Ride In 2/23

Back on the bike after a day off and it was cold. I'm really ready to retire the winter riding gear, especially the heavy gloves. They keep my hands warm, but then they get wet and gross from sweat and stay that way so that when I have to put them back on at the end of the day I'm not very happy. There can't be that many Arctic cold days left, can there?
Fairfax Drive's bike lanes were only a little bad and only in patches. Some ice, but not like previous storms. Should hopefully be all gone tomorrow.
"On the Street Where You Live". I didn't realize how many show tunes I know, much less am willing to sing while riding my bike. Of course, I'm terrible with lyrics, so my renditions feature a lot of mumble-humming between the few lines I know. I just make it up as I go and that suits me just fine.
A lot more people on bikes than  I expected given the temperature. I think I saw maybe 8 or 10 people on the streets of Georgetown alone and they were the street clothes-wearing types. Some without helmets. I think Washington is getting to be the kind of place where people are willing to take bikes out so long as there's no precipitation. We're developing flinty toughness, or at least those of us inclined to bicycle.
In today's news (which I had a lot of time to read since it took my computer 2 hours to boot up and install new anti-virus software), "scientists" have published a paper on what it takes to convert leisure cyclists to bike commuters. This part is hilarious for its spot-on accuracy:

Conclusions from the findings suggest that:

3. white-collar married workers with mid- or low-level incomes, who live in high-rise apartments and started leisure-cycling at a late age, are a productive target on which to concentrate the promotion of commuter-cycling, and

The other conclusions are about things like mixed-land use and congestion taxes and infrastructure spending, so I guess they're more important or whatever. I agree that those are good things and we should push really hard for them, but they're hard- my idea of advocacy is mostly about testifying to the ease/joy of riding a bike to work, which is much easier.