks and move over to allow faster-moving traffic a chance to get by. That makes sense: we’re Dallas, not Portland.
Anyway, what that means is that compared to 40 years ago, Dallas isn’t necessarily a bicyclist nirvana, but it’s now possible to look at cycling as an option for transportation. Oh, there are still the cyclists going around White Rock Lake to show off their latest conspicuous consumption acquisitions, ride a few hundred meters, strap their bikes to the backs of their cars, and go home after demonstrating their utter contempt for anybody and everybody on the roads, but they’re an increasingly irrelevant part of the cycling ecosystem here. Most established cyclists plant butt on seat and feet on pedals to go somewhere, and for a lot of us, it’s to go to work. For others, it’s to avoid the usual car-and-parking mess: a dear friend of Sarah’s bike commutes to music events just so she can get in and out without dealing with the usual “3200 attendees flooding a parking lot intended for 700” gibberish. Some, it’s to get grounded on the way to work. Others, it’s to take advantage of the perspective, whether birdwatching, rock collecting, or simply catching the scents and the noises that drivers would never experience. I know a few whose especial appreciation of cycling involves seeing new cats and dogs along the route, and I’m regularly watching for everything from armadillos to turtles to coyotes and opossums on my own travels. The reasons keep expanding, and so do the number of cyclists joining us.
This doesn’t mean that starting off commuter cycling is going to be easy. For most beginners, they haven’t been on a bike since their early teen years, and they discover very rapidly that things have changed a lot since then. Not just with the bikes themselves or with the routes: just simply that their bodies usually aren’t prepared for the new task, and getting it prepared is going to take time. A lot of those beginners try it for a week, decide that the aches and pains aren’t worth it, and consign that bike to a garage or storage shed, never to be touched again. The discussion here is to give enough advice that beginners WILL want to keep at it, do a great job at it, and keep at it for years. This advice isn’t absolute, it isn’t complete, and it definitely isn’t elitist. However, the hope is that while I’m out catching a quick photo of a pond turtle in a creek or pond beside the road, I might catch one or more of you and share the wealth as it were.
Because discussing commuter cycling is a long and detailed subject, this guide will be broken up into multiple installments for clarity and for reading ease. But to answer the question “How do I get started?”, we’re going to start with “when,” because “when” might save your life later.
First, Start NOW
I get the concerns about weather. Dallas is notorious for thunderstorms boiling up with no warning, with rains coming down so hard that you have to keep a hand over your mouth to keep from suffocating. (And no, I am NOT exaggerating.) Through March and April, the south winds start up with a fury, regularly hitting as much as 40mph/64kph, strong enough to stop a cyclist going downhill. (And for those laughing at the idea of Dallas having hills, trust me: you find every last hill in this place when you’re on a bicycle, and some have a grade so gradual that you don’t realize how hard you’re working until you hit the crest.) You don’t want to risk cold snaps and heat waves, and you want to start when things are perfect. Please let me assure you that a lot of words apply to Dallas weather, including words in languages that still exist only for their particular nuances in profanity, but “perfect” will never, ever apply. Wait for perfect spring weather, and you’ll still be waiting when the roads are literally hot enough to scorch your tires and any flesh that comes in contact with them. Wait for perfect fall weather, and you’ll be dealing with holiday traffic and sunsets at 5:30 in the evening. Unless you like suffering from heat exhaustion, get going right now while the weather is still tolerable, because you want to be able to function in summer heat by the time it hits, and the best way to do that is to acclimate before it arrives.
Another aspect is distance. Right now, I’m less than six months away from my 60th birthday, and I get on a bike with memories of how hard and how far I biked in my early twenties. I returned to my bike in 2024 after a two-year gap, to a nightmare job on a route where biking was a surefire method of quick and painful death (even in a car, the commute was a horror, especially the Monday after a Dallas Cowboys game, where everyone on the road combined a nearly lethal hangover with watching videos of the previous night’s game while driving), assuming “Oh, I can still do the old work commute.” Oh, I wasn’t even remotely in shape, and not just because I was still recovering from surgery for a burst appendix. Even with three and four days a week of training, it was still a solid month before I was able to recreate what was a quick jaunt down the street when I was 21, and I acknowledge that the sort of long trips I could do back in 1987 may be beyond me forever. Most bike commuters have stories of coworkers who thought they could make the same commute on the first day: we call them “drivers.”
(Personal story: about a decade ago, I made friends with an assistant manager at the flagship Half Price Books here in Dallas, mostly because I was regularly biking there for my book addiction and she wanted to know more. One day at the end of April, she told me that she had accepted a position with Half Price in Austin, and looked forward to living somewhere where she could bicycle to work every day, on the gross and delusional assumption that Austin was a safer city for cyclists than Dallas. I celebrated her transfer, but begged her to start biking right then so she’d be in shape in time for the move, but she told me she’d be okay. A few months later, a coworker passed on the news: she made her move at the beginning of June and figured that the first days of consistent blood temperatures would be fine for her first trip. Not only that, but she hadn’t prepared for Austin’s considerably hillier topography, and what was a reasonable bike trip as the turkey buzzard flew was instead practically three times the distance when figuring climbing hills and frantic braking when descending hills. The coworker related that she passed out from the heat on the way to work, and spent her first day ostensibly on the job in the hospital. I bring this up not to mock my friend, but to beg each and every one of you to be careful out there. You may think you’re strong enough and fit enough to make a massive bike trip on your first day, and I’d prefer not to get the word that you’re in the hospital or the morgue because your body said “Oh REALLY?”)
The best time for starting, to be perfectly honest, is in March and April. After St. Patrick’s Day, the odds of cold fronts that require actual cold weather gear go to just about nothing until after the end of November, so you won’t need winter gloves. Until the beginning of May, generally bring a light jacket or a longsleeve shirt just in case: they don’t weigh much, they can be taken off and put away as you heat up on your ride, and you’ll definitely appreciate having it if the starting morning weather is significantly colder than predicted. That jacket or shirt will also give a much-appreciated layer between you and the ground, you and the road, or you and some nimtwit blasting out of a driveway without checking for oncoming traffic if something should happen. Either way, it’s also cool enough even at midday that sunstroke or heat exhaustion are unlikely, but as anyone living here knows firsthand, that won’t last for long, and you want to be acclimated enough to rising temperatures, day by day, that a truly hot day won’t necessarily kill you.
Use Due Diligence When Buying Your Bike
Walking into a bike shop or perusing selections online, and you’re taken in by the sheer variety of options. Do you want a touring bike, a racing bike, or a mountain bike? Do you want shock absorbers or an E-bike assist? Standard aluminum or carbon fiber frame? Titanium gears, hydraulic brakes, and electronic shifting? Tubeless tires? Do you know the difference between Presta and Schrader inner tube valves? What about a recumbent bike, or one with a trailer, or extra-wide tires for offroad work?
Tell you what. Right now, you may know what you want, but you don’t know what you need, and if you’re going to be commuting, you need something dependable. That means “boring,” with as few bells, whistles, sirens, and klaxons as you can manage. When you’re ready to move to a new bike, you’ll have an idea of what you’ll want, but every last nonessential and complex item you get on your bike is one more thing that will blow out at the worst possible time when you need to get to or from work. Shock absorbers go out, and your trip is going to be a drudgery. Electronic shifting goes out, and you’re going to be aggravated. Hydraulic brakes go out, and you could be dead. Go for something basic for your first bike, with features that either you can fix and adjust yourself or that a typical bike shop can fix without the bike being laid up for two weeks or more while they order parts that may or may not arrive. Remember: this is to get you around, not to impress all of the bike trail hangers-on who spend more time polishing their paint than meeting rubber to road. There’s nothing wrong with researching and considering options, but for this first bike, try to go basic.
Next comes where you get your first bike. First and foremost, in the names of Arioch, Issek, Elvis, and Some Guy, don’t buy the first thing you come across, whether it’s from Walmart or Facebook Marketplace. (A dirty little secret: most of the new bikes you see on Facebook Marketplace are from resellers who buy them in bulk from manufacturers or from local bike shops, so you’re usually not saving any money. The plan is to sell these to the people doomscrolling Marketplace at 3 in the morning, drunk and/or bored out of their minds, who see a generic bike photo and figure “You know, I need a bike for exercise.” Odds are really good that they’ll come back for sale on Marketplace six months later after it’s been rotting in a garage for a while, so there’s that.) Many of the bikes sold by Walmart and sports supply shops aren’t intended to be ridden all that often: as the joke goes, “cheap is expensive,” especially when you have to keep buying that cheap bike because every one wears out on you after a couple of months. If you can, find a reputable bicycle shop or reseller where you can examine it beforehand and find out if it actually fits you. If your only option is to buy a used bike, try to bring a friend along who knows something about bikes, who knows how to look for broken welds and brake pads worn to the metal. Many bike shops carry sets of preowned bikes where the shops have refurbished old bikes with new tires and brakes and given them a thorough tuneup and relubing, usually at a significant savings off new prices, and they’ll generally be a lot safer than the one you bought off Some Guy’s front porch in the middle of the night.
You and your friend need to look for bent frames and wheels, cracks in welds, and rotting and/or worn tires, and decide between yourselves whether the savings made by buying from Some Guy is worth the cost of repair. Tires and tubes are going to be expensive, but they’re manageable. Older bikes may have completely obsolete gear that may or may not be replaceable: that bike that’s been collecting dust in an uncooled garage since 1987 may have wheels larger than the easily available tires and tubes, and odds are that brake and shift cables have rusted to uselessness by now. For liability reasons, most bike shops and most welding shops in general won’t touch bike frame rewelding: if you can weld your own, more power to you, but that’s a lot of trouble to invest in a bike when you can just buy one that doesn’t need fixing. The same goes for wheels with broken spokes, missing or broken reflectors and guards, and bent handlebars. You’d be amazed at the number of alleged adults who get hold of a bike for the first time in years, immediately start hopping curbs and jumping ramps, and then quietly put the bike up for sale once they’ve bent and beaten it into unusability.
(Another thing to watch out for: it’s absolutely amazing how many dubious bike shops promise “free repairs for life” that can’t be bothered to do those repairs when needed. I’ve personally had encounters with shops like this that sat on a bike for a week or longer, swore that repairs had been done, and then handed it back with absolutely nothing fixed and expecting to get paid for doing nothing. Your mileage may vary on this, but I learned 20 years ago that if you walk into a bike shop to the smell of various burned and vaporized cannabinoids, don’t bother expecting your bike to be ready when you insist “I really need to get this back because I need it to get to work.” I can’t smoke, but I don’t have issues with those who imbibe, but I also figure that there’s a time and a place, and bike shops where the staff is too busy hitting the bong to hide the smell are usually bike shops that don’t last long. Likewise, several manufacturers promise free replacement of frames if they break, but only if you bought them directly from the manufacturer and not from a bike shop. If you got it from Oat Willie’s Discount Bike and Ganj Shop, the manufacturer will tell you “too bad, so sad, bring it up with the guys you bought it from and don’t bother us again.”)
After you’ve looked at it, now ask to ride it around. Not much: just around a block, to make sure that the chain isn’t rusted solid, the wheel and crank bearings haven’t seized up, and the derailleur shifts through gears without sticking or throwing the chain. Make sure that the tires aren’t rubbing against the inside of the frame and the wheels aren’t wonky, and check for broken spokes that weren’t immediately noticeable during the first inspection. Check the seat and make sure that you can adjust it to fit your needs and not the needs of the previous buyer, and that the padding hasn’t disintegrated to powder and the cover isn’t torn or worn. For the most part, the bike should run smoothly and without any odd noises, and if the seller wants to argue about the noises or otherwise tries to justify anything that gives you concern, back off and find another seller. Again, if you want a project, knock yourself out, but if you’re just wanting to go to work and the grocery store, that bargain won’t be a bargain when you have to spend four and five times the bike’s price just to make it safe to ride.
One last thing to consider. Most bike shops recognize at a moment’s notice the difference between the bikes only ridden on occasional weekend runs around the lake and the ones ridden for commuting, mostly because wear adds up after a while. Many serious commuter cyclists end up buying a new bike every couple of years because it’s cheaper than the repairs and replacements for an older bike. Just be prepared for this: if you selected a good bike in the first place, you won’t be happy when it finally wears out, but at least you’ll have warning after a long, long time.
This section is getting too long, so check back for PHASE TWO, already in progress. I’m only getting started.
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