Capital Crescent trail head in Georgetown

Jorge,
Thanks for this reminder – I’ve certainly gotten a bit too hot-headed at the trail head. I ride it twice a day, every day, and have done my best to try and be more mellow about it lately.

One of my big gripes is that drivers (often from out of town, but plenty of DC drivers too) speed down to the end of Water St. thinking they’ve found the secret exit out of Georgetown (or thinking that they are actually driving up on the Whitehurst, because their GPS maps dont do 3D very well. Getting to the end, they find out there’s no where to go, then do an 18-point U-turn at the trailhead and speed off back up Water St. As someone who rides that stretch, and pushes my daughter in the stroller along that stretch (with no sidewalks, of course), its really unnerving.

The problem was made worse by the fact that the only indication that the street was a dead end came *at the end of the street*. I pleaded with DDOT for more than a year to fix this and put up No Outlet signs further up Water St. They did, although they posted them about 20ft in the air on the Whitehurst support columns (20ft traffic control signs are definitely not code). It seems to help a little but not much.

All of that is my rant about the trailhead – which may in fact only get worse if Georgetown gets there way and gets to build a boathouse at the beginning of the trail – but I agree that people should take it easy down there – whether on two wheels or four.

This is one of the reasons I think it’s good to be multi-modal. There have definitely been times when I’m driving and I’ve seen a cyclist do something and though, “What a jerk”. Then, five seconds later, I realize I do the same thing when I’m on my bike. The same goes for being a pedestrian (especially when I’m herding the 2 and 4 year old through busy streets).

It’s much easier to dismiss situations you’ve never been in yourself. So I try to imagine myself in the other person’s shoes, and sometimes that actually works (Often I still think they’re a jerk, but you do what you can).

@JorgeGortex 37045 wrote:

Its off topic, but as for the Georgetown boathouse project… shouldn’t affect the trail at all. There will be no vehicular parking down on site, at least that is my understanding. The most you will get are most students on bikes…

Hmm – last time I checked the plans, they had a driveway all the way up to the entrance of the boathouse. And, just as with the current facilities, there’s going to be traffic for picking up and dropping off boats. There may very well be limited parking, but I suspect the volume of vehicle traffic will increase significantly.

It would be unfortunate to have to remove a piece of DC history, but one way to deal with the space constraints may be to remove the remains of the Aqueduct.