Biking Valencia, Spain’s Incredible Urban Cycling Infrastructure With Riding & Safety Tips

In Valencia, Spain, I ride through several different urban cycling environments – from streets designed for bikes and to calm traffic to protected lanes to off-street lanes and paths. I discuss ways to safely and navigate this infrastructure. Along the way, I tell some stories about legendary National Hockey League head coach, Ken Hitchcock. This is part one of a two-part video.

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En Valencia, España, recorro varios tipos de infraestructuras ciclistas urbanas: desde calles diseñadas para bicis y para calmar el tráfico, hasta carriles protegidos y vías fuera de la calzada. Comento formas de circular con seguridad y aprovechar esta infraestructura. Y de paso, cuento algunas historias sobre el legendario entrenador de la NHL, Ken Hitchcock. Este es el primer vídeo de una serie de dos partes.

Another video of me riding my bike through the streets of Valencia, Spain. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the cycling infrastructure here and how to ride your bike safely and effectively in the streets in traffic. Uh, the latter I feel like I know a fair bit about. I feel like I do it all quite well. Uh, the former I’m still learning about. So, if you are in Valencia, in Spain, or otherwise better informed about the way things work here, feel free to offer or add more information in the comments or in an email because uh there’s some things I just don’t know about. There are some things that I do know, but I would like reconfirmed. Or to be perfectly honest with you, there are some things that I do know that I’ll act like I don’t know just to boost engagement. Yes, it’s a dirty trick. Uh, and it’s a trick that I’ve used for a long time. Uh, I mentioned in the last video or one of the last videos that I used to host radio talk shows back in in the day. I was about to say my previous life, but I hate when people say that. Um, and one thing we used to do, I used to do um I used to host a postgame show um for the Dallas Stars hockey games. So I go on the air after the games And and by the way, we’ve just ridden through like two very popular, very distinct cycling environments here in Valencia. And I think I’m going to go back around after I’m done telling this story so we can see where they are. We’ll start from there. But I used to uh host the Dallas Stars Postgame show and it was good. It was a lot of fun. It’s probably some of the better radio that I did in what was admittedly a lot of not so good radio, but I would go on right after the games. We didn’t host we didn’t have the games on our station. So when the game would end, we’d cut out of whatever programming was on and go right to my postgame show. And there was a lot of excitement around the Dallas Stars hockey team at the time because they were really, really good. So, I’d stay on till 1 2 3 sometimes 4 in the morning during the playoffs. And for home games very often, the players or the team’s head coach at the time, a great Canadian guy named Ken Hitchcock, would call in to the show. And it was super cool because we weren’t the flagship station for the games, but we were the station they were listening to on the way home and calling into. So, of course, that made me feel pretty good. And what I would do in order to entice Ken Hitchcock in particular to call in was act like I didn’t know something. So, we’d be talking and be in conversation, for example, talking about the Edmonton Oilers, uh, who were a Stanley Cup dynasty in the 1980s. and their famous line consisted of Wayne Gretzky, Yari Curry, and Glenn Anderson, I believe. So, I would start talking, the Oilers would come up in conversation. I think the Stars were playing the Oilers at the time, or I was comparing the Stars to those great Oiler teams, which might have been a bit of a stretch. And I remember saying, “So, that line that the Oilers had during that time, it was Gretzky, Yari Curry, and who was the third guy on that line? I can’t for the life of me remember who it was and without fail. This was one one example of how I would do this. Um without fail they’re like, “Oh, Ken Hitchcock is on the line.” And I would just go to the phone. Hey, Hitch, you’re driving home. How’s it going? Hey, Rocco. And his Canadian accent. Oh, the third guy in that line, you know, was uh Glenn Anderson. Oh, Glenn Anderson Hitch, thank you so much. We appreciate that. Um, so that was fun. Hitchcock was really one of the better guys um you’re ever going to find in sports. Uh, hockey people are fantastic, especially Canadians. But Hitch, he was one of a kind. I remember um when Wayne Gretzky played for the New York Rangers. Um my grandfather was not a big Wayne Gretzky fan cuz he didn’t think Gretzky was tough enough. You know, he would never fight. Everybody else did all the dirty work and all the fighting to protect Gretzky. And he felt like when Gretzky was on the ice, that’s what everybody was doing. and they were focusing on protecting him and they weren’t focusing enough on their strategy, on their game, as you would say it in hockey. So, I remember one time I was in the elevator at the arena where the Dallas Stars play before a game and it just so happened that Ken Hitchcock was in the elevator with me and they were playing the Rangers that day. Gretzky was on the Rangers and I said to Hitch, “Oh, you know, they’re not sure if Gretzky is going to play today cuz he was fighting an injury or something. Um, oh yeah, what do you think? What do you think of the Rangers today? And Hitch says, “Well, you know, I’ll tell you, Rock, I think they might be a little bit tougher if Gretzky isn’t in there because when Gretzky plays, they tend just to focus on him and they don’t focus on their game.” So, of course, I told the story to my grandfather, and his first words were, “See, an NHL coach, an NHL coach agrees with me.” which is just um a great moment that I’m glad he could have because grandfather was a proud man especially about his hockey knowledge. So anyway, there’s that. So in Valencia there are there are many different cycling environments. Right now I’m in the middle of the street as you would be uh in any city. You’re allowed to be there. Sure, you can move over to the left a little bit if you want to, but really where I am right now in this situation is not a problem. Shouldn’t be a problem anywhere in the world, even in the United States. However, in the United States, you will get people who are very uh impatient and they’ll be behind you honking, pushing occasionally, or just being generally impatient because they think you’re in the way and you’re not supposed to be where you are. Not the case. So, this is just a regular street as you can see with a fair bit of traffic. It’s very narrow. as one way as many if not most of the streets in Valencia are, which makes it more difficult for drivers, but which makes it better for people walking or biking through the city. So, just a regular street. I think you need a little bit of maybe a little bit of confidence on the bike to be able to manage this well. But I think even for just a advanced beginner, intermediate rider, this isn’t too crazy. The biggest thing is getting used to the way the streets are set up in Spain. So, we’re coming through this intersection, the light green, and it’s a bit different than an American intersection. So, you just have to get used to those differences. Crossing the nice median. And now we’re heading back into Rousafa in a two-lane street. We’re going to cross another median and that’s going to take us into, I believe, if memory serves me, our first true cycling environment. And if it doesn’t, No, it is. I can see the the markings up ahead. Um, what I did is popped up ahead of the crosswalk there. Technically, you’re not supposed to do that, but from a safety perspective, it’s the way to go. So here we’re in a secret kaj. As I bend down, you might be able to see the marking in the street. You see that? 20 kilomeros per hour. That is slow. I was going faster than that, which is the equivalent of about 12 m an hour, I think. Stop for the people that are coming through the crosswalk and continue on the seclo. So bottom line is at just a very barely a brisk pace I’m going as fast or faster than I need to go and cars need to understand and respect this. It’s a seclo most of them are 20 I’ve seen some that are 30 kilometers per hour maximum speed. I’m in the middle of the road because there’s no need for me to be to the side. big advantage when something like that happens. I can get by, but people aren’t going to push you and so forth because they don’t have the right to do it. Level of patience here is incredible. There’s always taxi cab stopping in the middle of the street, often for much longer than that one just stopped. And people generally tend to be pretty cool. There’s always one. I’d say once a week you encounter somebody who isn’t, but even their anger and their impatience and their angst is a fraction of what you find in LA. So, we’re coming off of the seclo to a busier two-lane traffic street with a separate lane for taxi and EMT traffic. You’ll see there’s a taxi right there. And I’m still unsure if I’m supposed to be in this lane or not. EMT, by the way, is not an emergency vehicle. I was wrong in the last video. It’s the public transportation system. But I think cyclists are okay here. I mean, it makes complete sense to be here and to be out in the street there to the left. The thing though is that, you know, you have to move. You have to move in this lane. There’s nobody behind me right now. I rarely encounter anybody behind me. But this isn’t the lane to just like stroll in. If you want to stroll, you probably just shouldn’t ride on this street. That’s part of the thing here, right? You have so many other options for where you can ride. As a cyclist, if you’re not going fast, you really are kind of a dick to be on this street. You’re just needlessly holding people up. That said, you don’t always know where you’re going or how to get there. So, you have to you you won’t encounter I haven’t encountered in the times when I have gone a bit more slowly there. There’s a lot of infrastructure here is what I’m saying. So, there isn’t a huge need to take the streets that don’t have that infrastructure. Now, here’s a street with nothing. It’s two lanes. It sees a fair bit of traffic relative to a lot of cities. It’s not a lot of car traffic, but it’s there. And It’s pretty easy to navigate. Sometimes people going slow and being patient. There’s a liability right there. Right blinker is on. You want to be to the left of the car. If you’re to the right, you’re potentially in a blind spot and you get turned into, which happened to me in San Francisco once. The person that didn’t really hit me, they grazed me. Just took off. They didn’t care. But this lane you can go at a moderate pace and be okay. Another seclo which brings us back into the heart of Rousafa. There’s a guy walking with a bicycle pump. Bikes are super popular here. Cloaj Lane car de Pero. Um, and now I best way I know how to call this is a sidewalk. Sidewalk bike lane. Pronouncing words in Spanish or I guess in any language you’re just starting to learn is not easy. I have a solid 48 49 years, not counting when I couldn’t talk. Although I guess I was being trained then. So let’s just say a solid almost 50 years of speaking and saying things one way. Adjusting it to fit a new language isn’t easy. But we’ll call this a sidewalk bike lane. And it’s a part of the relatively new infrastructure here where there’s a lane of street traffic. There’s parked cars and then there’s a bike lane on the sidewalk and then there’s a pretty wide sidewalk where people can walk. One thing about this one on Kaja De Kuba and Rousafa is that it gets a little bit narrow in this part. As we pass by Baroli, which is to the right, but out of the frame gets a little bit narrow. Now on this street, I had a choice. I decided to choose the bike lane. However, and this is what I find to be like doubly incredible about this place is that Kaj de Kuba, at least in the stretch that I was on, is also a seco kaj. So, some people, and rightfully so, this doesn’t get I think this gets a little bit overlooked. Some people aren’t super comfortable in that bike lane. In fact, if you’re a cyclist who is a bit intimidated or not really comfortable riding um amongst other cyclists with pedestrians coming by, you might be better off um on the streets in that situation cuz there’s a lot more to deal with when you’re in this type of bike lane on the sidewalk, especially on a busy street where there are a lot of tourists. There’s so many of these little group tours on bikes that are happening that uh that it could be tougher actually to be in the bike lane. So you might go in that case with a secl. So now we’re on a slightly different variation. I wouldn’t call it a sidewalk bike lane, but I would call it a protected bike lane. That would be where cars would traditionally park on a traditional street, which should soon become an antiquated they hardly use them anymore type of street if we really want to be multimodal in the United States and around the world. Um, and then see it goes up on the sidewalk here because there’s a cur the curb is to the right of me. And then when we come down off of the painted part, it’s to the right of the curb, which is there. And now we’re actually on the street technically, but to our right is a row of parked cars. Front of me, I got a guy going a little bit slow and a city bike. So, we’re just going to casually pass him here. I’m going to probably make this a two-part video. I like what we just did. I feel like it was pretty concise. I hope it was clear. And I want to find some other environments and not throw them all at you at once in one video. still get a little bit of a little bit gunshy going into an intersection when a car is about to turn into it, even if I have the green light, which is probably good. You can’t let a good urban cycling environment lull you to sleep. Oh, there’s a bike lane. That’s the thing. No matter that no matter whether it’s Valencia or it’s San Francisco or Los Angeles or your average run-of-the-mill suburb just because a bike lane exists, it doesn’t mean you can’t pay attention. You don’t need to pay attention. It doesn’t really mean anything. And it also doesn’t mean that you’re safer in a bike lane. Like the example before on Kaj Duba, honestly the more that I have written on it and I ride on it a lot now, the more I’m likely just to take the sequel Kaj and not take the debi when I learn a word or when I have to relearn a word, I often walk around just saying it to myself over and over and over and over again. Eventually they stick. I often wonder if the rental bike business in Valencia. So I think these are two rental bikes in front of us. It’s a lot of rental bike shops on Kaj Duba throughout the city. I often wonder if the rental bike business in Valencia is like the weed business, the legal weed business in California, which is struggling because so many people rushed into the space and legal weed isn’t cheap, man. A lot of taxes, a lot of regulation. So, you pay a lot for legal weed. I remember being in a bar that I used to go to a lot in LA. and the bartender the bartender um somebody walked in and threw a big bag of weed on the bar for him. It’s like he’s he’s not buying legal weed. Yeah, I think it’s a tourist situation here. So, what I’m going to do is I have a clear path to do is get on the sidewalk. There’s nobody coming. Just get past them, you know. No big deal. No passada. All right. So, yeah, I’m going to enter another environment here, which will probably be in part two of this video.