MAR 22, 2010 – 12:00AM

I don’t miss much about driving when I swap four wheels for two.

I can do without the controlled climate, the traffic and a big chunk of the other drivers on the road.

I don’t miss having to pay at the pump, change the oil or scrape the windows.

But there is one thing I miss when I choose to ride instead of drive: music.

I’m not a huge audiophile, but I do like my tunes. On the rare occasion I sit around my house listening to music, it’s usually to my iPod or music ripped onto my computer.

I run with my iPod, too.

Occasionally, when I’m slaving over the hot stove, I’ll turn on the radio, but, for the most part, the only time I get to listen to real, live (or prerecorded) radio is when I’m in the car.

I don’t miss talk radio, and I can’t stand sports-talk radio, but I do like the exposure to “new” music that radio provides. OK, so I’m something of a dinosaur.

Unfortunately, there’s no good way to listen to music on the bike.

Several years ago, when I first started riding semi-regularly, I’d drive to the nearest point of the bike-and-hike trail that runs along the South Lawrence Trafficway, unload my bike off the rack and ride to one end, then the other.

Silly, I know.

But on occasion — and especially in March, I recall fondly now, when the Kansas University basketball team would play the early early-round games in the league or NCAA tournaments — I’d take along a portable radio and listen as I rode.

There’s hardly any traffic on the bike path, and it’s all foot or rollerblade or bike traffic anyway. It crosses honest-to-gosh roadways at a few places, but I never felt the game or music in my ears ever put me in any real danger of what little traffic I encountered.

But I eventually outgrew the bike-and-hike path, and the headphones went away.

Hearing is so important to cyclists hoping to share the roads with cars. I’d never ride on the road with headphones in any more than I’d ride with blinders on.

I know many pro cyclists listen to tunes as they ride, but, well, they’re pros. They have better bike-handling skills and, probably, a better sense for the road than I’ll ever so much as sniff.

Plus, they have to be out there. If they’re not putting in the miles — long slow distances, intervals, whatever — they won’t be pros for long. So I have to figure at least some of the time they’re out there because they have to be, and music helps distract them from the ride.

For almost all of my rides, I choose to be out there.

I don’t want to be distracted from it. I want to enjoy it, or at least experience it.

I’ve seen a few handlebar-mounted radios that are designed to bathe audiophile cyclists in music without depriving them of crucial sound cues so key to safe cycling. But I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t detract significantly from both experiences.

So, I fear, I won’t be getting my groove on while cycling anytime soon.

Unless, of course, I can figure a way to strap a massive boombox to the back of my bike and share the tunes with everybody within earshot, turning me into the Pied Piper of Pedaling.