With the fabulous bike-ro-phone invented by engineer Tim Skoog. The patent involved getting a hockey helmet from the Goodwill and equipping it with a microphone on the face guard that sits about an inch from one’s mouth; to limit wind distortion the microphone is covered with blue fake fur from the arm of a stuffed animal (If you think I’m making this up, you don’t know our engineer—he ripped off the arm of a cookie monster doll.)

There are a lot of things about bicyclists—and I’m one—that annoy me. Like the kid riding the wrong way down Commonwealth Avenue today (“Look, Ma, no hands!”) across the red light and into my path or the guy that ran over my foot as I was stepping off the sidewalk the other day. And, while I’m at, what’s up with wearing spandex cluttered with the spumoni of commercials and colors? I don’t get it.

But when it gets down to it, people who drive cars annoy me even more, and in greater numbers—they’ve driven into me, run me off the road, cut me off, knocked down my mail box, and get in my way in ever growing numbers on my commute into Boston. You know, at some point everyone has to take sides, and for me, when it comes to the future of cities, like Boston, cars are going to end up on the losing side of history. I’m on the side of the bicycle…if not on the side of that BU kid who cut me off this morning. I’ve never biked in this city before… until this week. If we were going to do a show on bicycling I figured we should put bicycles to the test as serious transportation. I might as well get on a bike. My personal motivation was pragmatic as well. My drive from Commonwealth Avenue out to Route 2 is insanely slow. The day I timed it—it took me a half hour, and that was a good day, to get from work to the Alewife T; it often takes an hour. There was a dog in the backseat of the car next to me with his head out the window. He looked like he wanted to run. I figured I’d have a better chance biking. Sure enough, I did the five mile stretch in 20 minutes by bike.

That was promising. Why haven’t I done this before? In my youth I biked in Seattle, I even biked when I lived in Alaska (24 hours of sunlight in summer—I never needed a reflector), and I bike in the sticks, where I live, but Boston I always thought was the worst place on Earth outside Baghdad for biking.

My good fortune and surprise this week is that it’s been okay so far.

Biking through Cambridge, I learned about how roads and lanes can be designed to make bicycling safer. And how traffic can be calmed down to make the streets safer even without bike lanes. Clearly safety, or more to the point, fear, is the number one reason people have for not wanting to bicycle in the city. Get more people out on the roads and together they’ll feel safer. Create space and lanes and separate tracks for bicycles and more people will go out into the roads.

Forty percent of all trips in the city—people going from point A to point B—are shorter than two miles. Imagine the effect on congestion, the climate, and our neighborhoods of encouraging more people to use bicycles instead of cars. Currently no more than one half of one percent of residents commute by bicycle. In Cambridge it’s two percent.

Is changing that going to be hard? No harder, no way, when compared to building more highways and roads. Since I live 70 miles away, I’m not dumping my car, but I’m sure going to buy a bike lock.

P.S. The head of the cookie monster now serves as a mascot for Radio Boston.