It's Monday again. Seems like it comes around every week and always at the beginning of it. I did do some bicycling this weekend (I went to the Udvar-Hazy wing of the Air and Space Museum out by Dulles), but I hadn't bike commuted since Thursday, so who even knows how much the terrain of the city changed since then. Turns out, not by very much.
Though, that isn't to say, that there were no changes. Since I last rode, green paint appeared in multiple places along my route, most notably around Stanton Park and on the new First Street cycletrack. I like the green paint, though I do find it somewhat derivative. Can't wait until DDOT pulls a Marina Abramovic and just sits there doing nothing for days on end. Oh wait.
MBT to R and R all the way across town, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. I tried to go the same speed, but it's all relative.
Sometimes I think about Vision Zero, which I believe is a kind of Lasik malpractice class action lawsuit, but also a safety plan and I think about safer walking and cycling, which are part (though not all) of that plan. And then I think about pleasant walking experiences I've had and where I've had them and what have made them pleasant. A few come to mind. (I really do love walking. Sometimes I think about walking while wistfully singing "I will always love you" [Parton]) Anyway, the stated goal is Vision Zero is to make waking SAFER, but I don't that means the same as making walking NICER. Sometimes I wonder if we could achieve the former if we only focused on the latter- if the safety benefit was just an ancillary benefit of trying to make the pedestrian experience a genuinely pleasurable experience. If we did the kinds of things that made walking and biking less stressful and more enjoyable, would the safety benefits just follow? Aren't they ancillary? Anyway, I guess Vision Nicer is a bit more qualitative and harder to pin down and beggars and choosers and all that.
Usual route home. Not much worse sometimes than being a cyclist in the right lane when a driver in the left lane insists on driving slowly because then the problem isn't the guy in the car next to you who's following the law, but the jerk biker who's going too slow. Can't win for losing sometimes.
I stopped at the store on the way home to buy ginger ale. I'm on a ginger ale kick lately. I like the ginger part, I like the ale part, I like them together. Good coda, Brian. Good coda.
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