Dave Askins ... Ann Arbor's Workman Biker

Centrifugal Force
Dave Askins rigged up the teeter-totter to a set of pedals, cranks, and gears. You go up and down for a while and everything's normal. It's a normal teeter-totter life. Then he says clip in and the shoes he gave you to wear all of a sudden make sense, but the sensation is no longer teeter-tottering. It's spinning and you're helping to make it happen. That's why everything's fine for a while. You're doing it.

It's not like a passive adventure ride at Cedar Point where someone else pulls the levers and makes it happen and you just get sick to your stomach. You pedal harder. Dave's talking the whole time about ways to bring biking into everyday life where it becomes more normal than putting your foot on a gas pedal. More normal than hiding from the air we breathe within the sealed envelope of metal and glass.

And the ride gets faster. You're in the middle of the street and cars go around you as you spin with wild teetering arcs, up and down and sideways. But the cars don't mind and you don't mind and eventually you're one focused centrifuge separating out cars from people walking by, kids selling lemonade, kids running around, cyclists waving as they pass, solo banjo players on the street, life in the city where all these various worlds coexist, and then there's Dave separated out as well.

He's riding up the street on his bike with his Bikes at Work bike trailer, hauling books for Books by Chance or teas for Arbor Teas. When he's not teetering or working on the Ann Arbor Chronicle, he's hauling a load.

If you're around downtown during the day, especially in the Old West Side area, you've seen Dave. He's a distinct character on the street, not just because he has a beard that reaches toward his chest, though that is a distinct feature. And not just because he's friendly and talkative. Neighborhood kids run up to him and he likes to tease them a bit or chat for a few minutes. There are a lot of "hi Dave's" as he makes his rounds. "I'm not even sure who each person is who waves," he says. "They're out of context on the street. I know I've met them somewhere, but I'm not always sure where." But Dave's ubiquitous presence breeds familiarity. "I like being out on the bike. It's closer to the community in a physical sense."

Mostly, you can't miss him because of that bike and trailer combination loaded down with whatever he's hauling at that moment. It looks daunting. You feel his pain, but you're glad that it's not your pain. For some, just getting their legs over the saddle of a bike is challenge enough, much less hauling a couple hundred pounds of books up and down the hills of this town. Every move has to be calculated in advance. It's a Fruehauf of a bike load.

Then there are the days he hauls his teeter-totter down the road. With teeter in tow, lights change to red before the tail end has a chance to clear the intersection. It's like watching a fire truck pass with the ladder fully extended out the back.

Hauling Stuff
The trailer, made by Bikes At Work, is an aluminum marvel of functional engineering. It has holes and knobs for all kinds of tie down options. It has a pivoting swingarm that attaches firmly to a strong part of the bike frame. It has cute aluminum fenders. It looks like it was engineered by an engineer. It's not to be messed with. It is big and robust compared to those kid hauling bike trailers wandering the byways.

Crossing a street is a physics problem. Add it up: a few hundred pounds, plus an overall length of close to twelve feet, then take into account the percent of road slope up or down, and finally the speed at which a car approaches on the cross street. Get any of those wrong and there could be a lot of books strewn all over the street and one not very happy guy with a long beard.

3000 lbs vs. 23 lbs
Dave's been hit by cars before as a solo rider without having any trailer to deal with. It's the dread of any commuter. In the first incident he was crossing the I-94 overpass on State Street. "The rear end of the bike lifted right up," Dave said. "I had no idea what was going on." (Hmmm. Teeter totters do that. Seed of an idea perhaps?) The front end of a car met the rear end of his bike and he lost the match. His bike was trash, but he came out okay, if a bit stunned.

The second time he was zipping along Maple near the M-14 interchange. He had the right-of-way and made eye contact with the driver of the car sitting at the stop sign. Apparently eye contact wasn't enough. She pulled out and he T-boned her. Hint for Dave: stay away from freeway interchanges.

Communication
These experiences have led to a sage wariness about what a couple thousand pounds of moving metal can do to a gangly twenty pounds of bike and the trauma imposed on its rider. He's confident out there with his heavily laden trailer, but he doesn't take any foolish chances. It's all about clear signals to those around him and gauging where he is at any given moment. It's not as much about strict rules of the road as it is about safety, courtesy and communication. He doesn't always come to a complete stop at stop signs, but that doesn't mean he blows through them either. And he never tries to beat a car. But he also knows that if it came down to it and a police officer gave him a ticket for not stopping, he'd accept the consequences and pay the ticket.

Seizing Diem
He rides a beautiful titanium Airborne Carpe Diem that seizes the moment with extra G forces. The wheels were locally built up to withstand the heavy load and year round abuse that his routes dish out.

What caught him by surprise recently was his front fork. He left his house one afternoon, trailer in tow. At the end of the street the front of the bike felt a bit spongy. As he applied the brakes, the sponge snapped. Both sides of the fork sheared right off. All those loads, day after day, week after week, year round had created metal fatigue on the aluminum fork and it finally had enough. Fortunately, that surprise happened at a very slow speed just as he was leaving for a job. He doesn't like to think about the possibilities if he'd been traveling faster.

Dave doesn't own a car. He's a Zip car guy if he needs one, which he usually doesn't. In fact, he has yet to make use of the Zip system. In this case, he needed to fix the bike pronto and the Zip car takes advance notice. The bike is part of his livelihood and he couldn't wait. So he schlepped by foot up to Great Lakes Cycling on Stadium with the bike over his shoulder and the fork pieces in his hands. They found him a nice new steel fork. (Who ever heard of an aluminum fork, anyway?) If it happens again, it's hoped that this new one will bend rather than snap. If you've watched him bounding downhill with trailer fully loaded, you'll realize just what kind of assurance that brings.

Yes, Ann Arbor is Like the Rest of the World
Ann Arbor is not flat. There's always a hill or two or three somewhere between where you are and where you're going. Ride down Liberty headed east. Cross the railroad tracks at First Street. Look up. There's a wicked spike of a hill leading up to Ashley. This short climb hurts when you're riding a bike solo. I recently watched a middle-aged non-athletic couple ride their bikes up this hill. It was painful to watch as they zig-zagged their way crank by crank up the slope.

Imagine hauling that trailer with those few hundred pounds of books. Imagine getting the red light at each intersection. Even as you wait at Ashley alongside the Fleetwood, there's still a bit of hill to finish as the light turns green and you go from a dead stop to cross the street, and even then it's still an uphill slope to Main. Gentle, but uphill.

Or...the other option is to take the books west, up the long, long uphill trek to the post office on Stadium. There's no way out without an up.

Dave does this year round. It's not like he takes the winters off. I've seen him out there hauling away in some of the most gruesome weather possible, even through deep snow. Why? "It's accessible economically and it's energy efficient," says Dave in a simple matter-of-fact way. "It's not that bad once you get out in it. It just looks bad while you're standing inside."

Embedded Energy
In fact, while many of us are still trying to figure out how to get our cars to be more efficient, Dave, without any car, is concerned about his small impact on the world. He thinks about the "embedded energy" in the aluminum and titanium of his bike and trailer system--the energy it takes to make them, use them, then to discard them. That's one reason he ended up using the trailer to haul the books and the tea. He'd originally purchased it to tote groceries and for personal errands. But he wanted to use it for more than that alone. Then one day in the early winter of 2007 he bumped into John Weise of Books by Chance. After a short discussion and a trial run, he was in the delivery business. The next fall he added Arbor Tea. He does UPS and USPS runs for both.

Dave's had other bike lives. From ages ten to sixteen, he used a bike to deliver papers in his hometown of Columbus, Indiana. He once rode from Columbus to St. Louis, Missouri where he went to college. The most memorable trek was a ride from Germany to Portugal in a post-fellowship exploration of Europe. He and a friend traveled light, camped and stayed in hostels. Later he even did a little criterium racing, but realized that it wasn't for him--too much about strategy and not enough about recreation.

But what is Dave's idea of an ideal ride? A very long one. Without having to haul anything, just him and the bike. Head out light and just pedal. Let someone else tote the load.

I don't know. I'm having a hard time seeing Dave without that trailer, but I'm sure anything's possible.

Okay, go ahead and roll your eyes about the excentrifugal teeter-totter. But Dave already dries the family clothes in a spin cycle powered by the spin of his legs. He built it up a while back and when it was done and it worked, he came up to me as excited as a little boy. He'd removed himself from the power grid when it came to drying the outfits that get him through the seasons. Do you really think the centrifugal teeter-totter idea is wacky? Remember, this is Dave. He's already convinced mayors and other supposedly respectable folk to teeter along with him in his "Homeless" alter ego as he asks them about current issues. Do you think the multi-modal teeter is far behind?

Watch for it. Dave's always pondering something.