The kayak-commuting market could become the next viable category of paddlesports.
 

Wherever there is a channel for water, there is a road for the canoe.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

You’ve seen the ad. “70 percent of the earth is water. We’ll help get your customers there.” Or “you there.” Or “we’ll take you there.”

Whatever the variation, the point of the ad is that a lot of water is lying around and we should be taking advantage of it. But these advertisers are really only concerned about one kind of water: the fun kind.

In economic times like these, however, when most consumers’ needs have slid down the Maslow hierarchy by a rung or two, paddling for the fun of it just doesn’t seem so important compared to, say, eating.  

Unless, of course, you consider the purpose Long Island Boathouse director John McGarvey has applied to it: Transportation.

Transportation was, of course, the original purpose of canoes and kayaks—not to mention the reason our ancestors built their most important cities on the shores of the nation’s biggest lakes, rivers, harbors and bays.

But just as it has done with skiing, horseback riding, and sailing, the automobile has usurped paddling of its most practical purpose—transportation—and relegated it to the margins of recreation.
McGarvey is hoping to change that for a handful of iconoclastic New Yorkers who live and/or work somewhere close to the East and Hudson rivers.
And he’s leading by example.

Several times a month, he skips down his apartment stairs, rides his bike to the boathouse, and paddles with the tide to his destination.
“On the East River, I always have the tide in my favor if I time it right,” he says.

So far, he says, he’s rallied a few dozen New Yorkers to ditch the car for the kayak.
He could be on the frontier of a renewed trend and what could develop into a new market for paddlesports manufacturers.

Two hundred miles to the south, Brad Nelson, 59, is mulling the same concept for Baltimore.

Nelson is the owner of the Stark Moon retail shop, a brand that once lured paddlers into three different locations—in Havre de Grace, Maryland, Baltimore, and Fayetteville, West Virginia, the Gauley River hangout BJ Johnson’s Falling Rain videos turned into a cult curiosity in the mid-1990s.

“It was a sort of magic time,” Nelson says. “The (low) water conditions brought everybody to Fayetteville. We had levels where pros had fun but mortals could paddle it. When there was water everywhere, people didn’t travel to Fayetteville.”

Five years ago, Nelson had to close the Fayetteville and Havre de Grace shop.
“In the spring of 2001, paddlesports collapsed in the east,” he explains. “We had a late winter that lingered into May. And it was still cold as hell out. At the end of the season, it was like ‘wow nobody made any money.’ It collapsed. It really did. There were so many boats. So many stores. Nobody made anything.”

Since then, Nelson, like any businessman, has been trying to figure out some new directions for paddlesports. One, he says, is the shoulder seasons. Promote paddling in the fall, with the foliage. Show some pictures of baby-boomers paddling in the autumn.

The other is kayak commuting. And for a paddler living near Baltimore’s downtown, commuting by boat makes very good sense.

The water crawls from Chesapeake Bay into Baltimore like a giant tree trunk, then branches off into the harbor created by the mouth of the Patapsco River. To get from the southwest side of the Patapsco River to the northeast side, a motorist would have to drive through downtown traffic to the Interstate 95 bridge, cross the river, then endure more downtown traffic.

“Or you could paddle across the harbor in 10 minutes, dock and walk to work,” he says. “It takes 20 minutes to drive across the bridge.”

Nelson also runs the Canton Kayak Club, which has five boathouses and 70 kayaks scattered throughout the harbor. For $135 a year, any of the club’s 500 members can paddle one of those boats in the harbor. Most use it for recreation, for a way to enjoy the city without being in the city.

“You’re likely to see someone out there from daybreak to dusk 100 percent of the time,” Nelson says. “We have about 24 kayak commuters, perhaps 40,” he says. “I even think some people do their shopping with them. I think the club members in the community are the ones doing it. They’ll get to work and say ‘guess what I’m doing’ and their co-worker will say ‘how did you do that?’ ”

Nelson is hoping even more will start using those recreational boats for errands and work.
It doesn’t just make sense in Baltimore. Seventy-five percent of Americans live in urban areas. And the original developers built most of those cities on the shores of a harbor, delta, a slow-moving river, or a lake.

But few Americans, heck, few paddlers, have ever actually used their boats for the everyday, mundane forms of travel

These paddlers and everyday workers are what marketers might call latent demand, a group of people who don’t know they prefer kayak commuting to car commuting until, someone convinces them to actually try it. But to tap into this market, the industry would have to first develop it.  

And if the industry is in need of a role model, it should look to the bicycle commuting market. Bike commuting in the last two years has usurped road racing (think sea kayaking) and mountain biking (think whitewater) as the biggest single player in the $6.1 billion cycling industry.

“We’re seeing definite movement toward a more utilitarian product, particularly, the flatbar 700c bikes,” says Jay Townley, an independent bicycle industry researcher and a partner in the researching firm Gluskin-Townley Group. “The biggest deal in 2008 [when the gas spiked at $4 a gallon] was not new bikes, but servicing and accessories. For example, the specialty bicycle retail channel ran out of wire baskets, which they haven’t run out of in maybe 30 years.”

At Cannondale, the urban line of bicycles has, in the last few years, become its most popular category, says the company’s marketing director, Scott Struve.
And that, according to Townley, is the general trend across all the brands.

“The hybrids (urban/commuter bikes) have been around for 20 years,” Townley said. “But three years ago, the hybrids got more popular.”

To gain this kind of market share, you might think manufacturers would have to get the urban bike on every street in the U.S.

But they don’t. That’s because they don’t really need to. Less than one out of 200 Americans uses a bike as his primary mode of transportation, according to the U.S. Census’s American Community Survey. (In fact, twice as many Americans live in a prison than ride their bikes to work.)
Kansas City, Missouri, had the least bike-commuters of any major U.S. city. But Memphis, Indianapolis, Wichita and Omaha—all flat cities, where the cycling conditions would seem to be ideal—had just a few more.

The national leader, according to the U.S. Census 2005 American Community Survey was Portland, Oregon, with more than three in a hundred using their bikes as their primary mode of transportation to work. (As a comparison, 40 percent of Amsterdam’s traffic comes from bikes.) Minneapolis was second, Seattle third and San Francisco was fourth. Three out of the top four bike-commuting cities are also notoriously hilly cities, and seemingly the least inviting to cyclists.

For the paddlesports manufacturer trying to draw some parallels, this data indicates a marketable characteristic of the human-powered commuter: As long as their routes to work are relatively safe, they’ll ride—even if it’s uphill all the way.

What seems to make the difference between Portland and Kansas City is not the existence of hills, but of things like bike lanes, bike trails, and bike racks on buses. Seattle and Portland have a bounty of all of these things. Kansas City has a dearth of them.

“We’ve seen in the last year or two, cities like Portland, and New York City have been making big efforts to build more bike lanes and bike paths,” says Kate Scheider, a researcher for the Boulder, Colorado-based advocacy group Bikes Belong. “There’s a direct correlation between infrastructure going in and increases in biking.”

And a lack of infrastructure is, perhaps, the single biggest obstacle preventing a metropolitan kayaker from becoming a kayak commuter.

“Kayak commuting is a long-term goal [of New York City’s Long Island Boathouse],” says Long Island Boathouse director John McGarvey. “But to do that you have to have locations for them to arrive at. Unless they have a folding kayak, it’s [kayak commuting] not too functional.”

Those places to arrive at are boathouses, which for a kayaker commuting to work might be even more critical than a bike rack is to a bike commuter.

New York City has six of them. But the Long Island Boathouse is the only one on the East River.
Getting more boat houses requires land down on the water, which in big cities, is almost always more expensive than a community boathouse can afford.

A benefactor, then, is pretty much the only other option, which sometimes might come from a private individual, or most likely, government.

And if any local government could see the political sense in endorsing a kayak-commuting investment, that local government would exist in King County, Washington, where 25-mile-long Lake Washington divides Seattle from its eastside suburbs.

Just two bridges connect the one million residents living on either side of the lake, which ranges in width from a mile to four or five miles. And on any given day, the department of transportation says, 115,000 motorists will cross the four-lane Highway 520 bridge. The rest of traffic heads five miles south to cross the Interstate 90 bridge. Chances are, if you’re leaving work at 5 p.m., both bridges will greet you like with a red river of brake lights.

Puget Sounders lost 53 hours of their lives last year, waiting in traffic, which has them on all the top 10 lists for worst U.S. traffic.

And because of this, the mayor of Seattle has established easing traffic congestion as his No. 1 priority.

To accomplish his goal, Mayor Greg Nikels and county leaders are pursuing the traditional remedies, such as bridge replacements. But they are also zealously pushing alternative forms of transportation.
Buses? Of course, the county says. We have 1,300 of them serving 2,134 square miles.

Vanpooling? Vansharing? We have 900 on the road already, but if none of those work for you, you can start a new one. Here, we’ll loan you a vehicle.

Bikes? Your employer might even be able to get a tax credit out of it.

Bike racks on buses? They’ve been on the Metro buses since the late 70s.

Bikestations with lockers, food and tools for fixing bikes? Sounds like a good idea. You can have 24/7 access to them for just $15 a month. Heck, if people ride their bikes, we’ll tune-up their own bike or give them a Novara Transfer for free. We’ll create a website where participants can log their miles and compare theirs to others. We’ll call it The Green Bike Project.

What about building a few boathouses to encourage kayak-commuting?
“How seriously the Mayor would take a proposal like this would depend on how seriously it is presented,” said Alex Fryer, a spokesman for Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. “That's difficult to say, given this is the first we've heard of such an idea.”