3/30/11

Ride In 3/30

I expected to have to write about riding in the rain this morning, but I was pleased to find that the rain/wintry mix did not yet come and I could instead regale you with the usual mundanities (surprisingly, a real word).
I'm pretty sure that I saw the thus-far elusive hipster on my ride into work this morning. He wasn't riding his fixie, but instead a hybrid with a front-suspension. A hipster without a fixie is like a wild palomino without its characteristic gold coat and light cream mane and tail. Man, he rides through traffic aggressively. He cut accross Fairfax from the bike lane on the right to the left turn only onto Kirkwood lane, paused briefly at the light, jutted his bike into the intersection and took advantage of the green light for the cars coming out of the church/coffee shop parking lot-cum-cut through from Wilson to Fairfax, jumped off the curb while making a left across traffic back onto to Wilson and made it halfway through the street before having to stop due to oncoming traffic from Washington Boulevard. I stuck with him, though only half as artfully. I wanted to see where he was heading because I'm always curious to know what bars serve PBR this early in the morning. Turns out he went into the Arlington County building, where perhaps he "works".
For the rest of the way through Arlington, I decided to observe the varying sartorial approaches to dealing with today's odd weather (though I have no insouciant pictures of the over-stylized and bespoke). The choices ranged from winter coats and wellies, to boots over leggings (which are not pants) with sweatshirt accompaniment, to suit jackets with no top coat, to  standard "army guy" in fatigues. It's tough to dress in this weather because it's difficult to dress for 40 and rain later in general and also because it's not a super common Washington weather type. I think that any permutation of "rain coat" would have worked, but it was coldish this morning and I understand the hesitancy.
One of the perils of the "interwebs" as I like to call them is interacting with people without actually knowing what they look like. For example, I saw someone turning her bike onto the Key Bridge whose bike had pink streamers coming off the bar ends. Was it @girlonabikeDC and Betty? I don't think so, but I have no idea. Someone might be ripping off your style.
I'm not entirely sure that there's enough room between Calvert Street and Davis Place on Tunlaw, per the GP transpo plan. It seems pretty tight going through there, but I don't know. I would recommend instead a "Cyclists May Use Full Lane" sign. You shouldn't stripe bike lanes if there's no reasonable expectation that they'll actually help.

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