One key part to maintaining a biking lifestyle is being intentional in planning your daily routine. You need to identify businesses that you visit frequently and plan to stick with the same place for a while. This could include any type of business, such as grocery, gym, parks, hairdresser/barber, or childcare/ daycare. If you live in suburban area, there are likely many options around you– some close and some far away. So how do you select the one that is right for you and still allows you to bike? Below we discuss finding the right daycare as an example, but the same methodology can be applied to other establishments. Why start with day care? Well, our family had a recent addition, and this addition needs a place to hang out while we are working.
Throughout this analysis, you also might want to consider when you can bike with a baby.
When to Look for a Daycare?
This has nothing to do with biking, but we found it shocking that many places in the United States require a deposit to hold a spot as early as six months in advance! So, you might want to start looking for daycares and planning earlier than you think. If you are wondering why the United States daycare market is at capacity and so broken, check out this segment on NPR.
Step 1: Find All Daycares in a 20-Minute Radius
Put together a list of day cares within 20 minutes biking time of your home address. How to find these locations? Simply go to Google Maps, locate your home, and then search nearby for “daycare” or “childcare.”
Why 20 minutes? It’s part of the 20-minute neighborhood concept and can feel like a reasonable amount of time to travel for a daily task. Any longer and you’ll likely feel the impact of carving out even more time ferrying your kid around. Of course, there are exceptions. For example, you may be OK with a longer travel time if the daycare is on the way to work, saving overall time in the day. Or, you may be OK with additional distance to prioritize a high-quality daycare. However, more travel time for an errand could negatively impact your motivation or safety (probability of a crash) just like it would when using a car.
Step 2: Identify High-Quality Daycares
You want the best for your child, so don’t skip this step. For each daycare in the 20-minute biking radius, read childcare reviews, talk to the staff, and schedule tours at each location.
Daycares understand that this evaluation is part of the process and should be willing to accommodate your schedule. There isn’t one way to identify a high-quality establishment, but you might want to consider the caretaker-to-child ratio (minimum often dictated by state laws), teacher/caretaker qualifications and turnover, cleanliness and organization of the facility, as well as educational program as children advance in age. In some cases, it might be a general gut feel when you visit a location. Hopefully, by the end of this step you will have a few high-quality facilities on your list.
Step 3: Filter Out Daycares that do not Meet your Needs or Priorities
Start to filter out daycares that don’t fit your family needs or priorities. You might consider if the cost is in budget, if there are flexible hours of operation that can accommodate your work schedule, earliest availability for a spot, or how many mandatory holidays there are in a year that would require outside childcare.
Step 4: Select a Daycare that has Options for Safe Accessibility
Accessibility is important because the more ways you can access a daycare, the better. Ultimate flexibility means that you can safely walk, bike, drive, or take public transportation. If you have time, and the weather is nice, you might walk. If you have less time, or it’s part of a longer commute then you can bike or take public transportation. Finally, if you are in a rush, then you can fall back on driving.
Many times, the closest daycare will have the best level of accessibility, but there are other aspects to consider. For example, if you can travel to the daycare on a bike path, then you’ll have an easier and more pleasant way of getting there than you would if you had to cross a major road. Also, if the route to the daycare aligns well with other daily stops (i.e. work, school, evening activities), then you might opt for a location that is less accessible or convenient if it saves time overall in your day.
When doing this analysis, also consider safety — especially the specific route and biking infrastructure to get to the daycare. We highly recommend avoiding busy roads with high-speed traffic even if there is a dedicated bike lane. You might find it makes sense to bike on the sidewalk.
Step 5: Test the Route
Before making a final decision, ride or walk the route to the daycare on the weekend. Go alone or with your kid. Perhaps take your dog for a walk. If your route includes a cafe or coffee shop, it can be a fun weekend outing for the whole family. If you have the opportunity, try biking the route in the dark to simulate early morning and late evening winter commutes.
Don’t fully trust the first bike route shown on Google Maps. Look for shortcuts through parks of businesses that can save time or improve the travel experience. In these cases, some on-foot exploration might be required, but you may already be familiar with nifty shortcuts in your neighborhood.
An Example how to Pick a Daycare
To illustrate the search process, we picked a random location in Gresham, an Eastern suburb of Portland.
Disclaimer: all of the reasons to disqualify day cares are random and fabricated for the purpose of analysis. This example should not be considered real opinion or endorsement. We never visited any of the daycares or read any of the business reviews.
Step 1: Find all Daycares in a 20-minute Radius
Our randomly selected “home base” is Central Station Apartment Complex, shown by the red marker in City Central. There are ten daycares nearby noted by purple location markers.
Steps 2 & 3: Identify High-Quality Daycares that meet Needs and Priorities
Six daycares are filtered out because they do not meet our quality expectations, needs, and/or priorities. In this case, they were randomly removed for the purpose of analysis. The four remaining daycares, noted in green location markers are considered acceptable, so we move on to do an accessibility analysis. At first glance, each of the locations are very close-by for walking and biking — your options may be further away.
- Gresham City Learning Center (17 min walk, 3 min bike ride)
- Child Care Development Services (14 min walk, 3 min bike ride)
- Eagle Twins Day Care (14 min walk, 3 min bike ride)
- Gresham Kinder Care (17 min walk, 5 min bike ride)
Step 4: Options for Safe Accessibility
All of the options can be easily accessed by walking, biking, or driving so we next step is to look at the route for safety. This can be a bit tedious, but the best way of doing it is to follow Google Maps Street view from the home base to the daycare.
- Gresham City Learning Center (17 min walk, 3 min bike ride). This route has multiple options that don’t have bike lanes, but go along low-speed streets. There are also a few cafes and coffee shops in case you want to stop by for breakfast on the way.
- Child Care Development Services (14 min walk, 3 min bike ride). This is a very similar route to Gresham City Learning Center, but has slightly shorter walk time.
- Eagle Twins Day Care (14 min walk, 3 min bike ride). This route goes along slightly busier road that has a bike lane. It also includes a major road crossing that has a crosswalk which can detract from the biking experience.
- Gresham Kinder Care (17 min walk, 5 min bike ride). Similar to Eagle Twins Day Care, it goes along a very busy road (NE Division) with a bike lane. It is the longest travel time, but still very close-by.
We prefer less busy streets without bike lane over busy roads with bike lanes, so our selection would be between the first two candidates, Gresham City Learning Center or Child Care Development Services. Final decision might be based on other factors that stood out in prior steps.
Step 5 Test the Route
Bike the route to both locations, noting how the travel time feels or anything notable in your experience to narrow down to the final option. Your decision might also be based on other factors that stood out in prior steps of analysis. Once you’ve decided, don’t forget to get the deposit in early!
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