It wasn’t one of those official car-free pledges or hyped-up social media challenges. It wasn’t because gas prices are kind of insane again. Rather, when Eric Butte decided in September to shut his car in his garage for months on end, he was really just curious. What would it be like to ride his bike around town every day?
“Having seen the traffic,” he said last Thursday afternoon after riding his bike to East Hampton Village despite a chance of intermittent rain, “I thought just as an experiment, since I have the flexibility,” that going without a car would be interesting. It was also a way to address environmental concerns, “but without making a big statement.”
“It turned into a seven-month project that highlighted how many problems there are for alternative transport on the East End,” said Mr. Butte, who has lived in East Hampton for more than 20 years, the last 12 full time.
Here are his observations, put into terms that he hopes will sound constructive rather than critical.
“A large sign outside the recycling center clearly states ‘no bicycles,’ so even if someone was trying to contribute by taking a car off the road and had a small bike trailer to make their garbage run, they wouldn’t be allowed in the facility.”
“The bus system is infrequent, which isn’t in itself a problem, but after a certain hour — 7 or 7:30 p.m. — it’s nonexistent,” he said.
Trains are unfortunately infrequent, too, and you can’t take a bike on some of them. “There is a price point where driving costs the same as taking the train,” Mr. Butte said, referring to times he had to take a train as far west as Jamaica in order to head back east on a different branch, like Huntington or Oyster Bay.
In the evenings, Mr. Butte said he passed “quite a few late-night restaurant workers biking back to Springs. . . . It sort of highlights the lack of consistent transportation that is aligned with the schedules of the people who need it.”
“It seems like if we want cars off the road, we have to pre-emptively add train and bus service that works for people’s schedules. If you build it, they will come — it might take a little while.”
“I feel bad for people who only have bikes available to them when full season is in gear, because drivers seem to be a little bit more distracted or in a rush.”
A “really big thing,” Mr. Butte said, was “knowing that a five-minute drive to the shops is going to take me 20 minutes to bike. [It] made me more thoughtful about planning things.”
Streets like Stephen Hand’s Path and Three Mile Harbor Road need “a lot of work to make it biker friendly.”
Speaking of Three Mile Harbor Road, those who attended the May 8 meeting at East Hampton Town Hall concerning Suffolk County’s upcoming overhaul of the road heard Mr. Butte speak about his experiences without a car. The county is planning bike lanes on both sides of the road, but their specific attributes have yet to be decided.
“Whether it was day or night,” he told a standing-room-only crowd, “the speed with which people drive is incredibly high. Consider how you are going to separate the bike lane from the car path that you’re talking about. Painted lines, unfortunately, are not going to do it. Bump-type indicators might help. In the European model, the sidewalk is extended and the bike lane is raised above the street.”
Earlier that day, county officials spent time in East Hampton riding the new on-demand buses that replaced the fixed-route 10B and 10C buses.
After the roadwork meeting, “Our county legislator gave me that flier about the new bus service and said, ‘Oh, do you know about this new on-demand service?’ I said, ‘I do, and my neighborhood is not covered. It has been left out.’ ”
Ahead of his experiment, Mr. Butte made a few inexpensive safety investments: a new red strobe light for the back of his bike and a new white handlebar light for the front.
A few times, when he had to get to Kennedy Airport, he found himself biking to the train with a piece of rolling luggage in tow.
He learned some uplifting lessons, too. Notably, when he was riding his bike on clear nights, even in the cold winter months, the scenery was “really very meditative and incredibly beautiful,” Mr. Butte said.
He found himself scheduling his bike rides around town so that they would also serve as cardio exercise. He also found himself growing more conscious of trash disposal when going grocery shopping, opting for items with less packaging that he would have to lug home in a big backpack, which also meant less waste to deal with later.
And “the idea that you can make a difference, one person at a time” was a great feeling, all around.
He acknowledged it was easier on him because he doesn’t have children to shuttle to after-school activities or pediatrician appointments. “It made me wonder about the people who economically can’t afford to have a car,” he said. “What do they do? How do they get their family around? There really aren’t great options.”
Mr. Butte’s goal was to go for three months without a car at first, which then turned into six, and then seven, before he was ready to get back behind the wheel. He joked that his social life had taken a bit of a hit, since he paid fewer visits to friends in Hampton Bays and Southampton. “Once I had my car back, people were like, ‘Oh, good to see you again.’ ”
Out of this process came some concrete ideas, like adding a bike rack at Town Hall and expanding the area served by the on-demand buses. Could the Long Island Rail Road eliminate ticket fees for intra-zone travel, for instance, between East Hampton and Montauk? Could the free Hampton Hopper or Circuit services be expanded?
“If we could all figure out how to coexist” — drivers, bicyclists, pedestrians, commuters — “it would be tremendous,” he said. “I’m not giving up my car, but I would use my car less if the roads were more conducive to biking. . . . Hopefully someone will say, ‘Oh, okay, there are people who would bike if we made it conducive, or just less dangerous at the very least.’ ”
