Still here

Hi everyone, sorry for the slowdown in posting lately. Sometimes life gets in the way of art - and both can get in the way of bike blogging. The relative dearth of DC cycling photo-ops in winter doesn't help. I'll post when I can until the spring bloom!

Best winter biking gloves?

From a reader:

I've looked all over the vast land that is the internet looking for gloves that are both attractive and functionally windproof. This winter I've tried 3 pairs of gloves: The CS commuter glove, the North Face Windfall, and a pair of columbia skiing gloves.

CS Commuter gloves - decent warmth, sub par grip, but looks good and simple, windproof. Windfall - hated these. Ski gloves - the best but toooo bulky.

Any suggestions out there for good looking bike gloves? Seems impossible, but I don't think someone on the internet has written about this yet! 

18th St and Columbia Rd

Yes, another Adams Morgan picture. There's that curved building again in the background. What can I say, I pass that way a lot, and it usually has decent bike traffic, a CaBi station, cool cafes... The area just has a certain gravitational pull. I used to live around there and it still feels like the center of my DC universe.

Pittsburgh

Streetfilms' interesting look at Pittsburgh, its infrastructure, and efforts to improve public space, livable streets, and biking. I like what they've done with Market Square.

11th and Irving St

A resolution

The Washington Area Bicyclist Association has an online Resolution to Ride Responsibly that area cyclists can sign:

Please think about how you ride, your responsibility to yourself and other road users, and what you can do to help as a member of the bicycling community.

The pledge itself includes:

• I resolve to be a more responsible bicyclist

• I resolve to better respect the rights of other road users

• I resolve to make a good faith effort to better follow the law

• I resolve to yield to pedestrians

• I resolve to help make bicycling safer and easier for all of us

Sounds reasonable and welcome. I know some are irritated by it for various reasons, but not me. While I think I'm already a responsible rider, I'm signing because I'm all for encouraging a more civic-minded collective biking mentality in DC. We need to always strive to be a positive and collaborative part of the overall transit-scape.

Think of it as good cycling citizen-ship. All of us, to varying degrees, can do even better on these points. This could make the task of cycling advocacy easier during this pivotal time, and help defuse the kind of driver hostility that we know is out there, right or wrong.

No one's saying absolute, strict compliance, just as (for example) none of us stop fully at every stop sign when driving. Just make being a good biking citizen a goal and a habit as best you can. If you're already doing that, great.

Let's seduce with reasonableness, even in the face of irrationality.

18th Street

And in biking news

DCC is very pleased, things are seeming downright sensible around here:

DC press doesn't fall for bike-baiting

The Washington Examiner published a poorly-researched article about bike lane opposition. But instead of jumping onto an anti-bike lane revolt, DC press and opinion leaders quickly saw through the rhetoric and put forth a more nuanced and sensible reaction.

No anti-bike revolution at DDOT, at least not yet:

Bellamy to serve as interim head of DDOT

[to DDOT employees] "I don’t know how long I will serve in this capacity, but regardless please continue doing what you’re doing, keep working on all the projects and programs that make DDOT shine."

And CaBi is using cool cargo bikes for maintenance vehicles!

18th St and Columbia Rd

Wooing is key

from Streetsblog:

Wooing the Hesitant Cyclist

For those who bike everywhere now, biking in the street is probably no big deal. But most of those cyclists probably fall within the two categories of “Strong and Fearless” or “Enthused and Confident.” Together they make up 8% of the population. In the U.S., 8% is pretty good, but if we really want to break through, we need to find a way to get the 60% who are “Interested but Concerned” to ride a bike.

full article

Out with the new, in with the old?

From the Washington Post:

Mayors with vision should get some credit for D.C.'s population gain

[B]y picking can-do managers willing to take risks with new ideas, [Fenty] also helped bring about improvements in public safety, transportation, economic development and other areas.

Some of the accomplishments that contributed to the city's success helped to undermine Mr. Fenty politically. The city's changing demography unnerved some longtime residents, as never-healed divisions of race, class and geography reemerged.

Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) was elected mayor with the laudable idea that change can attract new residents without making existing ones feel unwelcome.

Pretty well sums it up.

Though the thinly-disguised code words get so tiring. Just for clarity, for those reading this from other cities, 'longtime residents' and 'existing ones' is DC code to mean black. 'New residents' means white.

Race is an incredibly loaded stew that underlies almost every debate in Washington (meaning the city where people live, not the federal side). Outgoing Mayor Fenty is outgoing largely because race dynamics cost him his job - to oversimplify, whites generally liked what he was doing, blacks generally were pissed off at him. It's really too bad, I really thought that Fenty being bi-racial would be a brilliant way to defuse a lot of the usual brouhaha. In the end he couldn't transcend race with results, which is what he seemed to be trying to do.

Anyway, I can't even begin to get deeper into the complexities and sensitivities of the subject here, and it would be too off-topic. But part of the reason this is actually on-topic at all is the way bike lanes lately have become iconic, lumped with cafes and expensive condos as pseudo-symbols of what whites supposedly want but blacks supposedly don't. At least early on, Capital Bikeshare was sometimes pointed to as hipster folly, even though what could be more Everyman than A-to-B urban transit that costs way less than Metro or the bus?

Vincent Gray says his goal is to create 'One City' from the current parallel universes. We'll see.

full article

Tame and Reclaim

This is a few months old, but still a good one from Streetfilms. Look at the variety of people out using the protected two-way bike lane.

The Taming and Reclaiming of Prospect Park West

Pierce Park

If you're heading into Adams Morgan from Calvert Street Bridge, there are perfectly fine bike lanes on Calvert Street. But the walkways through Walter Pierce Park* make for a decent protected cycletrack as well. Call it the scenic route.

(*Or as my daughter calls it, 'Shady Park', since the tree canopy in the playground area makes it great on hot days.)

I should also mention, since it's hard to tell, this pair looked trés chic.

Extra-stone age

From the BBC:

Average UK male weight up 16lb in 15 years, study finds

"The problem is really how people are getting around. They are driving more, cycling less and more likely to be employed in a sedentary job.

"Physical activity is slowly being removed from day-to-day life."

Not to pick on the Brits, it's happening everywhere, not least of course in the US of 'hey, buffet!'. I've read the Aussies have their own obesity epidemic. If only a certain magic wand (on two wheels) weren't staring us right in the face...

full article

18th St and Columbia Rd

Yeah, I know, I've used this building as a backdrop before. But not at night!

Getting better

From today's Washington Post, in case you missed it:

D.C. expands network of cycling lanes, bike-sharing program

"This is not bicycling for the sake of bicycling," [Jim Sebastian, cycling coordinator for the District Department of Transportation] said. "We view bicycling as part of our transportation system, like the Circulator [bus service] and Metrorail. We want to give people an alternative."

And, pleasant surprise, for once no counter-punch quotes from disgruntled drivers tacked on at the end for 'balance'. No, 'uh-oh, driving's about to get a lot more treacherous around here, folks!' kind of thing (which I was appalled to see on a TV news bit when the Pennsylvania Ave lanes opened).

full article

A victory lap of sorts

Earlier I saw a tweet from outgoing head of DDOT Gabe Klein who, along with friends and folks from various DC bike orgs, planned an informal happy-hour bike jaunt around some of DC's cycletracks and bike lanes this evening. So I joined 'em.

It was like touring the legacy, especially with some people using CaBis. I suppose it could have been a bummer, what with the uncertainty about the intentions of the incoming mayor. I'm not big on the whole organized ride thing personally, but this was cool. It felt like a victory (and farewell) lap around some of Gabe's signature efforts. Maybe like Cal Ripken's final jog around Camden Yards. Anyway the caroling kept it festive and it wasn't too cold.

We rode down the 17th Street bike lanes, past the White House, caught the tail end of the 15th Street cycletrack, across on the Pennsylvania Ave cycletrack, through Chinatown, back up 15th Street, ending with a few drinks at Marvin back at 14th and U.

Our Man in Munich - Part IV

My friend Mike Tierney, an American expat in Munich, on growing up outside New York and sensory deprivation/activation:

Engaging all of the senses, and observations otherwise missed

3rd Ave Elevated over Cross Bronx Expressway, c. 1974, photo by Jack E. Boucher, via Wikimedia Commons

First, an autobiographical note.  I was born in the Bronx in the early 1960s, but I have no memories of the place.  My family was among the thousands who fled the boroughs of the City for the surrounding countryside.  By that time, Robert Moses and his acolytes had lacerated New York City with highways to make way for the new higher-order life form and left the Bronx drawn and quartered.  The new Cross Bronx Expressway became the evacuation route for those of sufficient means to create a better life as grass farmers and quarter-acre landed gentry in Westchester and Putnam Counties.  It was not long before the neighborhoods of the Bronx died like a drained swamp, all non-auto human life left to die of asphyxiation and UV exposure.  The swamp is an apt metaphor: a carbon sink, a wealth of biodiversity, and a source of nutrients and oxygen for the surrounding area.  

Hudson River Valley, © 2009 James G. Howes

And so I was deposited in the highlands above the Hudson River Valley, around 70 miles north of Manhattan, along with a bunch of other kids from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.  For a young boy it was the perfect Huck Finn life.  For years I explored miles of former farm fields that were growing into new forests, looking for caves and downed airplanes.  But we were city people: the winding country roads were called "blocks," and many evenings were spent hanging out on "the stoop" and listening to tales of milkmen, horse-drawn produce carts, and epic street stick-ball tournaments.

In my section of the woods ("our block") I was always outside, but that was it.  Otherwise, all I knew of my hometown was experienced from a car.  With the exception of a few parking lots and school playgrounds, my feet never touched the ground.  As a small child, the rest of my hometown was seen from the side window of the family Detroit land yacht, and later as an adolescent it was seen through the front windshield.  No better than High Definition TV, but with an 8-track tape deck and ash trays for everybody.  Had I not regularly hand-cranked the window open, I would never have known the smell of burning leaves (legal then), Indian Summer humidity, and melting snow.

Here endeth the historical note.

Biking through Munich offers sensory activation every kilometer, and it changes with the season.  Crossing the Isar by Rosenheimer Platz, twice a year you are hit with a sweet smell of fermentation from the industrial breweries that provide all the 6-7 million liters of beer consumed at Oktoberfest - with my help, of course.  Apparently, by law, all of the beer consumed must be brewed within the city boundary.

By Giesing (southeast of the city) I pass the Dallmayr coffee plant, where I get several hundred meters of the smell of roasting coffee.

In the fall a morning fog sets in between Giesing and Fasanenpark.  The temperature suddenly drops and only the nearby trees are visible, serving as both landmarks and speedometer.

One particular night offered something otherwise missed.  I was crossing the Isar coming home when I heard a strange splashing sound below the bridge.  I stopped to look.  My first reaction was that someone was driving a Fiat Cinquacento into the Isar.  I looked harder.  It was a beaver.  I swear you could throw a saddle over this thing.  Apparently there are a few of them living around the river, with no natural predators.  I realized then that this beast must be the basis of the Bavarian legend of the "Wolpertinger," a mischievous chimeric monster of the forest, similar to North America's Sasquatch and Mexico's dreaded Goat Sucker.  It submerged in to the blackness, leaving an eerie silence.  I checked my headlight and continued on.

Next:

Integration into the urban landscape and culture

Mo' better

More bicycling means safer streets

When many bicyclists are on the road, cycling safety improves substantially. […] Now comes data from Portland, Oregon, that suggests encouraging bicycle use leads to greater traffic safety in general.

And, it's worth noting:

[Portland's] 300-mile network cost approximately the same as the construction of a mile of urban freeway.

full article

First snow

Not many winter warriors out yesterday during the first real snow we've had.

Then again it was the middle of a weekday, when people are at work anyway. DC is not one of those cities with nonstop bustle. Morning rush, evening rush, the rest of the time is relatively quiet. Weekends are different, much more of a normal urban flow.

Certainly sounds better

from Greater Greater Washington:

Choose bike boulevards over bike lanes around H Street, NE

A "bike boulevard" prioritizes cyclists and pedestrians. And it provides motorists slower, more consistent speeds instead of the all-too-familiar race between stop signs and speed humps.

full article

Sense, us

No mention of biking directly in this report on new census data, but seems the patterns and reasons for the recent upswing in DC transit use mirror those that can lead to the choice of a bicycle as well.

More D.C. area commuters leaving the driving to others

[It reflects] the influx of younger residents who refuse to spend long hours in the car. Many of those in their 20s and 30s have chosen to live in vibrant neighborhoods along bus, Metro and rail lines, even if it means sacrificing the suburban amenities of their childhoods.

"They came of age in an environment of urbane media influences, watching 'Friends' and 'Seinfeld,' not 'Leave It to Beaver...' "

full article

At Random

Bonowice, Poland, 2003

East and West

Build it and they will come:

NYC Bike Count Continues Upward Trend in 2010

In total, the bike count is up 88 percent in the last three years.

And over on the left coast, similar trend, despite the three-year ban on new bike lanes:

Bicycling up 58 percent in S.F. since 2006

San Francisco, governed by a transit-first policy that discourages the use of private automobiles, has an ambitious plan to add 34 miles of bike lanes to the old network of 45 miles by 2014.

A hopefully rare post about helmets

You may have noticed I didn't point out in the previous post that the woman isn't wearing a helmet. First of all, it's obvious and speaks for itself.

Second, I don't want to be the guy saying 'see, don't wear a helmet'. I do want to be the guy saying 'make choices based on adult powers of risk assessment'.

Third, I don't want to talk much about helmets on this blog, because then the same arguments go around and around. It's boring and no one convinces anyone of anything.

With that said, ok, this is more good and sensible ammo for the next time someone says, 'hey, where's your helmet'?

If you don’t like wearing a bike helmet, you might like to read this

Why does the perception of bicycle safety seem to differ so much with the reality? One reason is this notion that you have to be wearing ’safety gear’ (aka ‘danger gear’ – helmets, fluoro) which any normal person looks at and thinks… “Gee, that MUST be dangerous. I wouldn’t want my husband/wife/child/mother/father doing that. You must be so brave… etc etc”.

I cycle over 5000km per year for commuting and every other trip I would normally take a car for. I haven’t ‘fallen off’ since I was 10 years old. I don’t wear a helmet for 99% of these trips. I’d like to not have to break the law.

full article

A mother knows

To me, this mom-cyclist is one of those quiet, unsung heroes of utility biking in DC. Not because she has the 'right' bike or chic attire. I just like the normal/cool clothes, no special gear, shopping bag in front, funky shoulder bag, kid in tow, a little twirly thing hanging off the back… No nonsense, serene, dignified demeanor, upright posture.

She knew where the not-so-known contraflow bike lane was and used it, unfazed by the trio of Do Not Enter signs. Or by the Brazil-esque (Terry Gilliam film, not the country) ductwork.

That cut-through was a closed road, now given over almost entirely to bikes. More here. It's actually a great back way to cross Adams Morgan north-south without dealing with 18th Street hassles.

Parking ups and downs

Bike parking has proliferated across the city in the last few years. But of course, bikes often end up lashed to any available pole. Like a dog waiting for its owner, or a horse in front of the saloon. But hey, that's one of the real beauties of urban biking, parking right in front of where you're going.

Usually it works perfectly fine.

Sometimes it's slightly awkward, like when dealing with a low parking meter.

And sometimes you come back and your bike is in an undignified heap, all akimbo. That sucks.

Our Man in Munich - Part III

Third in a series from my friend Michael Tierney, an American expat living and cycling in Munich:

The glorious dearth of spandex

I was on a bike path that cuts through the woods along the S-Bahn (Metro) tracks near the Fasangarten stop.  As I approached a street crossing I noticed an older man fifty feet downrange on an old creaking bike.  He was smoking a cigar as he rode, leaving a sequence of smoke clouds behind him.  In my head I heard locomotive sound effects as he accelerated: puff ... ... puff ... ... puff ... puff ... puff - puff - puff - puffpuffpuffpufpfpf.

As I blew through this Morse code SOS of smoke and smoldering lung contents I realized that I never see anyone in spandex.  I have ridden through biker-emitted cigarette plume sequences more often than I have seen anyone wearing an aerodynamic outfit that matches the bike.  Those times have has been on weekends and on paths that run along the river.

This guy is just on his way to work.  Note the gloves.  A good pair of gloves is key.  

The best of the city bikers, however, are the older women, purse in basket, hat defying aerodynamics, and the way they swing one leg in front of the seat and over the pedal crank to coast the last 30 feet of their trip standing on the left pedal.  It is a half century-rehearsed old school side saddle dismount, usually in front of the Apoteke (pharmacy) for a fresh can of purple hair dye.  I love those moments.  But beware and stay out of their way.  They are the curators of bike path etiquette and are quick to dispense terse instructions to anyone breaching them, with steely gaze and Bavarian accent.  They can smell fear and consider hesitation an invitation for a lecture.  Just look down and say "entschuldigen Sie bitte."

Next:

Integration into the urban landscape and culture

Engaging all of the senses and observations otherwise missed

Double Dutch

Just as I was wondering where all the citizen cyclists are hibernating, suddenly two Dutch bikes cross my path? On a cold night, no less. Like seeing two American eagles in this town, at least in the cold months. Ok not both Dutch, Alan's was a beautiful Pashley, Meg had a full-on WorkCycles step-through. They said they lived in Arlington but were up in Petworth for a party.

Let's call Meg and Alan City Zen Cyclists of the day (or evening). I wish I had taken a better picture, maybe I was dazzled...

Talking points

How to Talk to a Conservative About Cycling

Bottom line (and that is what conservatives like to think they are all about): Cycling saves money, saves lives and makes us stronger as individuals and as a nation. Spending money to support cycling is like putting money in the bank - it pays big dividends at low risk. It’s as all American as Mom’s apple pie. How much more conservative can you get?

full article