Ride In 6/28: Put your archdukes up

Around 10 AM, CNN posted "Local bike blogger gets healthcare prediction wrong." They retracted it soon thereafter.

The driver of an SUV complaining that bicyclists take up too much space on the road is like Joey Chestnut getting upset over your running out of hot dogs on the Fourth of July.

Here are some pictures of the Supreme Court, circa 8AM.

It seemed crowded, but hardly like pandemonium. Not like they were opening a new Chick-fil-A or something.

Lots of cyclists very interested in trying to ride fast only to be rebuffed by stop lights and a gentle breeze. Luckily no one was rebuffed by an illegally u-turning taxi, not that there weren't any. The idea of spot enforcement might be nice, but we need a re-engineering of Pennsylvania Avenue if we really want this to stop. The economic incentive to break the law to pick up fares simply won't outweigh the potential cost of any police penalty. Just make it less like to do, you know, with those plastic things I said I wouldn't write about today.

The gap between pedestrians crossing in a crosswalk is not really wide enough to ride your bike through. Stop trying to do that, some people on bikes. If you begrudge a motorist for being upset over the two second delay you might cause him, you really shouldn't begrudge a pedestrian for doing the same to you. But then again, hypocrisy is one of our society's favorite crisy's, maybe only second to this one.

15th to V. Along the way I rode behind a guy who was clutching a copy of the Examiner in his left hand, as if he planned to read it while biking, which, thankfully, he didn't. V seems much shorter than R, in part because I don't travel on it for nearly as many blocks. I guess that's more than just part of the reason. I rode up Champlain, past Washington City Paper headquarters, pased City Bikes on Euclid, took a left on Columbia and then worked my way over the bridge and once again west and north and west. I don't think about my bike trip is terms of cardinal directions too frequently, mostly because I'm not in the middle of the woods or orienteering and the whole point of civilization might be to make navigation through places less dependent on abstract notions of direction. The whole point of Civilization II is to be a massive time suck for nerdy high school students.

Two dads with two sons on two trail-a-bikes on Wisconsin, which is a pretty busy road. Parentals: what kinds of things do you think about when you're biking your kids somewhere? How much do you alter your route? I suspect that you'd might choose less trafficked routes, but maybe there's some parenting philosophy (objectivism?) that suggests otherwise. I've never been responsible for transporting a child by bicycle, but maybe as part of a tired sitcom trope, I'll somehow become responsible to biking with an egg and thereby learn about responsibility and the difficulties of parenting. Tired sitcom tropes are the worst.

Had a driver not pass me until she could safely (for my safety, not hers) do so. Gotta say that it was sorta weird.