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Those are the "elite" cyclists. Anyway, I really didn't mean for my little video to cause such an uproar. The truth is that I keep my head on a swivel, never wear headphones, try and be as unintrusive as possible, and always try and take the path of least resistance. I say "passing left" and "thank you" to pedestrians. I do the little thank you wave when a motorist gives me space. I'm not a total hooligan living outside the law, and I still maintain that if I were to "act like a car" when I'm downtown then I would **** off more drivers than I already do.
1. For the record: I don't own a shred of spandex and my bike is a 10 year old steel Giant with a hybrid street/offroad setup. Nowhere near 'elite'
2. I actually enjoyed watching your videos since I used to live in SE (Bolling) and would ride to work at Waterfront. After they reopened the S. Capitol Bridge, I could get from home to my desk (including shower) in 30 minutes, compared to nearly an hour in car or shuttle to the Metro.
3. When you said "Yes, because it slows us down, and cops don't care." you confirmed everyone's worst suspicions about cyclists. We are on a constant uphill battle trying to get the local government to build better paths for everyone. Yet we constantly get stereotyped as a-holes who don't care about public safety. At every bike hearing there's the inevitable retiree or young parent who shows up with a horror story, then our projects get politely canned. If you want better trails (like that lousy connector to the S. Capitol Bridge) then please be careful with what you say.
1. For the record: I don't own a shred of spandex and my bike is a 10 year old steel Giant with a hybrid street/offroad setup. Nowhere near 'elite'
2. I actually enjoyed watching your videos since I used to live in SE (Bolling) and would ride to work at Waterfront. After they reopened the S. Capitol Bridge, I could get from home to my desk (including shower) in 30 minutes, compared to nearly an hour in car or shuttle to the Metro.
3. When you said "Yes, because it slows us down, and cops don't care." you confirmed everyone's worst suspicions about cyclists. We are on a constant uphill battle trying to get the local government to build better paths for everyone. Yet we constantly get stereotyped as a-holes who don't care about public safety. At every bike hearing there's the inevitable retiree or young parent who shows up with a horror story, then our projects get politely canned. If you want better trails (like that lousy connector to the S. Capitol Bridge) then please be careful with what you say.
I appreciate the constructive feedback. I, for one, don't consider myself a "problem child." I will say that my first response to the original poster could have been better argued (there are valid arguments for running red lights - I'm sure you've heard them if you are as deeply ensconed in the cycling community as you claim to be), but I was annoyed and wanted to be annoying back. Also, my initial response to you was in reaction to the "problem child" comment. Anyway, for the record, I apologize for any cattiness on my part in this thread, but not for the way I ride. I won't be checking this thread again.
I love biking, but it's because of what's in this whole discussion that I don't think I could ever take up biking as a way to commute to work: it's so STRESSFUL! I almost never drive in DC, particularly downtown, because I don't want to deal with the hassles of clogged streets, pedestrians everywhere, and terrible drivers. I'd much rather walk, bus, or metro around. I'm totally behind people ditching cars and using other all-around healthier ways of getting around, but for me biking around city streets downtown at rush hour just reintroduces all these personal stresses and dangers of the streets in having cars cut you off, avoiding collisions with drivers and other bikers, the apparent nebulous state of street biking laws, heated road rage between dumb drivers and rule-bending cyclists, and on and on. I have coworkers who bike into work and it seems almost everyday they talk about close-calls and generally unpleasant relations between drivers and cyclists.
I'm not against people biking to work; the health, economic, environmental, etc. benefits are many. But for me personally, to avoid high blood pressure, I'm more inclined to take the metro.
Three reasons why I think cycling is cool in DC is because:
1) It's become the "hip and trendy" thing to do, especially for yuppies, like being seen with Starbucks coffee and apple products.
2) DC makes it prohibitively expensive to own a car and use it for travel within the city. The only people I see own cars are those who are wealthy or poor (I'm not kidding about the second one).
3) Metro is becoming more expensive and more inefficient. And you options are either wait for constantly delayed trains or constantly crowded buses.
Actually, 15th Street (well, part of it) has a bike lane that goes against the flow of traffic AND is between the sidewalk and parked cars. Super safe, very good idea. It needs to be implemented in more streets.
Sweet. Hope more of that gets implimented.
Without sidetracking this thread too much...scooters? Much popularity in the DC area?
Without sidetracking this thread too much...scooters? Much popularity in the DC area?
Let me put it this way: This is the only place in the country where I've actually seen scooters. Scooters combine the safety of a motorcycle with the speed of a bicycle. For a little more $, you can get motorcycle that you can take on a highway and keep up with traffic.
For the record, I stop at stoplights and crosswalks (when doing so is not going to cause a crash). I yield at stop signs. I have a decade of daily city cycling under my belt with zero crashes. That said, this "sanctimonious driver" act really gets on my nerves.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eastli84
The laws apply equally to all of us.
Yes, and survey evidence indicates that drivers break the law just as often as cyclists -- with much deadlier consequences for others. Do you always stop for pedestrians at midblock crosswalks? Slow down to 25MPH in school zones, even on busy streets? Obey every speed limit, all of the time? A recent study by Milwaukee's Department of Public Works found that the majority of bicyclists at a downtown stoplight obeyed the rules (riding in the street, stopping at the light). Contrast that to the more than half of drivers almost everywhere else who break speed limit laws, or 80-100% of drivers not yielding at marked crosswalks -- even though it's dead-simple for drivers to follow those laws. You wouldn't even break a sweat!
For a cyclist, coming to a foot-down stop is nothing at all like tapping the brake pedal in a car: the car wields 500X as much horsepower/deadly force. It’s more like demanding that drivers stop, shift to park, engage the parking brake, turn off the ignition, remove the key, and start up again -- or akin to asking pedestrians to sit down before getting back up and crossing the street. Stopping at every single stop sign requires an appreciable amount of effort for a cyclist who's already going pretty slowly.
Remember that bicycles and pedestrians and horses and trolleys shared the road just fine for a long time, without any stop signs or stop lights or hardly any regulation at all. It was when cars exploded onto the scene in the 1920s -- and started killing people left and right, with fatalities quadrupling from 1913-1923 (when the traffic light was invented) -- that all this over-regulation of streets started, in order to make the streets safe from, not for, drivers. Along those lines, places that really, truly want to encourage cycling (like numerous West Coast cities, throughout northern Europe, and on side streets in Japan) tend to have yield signs where Americans would put stop signs. In some countries, like in the Netherlands, drivers are always at fault in crashes. Oh, and their traffic fatality rates are far lower.
Anyhow, I think DC makes a good cycling city because:
1. Distances are quite short. Most of the gentrified areas within the District are 1-3 miles from most downtown jobs, or from most other neighborhoods. Even at a super-cautious city-riding speed of 8MPH, that's <20 minutes to anywhere.
2. Transit doesn't work very well for many cross-town trips -- e.g., DuPont to Columbia Heights.
3. The dense street grid works pretty darn well at presenting choices and dispersing traffic. Some of the diagonals are pretty quiet, but since the distances are so short you don't have to take them.
4. It's flat, within the L'Enfant boundaries at least.
Last edited by paytonc; 09-27-2010 at 07:01 PM..
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