Ride In 6/27: Guaranteed Fresh Until Printed Date

The area in front of the White House was blocked with caution tape and stern looking uniformed men and I rode up 15th street, having little alternative other than turning around and going home. There's a cycletrack on 15th Street, but only up to the White House plaza and when that's closed, there's no direct way to connect to where the cycletrack picks up on the other side of H Street. H Street is one-way east and it's illegal to ride on the sidewalk there anyway, so you at least have to go two blocks north to I Street if you want to get back over. There's no bike lane or cycletrack on the blocks from the White House plaza to I Street, so you're riding next to parked cars in the door zone or maybe you're just riding in the right lane. To make the left turn onto I, you'd have to get out of that right lane and I couldn't do that because there really wasn't much room, so I kept riding on the bike lane-less stretch of 15 past I street to the next block, which is K Street, where there's also no bike lane. You could make a left turn from K Street and maybe ride in the K Street service lane (or whatever that is) and cross back into the cycletrack on 15th. But I didn't make the left turn on K Street, continuing instead on Vermont, where there is no bike lane. There's a traffic circle at Vermont and M and a block before that there's the L Street Cycletrack, but that also only runs east. To get to the M Street Cycletrack, where I was heading anyway, I could've ridden around the traffic circle 330 degrees or so or I could ride across in the crosswalk (or beforehand) and then ride on the sidewalk for a little before riding mostly across the street and then into the protected cycletrack. I didn't ride around the circle. 

I'm used to this. Sometimes bike lanes end and sometimes they're blocked and sometimes roads are closed and sometimes roads are just backed up. It's imperative to be intrepid. When a bicyclist has one good option and that one good option is taken away, that leaves no good options. That leaves being intrepid. Maybe bicyclists should have more than one good option.