Amity Bike Keeps Logging Those Free Miles

You won’t hear Guy D’Aniello complain about surging gas prices.

“We are probably the only business that wants gas to go higher,” says the long-time owner of D'Aniello's Amity Bike in Woodbridge.

D’Aniello opened Amity Bike 33 years ago, five years before his son Kurt – who now works at the shop and races bikes competitively – was born.

“Back in the old days I was in the army in California,” D’Aniello, 63, says of time spent in the late ‘60s/early 70s. “I saw everyone on bikes out there and realized a huge advantage.”

D’Aniello recalls a “tremendous gas crunch” in the early 70s, when he first decided to get into the bike business.

Fast-forward some 40 years and two things seem clear: gas prices are only going in one direction and the cost of commuting via cycle isn’t changing anytime soon.

Italians are hip to this dichotomy, D’Aniello says. In Italy, he says, bikes outsold cars last year.

D’Aniello bikes to work from his home in Hamden. He says he takes two routes to Woodbridge. The long way’s 26 miles and the “shortcut” is 12.

“I do a lot of riding in this area,” says D’Aniello, adding that Route 63 is popular with road bikers.

D’Aniello started road racing in 1973. He says while road biking has remained in “constant popularity” since then, mountain biking was in its “infancy” when he started riding.

Nowadays, “urban cycling” or riding to work, is in, D’Aniello says.

Police are also increasingly using bikes in their patrols, says the owner of a shop that carries 20 Cannondales outfitted for the men and women in blue.

D’Aniello says the Woodbridge Police Department has about five bikes that they use to patrol the area on the New Haven border, which in recent years has seen a fair amount of attempted bank robberies.

“It definitely has been a deterrent,” D’Aniello says of recent months.

And as far as advice for the common rider, he says, "Air your tires, oil your chain and expect the unexpected."

For more information on Amity Bike in Woodbridge, visit their website.