Self-Promotion

I wrote a thing about the L Street Cycletrack on Greater Greater Washington and then friend of the blog Kate Ryan has a thing about that thing (but mostly Evan Wilder's things) for WTOP. And that thing has comments, which are are so very trenchant! (side note: does trenchant mean dumb?)

Narrowing the L Street Cycletrack would really just be a stopgap, as would adding more flexposts. I think the long-term solution for that stretch needs to involve the abolition of the mixing zones, the installation of a curb, and a separate traffic signal sequence for drivers and cyclists. If narrowing would help in getting those things, so be it. If narrowing would help in the mean time before those things are installed, so be it. In any case, my thinking is that narrowing the lane would be a super easy step that could be taken right now at basically zero cost that would stop a large majority of the problems of illegal driving and illegal parking. It wouldn't be a panacea, but perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good. And perfect is, unfortunately, considerably distant. The L Street Cycletrack has been down for a year now and I think that's enough time to have studied what works and what doesn't work and I would applaud DDOT for taking any steps to make it better for those of us who ride in it day in and day out. Whether those steps will actually be taken, I don't know. I try not to be too pessimistic about these things, but the Potato doesn't have the best track record of late in speedily addressing easily addressable deficiencies.

Now, about the M Street Cycletrack... um, I got nothing. Maybe it'll be in before the New Year, maybe it won't go in until spring, maybe it'll be stuck in environmental review limbo forever (Forever Limbo is like Forever Tango, but with a stick. It's underwhelming) maybe you should ask mayoral candidates what they plan to do about it, maybe someone should finally call Carly Rae Jepsen, I don't know. Its delay is asinine.