Ride In 10/16: Appeasement

Quiet morning, cool morning. I wore gloves. They were not ermine. I wore a cap, which was not coonskin. Very little of my outfit derived from the demise of woodland creatures, with the exception, perhaps of helmet, which I believe was taken from a very safety-conscious badger.

Standard non-standard route, which is the route that takes me along Madison Drive and next to the National Mall, America's front yard. I take disagree with this characterization because there's no National Gnome Statue or the Museum of Crabgrass or anything like that. I've looked.

I had one of those awkward mishaps where I might have cut off a turning cyclist or he might have cut me off (it was unclear, since we were crossing paths) and I hate when that happens. I think I said sorry. Sorry.

I'm a traffic jam magnet. I was riding on the path next to the reflecting pool and found myself stuck behind three gigantic maintenance dump trucks. Just another use for a multi-use path: driving on it!

23rd Street needs a road diet. It might have Celiac disease.

I met up with the Official Wife by the Foggy Bottom metro and afterwards rode over to Virginia Avenue to pick up the trails that I would take for most of the rest of the way to work. I find crossing the Rock Creek Parkway to be one of my distasteful things I'm ever asked to do on my bike. It always leaves a bad taste in my mouth and not just because I lick the road signs while I wait. It just really peeves me that a road through a park is turned into a one-way restricted use commuter highway during rush hour. Peeves me! Here's my peeved-eye view as I waited to cross:

Cones of oppression

I know that a lot of cyclists like to use this road, especially on weekends, but if I had my druthers, we'd just unpave it and let nature reclaim it. This is a bad road and an unnecessary road and it creates bad incentives.

I counted 99 bicyclists riding in the opposite direction of the Capital Crescent Trail from the entrance at Water Street to the staircase at Manning Place. That's a lot of bicyclists. Two were on recumbents. All but three wore helmets. There were many, many reflective yellow jackets. There's definitely a stylistic dichotomy between the "ride on streets" riders and the "ride on path" riders that you could probably chalk up to a suburban/urban split, but which is probably actually based on the distances that each group rides, with the path riders typically covering more miles and preferring bikey clothes to make that more comfortable. I thought it was a pretty even mix of men and women. It definitely skewed older. The CCT is the CBS of DC bike infrastructure.

The climb up Macomb Street wasn't as bad as I thought it would be (it's been a while), nor were the hills on Loughboro and Nebraska. Traffic was reasonably sparse, at least until nearer the university, when I bailed to the sidewalk for a block before crossing the street and riding into the garage. I locked up my bike, gave myself a high five and continued on with the rest of my day.