Partial List of Reasons why St Paul is a Great Bicycle City

[Striping better bike lanes on Summit Avenue.]

[Despite the St-Thomas-looking, backward-white-baseball-cap-wearing young man in a beige Chrysler with Iowa plates who yelled “get on the sidewalk” at me this very morning, I want to share this partial list. (Special thanks to Amy, Jeff, and Andy for your help with this!)]

• Having hills and river bluffs are a great workout when you go up them 
• Aforementioned hills and river bluff workouts mean you are way more fit than the wimps over in perfectly flat Minneapolis
• Previously mentioned hills and river bluffs are also super fun when you go down them (Marshall Avenue, wheeee!)
• The fact that you can't get to St Paul by bike from Minneapolis without going up said hills and river bluffs keeps out the riffraff
• Flying along East River Road skirting the very edge of the river bluff like you are about to fall into the Mississippi which (because it’s not so anally separated between pedestrians and bicyclists and removed from the edge of the bluff) is way better than the West River Road, Q.E.D.
• All the trails like Bruce Vento, Gateway, Crosby Park, Hidden Falls, Lilydale give you a feeling of being far from the city, like you have completely escaped and are in the woods by yourself in the middle of nowhere, though secretly you are still in St Paul
• Biking along the river South-East of downtown and looking to your left and seeing a barge going along next to you
• Swede Hollow!
• Cruising down the big beautiful bike lane on Summit past all the mansions
• St Paul cops aren’t as big of jerks to cyclists as Minneapolis cops, for the most part, most of the time, mostly
• The Saint Paul Classic, which is a great, fun, annual city bike tour, and the guy who founded it, Richard Arey
• The fact that most of the neighborhoods are designed on grids so that you can usually find a quiet, low-traffic street that parallels a loud, high-traffic arterial in any given corridor
• The distances in Saint Paul are often too far to walk but just right for bicycling, i.e. you can get from one end of the city to the other in a half-hour or 45 minutes by bike, and see lots of interesting stuff
• Bike lanes on Summit, Como, Jefferson, (some of) Johnson Parkway, and Prior
• The Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition!

[The view of Fort Snelling from the bike trail at the very bottom of St Paul.]