I had an 8-mile bike trip today that I really enjoyed. It was a slow cruise from my house to Autozone, on my commuter, with a worn-out car battery stuffed in one of my pannier bags. I figured that I’ve taken my car to bring bikes in need of repair to bike shops enough times before — it was high time that I did more of the reverse.

It wasn’t like it was a difficult excursion — but it was something that I normally would have done by car. That’s one more trip by bike, one less by car, and — hopefully — will set a pattern for future similar journeys. The transition away from the vehicle is all about baby steps. Just look at initiatives like the Clif Bar 2-Mile Challenge , the similar One-Mile Solution proposal , and the budding Ten Trip Challenge . Clif Bar encourages frequenting local establishments and walking or biking to get there; One-Mile Solution advocates replacing one car trip per week; and participants in the Ten Trip Challenge try to minimize car journeys to 10 per month. Curious about how practical this would be to do in your neighborhood? Walk Score is a super-cool site that attempts to quantify just how ped-friendly the area around any given address is. My house rates a reasonable 69 out of 100 — but if you included bikeability, I’ve got just about everything close by. Move over a couple of blocks and the score jumps to 90.

When you hear yourself making excuses about it being too cold/wet/hot/whatever to ride, or you don’t know how the heck you’d carry something “so heavy” on your bike, remember that it’s all relative. Need inspiration? Check out Icebike for info on people riding through the winter… in Alaska! And for some cool snippets of people hauling lotsa gear, StreetFilms has several videos of Bike Moves, like this one below, that are pretty impressive.

I own a car which I drive very infrequently. Although I’ve contemplated giving it up and transitioning to a Zipcar car-sharing membership, my bike racing and pet ownership (no un-crated pets allowed with Zipcar) make this a little tough. So, I keep my almost 40mpg crapbox 1990 Civic, throw a Sabertec Blade on the muffler (more on that in a future post), and, along with the rest of my race team , try to downscale by one trip at a time.

Photo via Flickr by owenstache .