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 Practical Cycle is a family business in Old Sacramento. Our mission is to make cycling more practical for everyday people. We specialize in electric bikes, cargo bikes, tricycles, and commuter bikes as viable transportation options that are more fun, healthy, green, and affordable than automobiles. We stock a wide variety of accessories designed to make your bike more practical. We also offer bike rentals from our prime location near the American River Parkway bicycle path.
Our regular business hours are 10AM to 7PM daily during Spring/Summer and 10AM to 6PM daily during Fall/Winter. Early and late appointments are available, please contact us.
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Practical Cycle Blog
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Bike Commuting Tips
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A Better Way to Travel
Photo Credit: Sac Cycle Chic on a Worksman Commuter Bike
High gas prices. Expensive car payments. Traffic delays. Road rage. Expanding waistlines. There are many great reasons to consider traveling to work by bicycle. It's an effective, healthy, inexpensive, and fun alternative that is attracting more and more commuters all over the world. And the more you know, the more enjoyable bike commuting becomes.
Most of the people I know travel by means other than the bicycle. For the most part, they're still internal combusters. Automobile drivers. It's the norm, isn't it? In a society like ours--where more money is spent advertising automobiles than is spent on the entire national mass transit system, where everyone's background assumption equates travel with driving--it isn't easy to make the shift to bicycle commuting. I can attest to that. As detailed in this essay, I made many mistakes. I did it all wrong.
These articles aren't intended as the comprehensive guide to commuting by bicycle. It's not a "program" intended to work for everyone, in every situation. It merely relates the hard lessons learned by one cyclist over many years of riding to work everyday. My hope is that prospective bike commuters will avoid my errors. If nothing else, my experience demonstrates that it can be done. The addiction to driving can be broken, the necessity of mass transit strap-hanging can be avoided. The following might, just might, encourage others to discover how bicycle commuting can enhance their lives.
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"The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic."
-James Marston Fitch, New York Times, May 1, 1960
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Written by Paul Dorn
Paul Dorn is a writer and activist in Northern California, presently residing in Sacramento. He is the co-author (with Roni Sarig) of The Bike to Work Guide: What You Need to Know to Save Gas, Go Green, Get Fit, published in 2008 by Adams Media. He is the former editor of the Tube Times, newsletter of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC), and served on the SFBC board of directors. He is the former executive director of the California Bicycle Coalition. Dorn is certified by the League of American Bicyclists as a League Cycling Instructor (#1237).
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