Anchorage Daily News

SUMMERLAND, Calif. -- Clearly marked and easy to follow, the bike trail here ran past the antique shops and restaurants of this tiny town to disappear into a road that climbed away from the Pacific coast.

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For a moment, aside from the 70-degree weather absent all summer long in Southcentral Alaska, it was just like being back in Anchorage.

All the world over, one thing about bike trails always seems the same:

There is invariably a trail into nothingness, a trail to nowhere or a trail that dumps a rider out into automobile traffic with no obvious safe route ahead.

Transportation planners apparently think cyclists have some sort of built-in navigation system unknown to motorists that will help them find the interconnecting links. How else to explain the lack of signs to guide them on their way?

Sound familiar?

Anyone who has ridden the trails of Anchorage knows how hard it can be to connect our disconnected trails, especially when you get out of that downtown/Westchester Creek core designed long ago by those environmentally insensitive early Alaskans who weren't supposed to know how to design anything.

Why is that? Why is downtown home to trails so much more people-friendly than the sprawling new trails spawned south of Dimond Road and out into Muldoon?

I guess you could blame the automobile, if you buy into the idea that technology has a greater power to steer people than people have to steer technology.

Here in the capital of drive-in America, a good argument certainly could be made for the former.

Despite the go-green efforts of America's most populous state, the automobile still rules California. Then again, who would expect otherwise in the drive-in capital of the world?

The drive-in restaurant was perfected here. Then came drive-in movies, drive-in banks, drive-in liquor stores, and today there is the drive-in health club, which one drives to so as to exercise for one's health.

Hmm. Whatever happened to the idea of improving one's health by walking, instead of driving, to the corner grocery store?

Oh, that's right, the corner grocery got zoned off into supermarket land far from where people live to make room for everyone to drive and to ensure residential areas didn't have to put up with the traffic because everyone was driving everywhere all the time.

If you haven't noticed, Anchorage generally followed this trend, and though the city has done well in some respects in maintaining quality of life in the face of misguided zoning and rapid expansion, it has failed in some key areas.

Chief among them is the inter-connectivity of the city's trail system.

Anchorage has a lot of bike trails and a lot of ski trails, but you can't get anywhere on many of them.

They are in many ways like those drive-in health clubs. People drive to Hillside Park to put on their Nordic gear and go ski. People drive to Westchester Lagoon to unload their bikes and ride the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. People drive to Kincaid Park to bike or ski, depending on the season.

There is nothing wrong with this. It is good for everyone to get out in the Big Open Air and enjoy some of Anchorage's Big Wild Life. But if we are serious about weaning Alaska and America from that addiction to oil, staving off the climate change already playing havoc in rural parts of Alaska, and preventing our children from turning into little balls of fat, it might be time to at least start talking about doing something to encourage people to get around in ways other than by automobile.

Like by walking or running or pedaling a bicycle.

California is at least seriously talking about this, both for energy and environmental reasons.

Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing an initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forging better travel routes for people on bicycle or on foot, but any real actions to make this happen seem almost as hard to find on the ground here as in Anchorage.

The League of American Bicyclists gives the Santa Barbara area, of which this little town is part, a silver medal for its efforts to foster cycling.

Anchorage doesn't even rate a score on its chart of bicycle-friendly communities, and yet Anchorage is more like Santa Barbara than not.

There are, indeed, a fair number of bike trails. Learning them is no easy task. No map is readily available.

On the way down out of the Santa Ynez Mountains, a bike trail along a California highway -- barely discernible by the faded painting of a bike on a road shoulder at one point -- led directly onto a freeway entrance where a sign warned: No bicycles or pedestrians.

Backtracking along the route, I found a service road leading into this town. A marked bike trail materialized near the tiny town center. It was a very nice bike trail for a very short way.

On the far side of town, it ran into that road sans bike trail that climbed back away from the coast.

A U-turn to see if there might be a better option along a road that dipped under the paralleling freeway led smack into the entrance of a poorly marked trail running in its own fenced and buttressed corridor alongside the freeway.

Again there was a very nice bike trail for a very short way. Again it ran into another road lacking any bike trail markings or signs.

Of course, the good thing about California -- or at least this part of California, where estates and ranches predominate -- is that the ratio of roads to motor vehicles is high, significant public money has been invested in asphalt over the years, the asphalt holds up a lot better in the benign weather of California than the hostile weather of Alaska, and most motorists are in such a hurry they stick to the freeway.

So while the bike trails might not be much better than those of Anchorage, and are in some cases even worse, the roads are, in general, way better.

And the drivers you meet on those roads? Well, there is no comparison there.

Nearly all of them swing wide -- often into the opposite-lane-of-traffic wide -- when passing a cyclist. There is none of that near-miss passing so common in Anchorage, where no matter how wide and how empty the road there are drivers who won't even edge toward the center line of their lane.

Some of the locals here say drivers behave differently because the area is "bicycle friendly," whatever that means.

All I know is that it is kind of nice to ride somewhere where you don't feel like you have to have eyes in the back of your head at every moment to prevent getting run down.

And in that respect, maybe what makes a community bicycle friendly isn't so much the trails as the community.

Maybe we could do better on that front in Anchorage.

Outdoors editor Craig Medred writes an opinion column. Find him online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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