Trick question. What city in Michigan has the highest percentage of no-car households? Ah, you think, it must be a dense urban setting with a lot of very poor people. The city of Detroit, in other words. But Detroit only ranks 4th highest in the state; 21.9% of the housing units there have no vehicles available, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. If you know the Detroit area well, you know that there are some old suburbs and enclaves which are denser than Detroit. And indeed, they are strong choices. The city of Ecorse has 19.8% no-car households, and ranks 8th; Hamtramck has 20.5% and ranks 7th; River Rouge has 21.1% and ranks 5th; and Highland Park has 39.4% and ranks 2nd highest in the state. But what city is 1st? Another thought would be one of the poorest outstate cities. Muskegon Heights has 20.7% and ranks 11th; Benton Harbor has 31.5% and ranks 3rd. Still not the answer. What of college towns? Most university students used to go without cars, but not any more. Of Michigan cities with state universities, Big Rapids (Ferris State University) ranks 25th with 14.3%, and all the others (Detroit excepted) are less. Ypsilanti (Eastern Michigan University) is 29th, Kalamazoo (Western Michigan University) is 44th, Marquette (Northern Michigan University) is 63rd, East Lansing (Michigan State University) is 102nd, and Ann Arbor (University of Michigan) is 108th, with only 9.5%. This is a dramatic change: as recently as the 1980 census, Ann Arbor was in the top ten! Okay, enough teasing. The Michigan city which ranks #1 on this statistic, where 54.4% of households have no car, is the city of Mackinac Island. Which is pretty good, considering that it isn't legal to bring automobiles onto the island. (Presumably the residents who have cars garage them in nearby Mackinaw City or St. Ignace, accessible from the island by passenger ferries.) I mention this because I just returned from a visit to the famous island (phonetically "Mackinaw"), just east of the Mackinac Bridge which connects Michigan's two distinct regions, the Upper Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula. Mackinac Island is not the preserved 19th Century setting promised by tourist brochures. Most of the old houses have been crudely redone with vinyl siding, losing whatever architectural features they may have had, or demolished to make way for new condo complexes. The place has changed a lot since I last visited some thirty years ago. But it is still a place where the horse rules transportation; even garbage is collected by horsedrawn vehicles. Motorized golf carts are permitted only within golf courses. There are three emergency vehicles on the island, but they are rarely seen. Unlike the horses of New York City's Central Park, Mackinac Island horses work au naturel, with no diapers. The horse dung on the roads is quickly attended to. Even so, it's a reminder of how dirty every road and street used to be in the horsedrawn era. A citizen of 1900, suddenly transported to 1950, would have been astonished at the cleanliness of city streets. A citizen of 1950, suddenly transported to 2000, would also have been astonished by clean streets, because we no longer have cars which routinely drip oil everywhere they go. If you're as old as I am, you remember the greasy black stripe down the middle of every traffic lane. We think fondly of horsedrawn carriages and old-fashioned cars, and treasure places like Mackinac Island, but surely we are better off with cleaner technologies. When you take the carriage tour of the island, the guide introduces the horses, and says a bit about their respective personalities. The horsedrawn tour has to make periodic stops, not just to see sights, but to rest the horses. Unlike a car, you can't just park a horse and leave it overnight; there has to be a stable, staffed with handlers to attend to feeding, watering, and cleaning. A century ago, every city had this kind of infrastructure for routine horse care. In downtown Ann Arbor, Ashley Street (parallel with Main, one block west) was lined with livery stables and the like. Nowadays, it would probably be regarded as animal cruelty and a violation of zoning laws to keep horses in a downtown building. But life on Mackinac Island still seems to revolve around horse handling, stabling, training, feeding, and so on. Seeing it makes clear just how much labor, how much time and effort, how many skilled people, are required to keep this all going day after day. No doubt it's a major reason why things on the island are so expensive.27 responses total.
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"how many skilled people". Seems to me that it was less of a "skill" than it appears. Think about how many "skilled" people it takes to drive a car. When horses were transportation, caring for them wasn't so much of a specialty. What is awesome is that transporting people and goods has always taken a great deal of the capital of a society. The less transporting you have to do, the closer to the source that food, entertainment, etc are consumed, the more financial and social capital is available for other purposes.
Re #0: It may be part of the reason why things on the island are so expensive, but I think the major reason things are expensive there is that it's a tourist trap. They charge those kinds of prices for things because they can.
It's so true, but I'm nostalgic for the stories I heard of carriages drawn by horses so used to a routine that the driver could concentrate on getting some drinking in before arriving at the barn.
Re 1. Of course. Re 2 (para #1). True, but caring for horses is a specialty now. Re 3. And if it weren't a tourist trap, no doubt cars would be allowed. How many comparably sized and populated islands in the Great Lakes (or elsewhere) ban automobiles? Re 4. You can rent a horse and carriage there; the tour books sa that the horses know their way around the island, so you can't get lost.
You can't get lost anyway. The island is pretty small. It doesn't take long to walk around it (eight miles), and there aren't many internal roads. Of course, a bicycle makes it even "smaller".
I tried to bike on Mackinac Island and soon discovered "I am a flatlander". Any attempt at one of the road heading inward (and upward) quickly turned me into a pedestrian pushing a bike up a hill.
But then it's all downhill to English Landing....(I've been there, done that).
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I used to ride around Houghton on a road bike. I was in considerably better shape then than I am now. I continually wished I had a mountain bike, since they have much lower gearing, but was too cheap to actually buy one.
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Mine's a Schwinn LeTour. A heavy bike by modern standards, but considerably lighter than the cheap Roadmaster it replaced. I paid $50 for it.
My son and I rode our bike around Mackinac Island last June. We then pushed it up to the top, where we found Fort Mackinac was closed for the day. We visited other sites up on the hill. Pushing the bike up the hill was not the hardest part of "biking" to the interior of the island. Coming down the hill was *frightening*.
i love my bike. it's brown and small with pedal-backwards brakes. the chain guard broke off the other day and it has 2 locks. when i bike home drunk and accidentally crash into parked cars or the ground or wet tram tracks, it still holds up fine. man i love my bike.
(I didn't know they still made bikes with pedal-backwards brakes.)
Thjose are called coaster brakes right.
Yup; that's what they are, bru.
(my bike's pretty old)
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I have a Sears Free Spirit 10-speed in storage at my previous residence, i.e., a friend's house.
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Pedal backwards brakes? That might be a coaster brake, but there are also bikes without a free wheel. It's impossible to coast them, if the wheel is turning then the pedals are turning. If you're good, you can "stand" in place with them, actually going backwards/forwards. Slowing down is difficult since you have to slow the motion of the pedals. The one I used to ride, built by my brother, had a hand brake to make it possible to stop in a safe distance. It just had a standard sprocket, screwed on, and threaded so that it tended to tighten when pedalling. This was a potential problem, since if you tried to stop hard enough you could unscrew the sprocket. The only time that happened however was when someone stole it from our house once. We found it half a block away, laying by the side of the road, with the sprocket unscrewed. Apparantly, someone grabbed it, pedaled away as fast as they could, and half a block away, decided it was safe to coast a bit. I've always wondered exactly how far that person flew.
nah mine can coast. that would suck severely if i couldn't.
Mine has been locked up in the same place for several months. The back tire goes flat a lot, so I tend to drive or rollerblade rather than biking. (i've changed the inner tube at least 4 times, checked for sharp things inside the tire, and had it in to the shop twice where they found nothing wrong with it.) Shame, really--other than that it's not a bad bike.
I think you can get Kevlar-lined bike tires, Lynne.
When you pull out the inner tube, you can pump it up and look for the leak. If it's in a consistent place, you've then got a very specific spot on the tire or rim to check for sharp stuff. If it's somewhere different each time, you've got some other problem. If it's of the "snake bite" variety (two holes right next to eachother), that's most likely caused by being pinched between the rim and some bump you hit, in which case the cure is to pump it up to a higher air pressure (so it doesn't compress as easily). If you are just puncturing it a lot, there are a number of things to try. The most obvious is to avoid riding through broken glass if at all possible, and to brush the tires off immediately if you do (one of the things cycling gloves are useful for). Switching to a different type of tire or innertube can help too. My most recent rash of frequent flats stopped when I switched from lightweight high performance innertubes to the heaviest cheapest tubes I could find.
Hmmm. I've found that it tends to go flat slightly less if the air pressure is low, which is not consistent with the snake bite theory. Maybe I'll try to find heavier duty tubes...but as it is, I'm not a big biker, so the tubes I buy tend to be pretty cheap already. :) Tis a timely discussion in any case, as I left my rollerblades in California. No comment as to where I've left my heart. :)
You have several choices: