Biker's no fair-weather friend

ROANOKE - File this under Ideas That Seemed Good at the Time: On a late November whim, River Laker decided to sell his old Volvo station wagon to see if he could survive with a bicycle for six months. Only after the car was gone did he realize he was heading into the cold of winter.

Since then, fellow Roanokers have watched the 42-year-old Laker, known around town as the Carless Brit (he's from Folkestone in Great Britain), pedal through blowing ice and bitter winds, frigid temperatures and frosty mornings. His hands have nearly frozen on the handlebars, and his face has stung as if pocked with a dozen fresh pink dueling scars.

The question he frequently hears: Are you sure you don't need a ride?

But there's a point to it all: Roanoke's Ride Solutions, an organization that promotes carpooling, public transportation, ride-sharing, and walking and biking to work, has latched on to Laker's one-man, two-wheel experiment and made him its poster boy, the very face of its campaign to urge Big Lick residents to abandon their cars as much as possible.

"Someone doing this in the dead of winter sounds insane, but this could be a real opportunity to talk about transportation alternatives," said Jeremy Holmes, director of Ride Solutions, who said he found out about Laker on Facebook.com. "Because he's not a 'green' guy, he's not a hard-core environmentalist. He's a guy who works at a library. He's someone doing this every day and doing it in town, and people can relate to it."

The organization features updates about Laker on its Web site, uses a blog to promote discussion of Laker's solutions to such quandaries as how to carry groceries and dry-cleaning home on a bike, and also links to Laker's own blog.

Laker has spoken to high school students -- many of them itching to get that driver's license -- on the benefits of biking, and he's scheduled to speak at Radford University soon.

For his part, Laker, who thinks he has lost a little weight and gained some leg muscle two months into his experiment, said he is glad to be rid of the aggravations of car ownership -- the constant stop-and-go of city driving, the struggle to find a parking space downtown and the weekly loss of money at the gas pump.

The idea that seemed good at the time, he said, still seems good.

"Part of the fun for me was, I didn't know what was going to happen," said Laker, who works as a resource development coordinator for the city's libraries. "I thought, the worst thing that can happen was I'd have to get a car."

Laker, whose morning bike commute is 10 minutes, said he has been pleasantly surprised to learn how few potholes the city has, and he has been equally delighted to find that motorists almost always give him plenty of room to ride. On the other hand, he said he has discovered how few bike lanes and bike racks there are in Roanoke.

Still, he said, he would give the city's bike-friendliness a B+, a grade that would probably satisfy Roanoke leaders who have been pushing to make the city an environmental leader over the past several years.

Laker said he has also been pleased with the comments posted on his blog by readers, with the exception of a couple of "So what?" statements sent by people in New York who said they've lived for years without cars. (New Yorkers, Laker noted, have numerous mass transit options, unlike Roanokers.)

Laker said riding a bike requires him to make two trips per week for groceries, which he lugs home in a small backpack. Hills are occasionally dreadful, and the trek across the city each Sunday to get to church is a long haul, he said, but overall he's glad he ditched the 1991 Volvo for his bicycle, a 2002 Raleigh International, and even foul weather doesn't seem so bad anymore.

"I haven't felt I really needed a car," he said. "It's not as hard as I thought."

Ride Solutions' Holmes said that's the message he wants Roanokers to take away from the Carless Brit experiment.

"The city is [bike-]friendlier than most people give it credit for," Holmes said. "If you're going to do what he's doing, there's nothing to stop you from getting around."