Manhattan Tutti Strada Postponed

I'm sorry to report that my proposed adventure, tentatively titled "Manhattan Tutti Strada" (All Manhattan Streets/Roads) is being indefinitely postponed. This adventure was going to consist of me riding my bicycle on all the streets in Manhattan. This was something I wanted to do in my younger days when I could still run. I thought that trading my running shoes in for my bicycle was a fair trade given the lack of cooperation by the intervening years.

Anyway, I spoke to my Cousin Louis and he wasn’t too keen on the idea and that got me to wondering exactly how long this would take me and how many miles I would have to cover. For those of you out there who are math-phobic, skip the next few paragraphs and go straight to the paragraph that begins with, “So it seems that this wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

I did a little arithmetic and came to some startling conclusions. Manhattan is 22 miles long, but is truncated at the northern and southern ends. (When was the last time you came across the word “truncated”?) So I used a length of 20 miles in my calculations. The average width of Manhattan is 2 miles or 12 avenues. This means that there are about 240 north-south miles (20 miles x 12 avenues). That’s a lot, but pales in comparison to the east-west streets.

There are 20 short blocks (that run east-west) to the mile in Manhattan. Given that Manhattan is 20 miles long and two miles wide that means that there are 800 east-west miles of streets (20 miles x 20 blocks per mile x 2 miles wide). That’s a lot of miles. The whole total is about 1,040 miles. That’s even more than a lot of miles.

So it seems that this wasn’t such a good idea after all. This past Saturday I rode about 50 miles and was pretty tired. I would have to repeat that journey about 21 times. That means it would take me about two years if I went once a month or one year if I went twice per month. Given that I probably couldn’t do too much riding in the winter and probably couldn’t ride as fast on the crowded Manhattan streets as I did on the auto-less trails in New Jersey, I figure it would take anywhere from three to four years to complete this journey. Man, I don’t know if this is going to work.

I haven’t given up yet though. Maybe I just need to talk to a more optimistic relative and/or one with less-grounded mental facilities.

Take care and I'll talk to you soon.