2014 February Trail Conditions

@DaveK 77609 wrote:

It just reinforces that the council and the mayor don’t really care. There are good guys at DDOT but they shouldn’t have to be the ones in the truck clearing infrastructure. Bikes are great and all as long as those bikers don’t mess with church parking.

Yeah, I know the mayor and council don’t care. If you heard Gray speak at Bike to Work Day, it was painfully obvious from moment one that he was just saying words without anything behind them. I walked away. Preferable to be at work than listen to that. And I know my councilmember, Jim Graham, only gets out of his car to walk a few feet from his illegal parking spot to whatever meeting he might be going to. Jack Evans likes removing safety infrastructure so he can speed along to wherever in his car.

How do you form a church? Can we form one and declare all DC bike infrastructure to be part of the church? Then maybe they’d listen.

@jrenaut 77613 wrote:

How do you form a church? Can we form one and declare all DC bike infrastructure to be part of the church? Then maybe they’d listen.

I thought we were already congregating in The Church of the Frozen Saddle. No?

@Dirt 77558 wrote:

Because it couldn’t climb over the 4′ wall of ice to get onto the W&OD at Gallows Road!!!!

New blog entry to go with that: http://lovemycommute.blogspot.com/2014/02/crosswalks-and-snow-on-w-trail.html

Thanks Arlington for being AWESOME about plowing. Keep it up!!!! Y’all are leading the pack.

Love,

Dirt

Your blog post was passed along to the VDOT folks by one of the Arlington planners. I’ll let you know if we hear anything. Even if the trails don’t get cleared, removing some of the four foot walls will help later on in the week.

@Tim Kelley 77632 wrote:

Your blog post was passed along to the VDOT folks by one of the Arlington planners. I’ll let you know if we hear anything. Even if the trails don’t get cleared, removing some of the four foot walls will help later on in the week.

That’s exactly the reaction I was hoping for. Lots of people are still using the trail… even where it is quite disgusting. Having to deal with the piles of ice and snow makes it really easy to stumble out into traffic.

Thanks Tim! You are awesome.

Pete

@Dirt 77635 wrote:

Having to deal with the piles of ice and snow makes it really easy to stumble out into traffic.

Speaking of which, there’s a bad pile in Arlington where the Custis crosses Scott St. You pretty much had to lift your bike over it yesterday, although there’s some lower spots now. Still required dismounting as of this morning.

Arlington Crews are still working on this at night:

Ice forces cars to park in the bike lane.

Custis still has some icy spots, but they’re melting. Custis and W&OD was plowed again between 9 and 10am this morning.

Big icy spot going under I-66 on Custis. be careful. It is melting, but still kind of tough.

W&OD in the sun is clear. Brandymore Castle climb is still icy on both sides.

Hugs and Kisses,

Pete

PS: Thanks Arlington! Your snow removal on the trails is awesome.

@jnva 77637 wrote:

I tried. Got stuck at the top.

http://youtu.be/HWK2LGH736w

BECAUSE (no) SKIS!

@baiskeli 77640 wrote:

Damn skiers should get off the trails!

Damn cyclists should get off the roads!

The point of mocking the “skiers” argument isn’t that skiers have no right to be on the trail, it’s that there’s no plausible way that skiers are hopscotching across the mixed pavement, snow, and ice (and gallows road) as a pleasant recreational activity. The trails, in the state that they are in, serve no beneficial function to any group of users. If NVRPA could identify a real group of skiing constituents, I’m sure they could get them together with WABA, pedestrian/jogging advocacy groups, etc., and come up with an actual plan that could serve various groups’ legitimate needs and desires. (E.g., skiing may be something useful along the unpaved W&OD sidepaths, and a strategy could be worked out to bridge gaps, maybe by reserving one lane of the paved trail in certain sections as a snow surface, or somesuch. It’s still not clear to me how you get across intersecting roads, so maybe there’s a limited number of sections of trail where this is even worth talking about?) Anyway, the current status quo is nothing more than a cop-out, and NVRPA should be held accountable/ridiculed for it. That said, in late-breaking news, there’s some reporting that they’ve actually started clearing out in Reston. Maybe Dirt shamed them into it? I will point out that clearing snow off a paved surface is a lot harder if you let people tramp all over it first…