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I’ve seen one that is about that size on H Street NE not infrequently. Often around the Queen Vic / Granville Moore bike racks. So have hope! There’s at least one out there.

Great choice of bike btw. My wife has a Civia Loring and it’s a great town bike.

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Every single luxury car on Capitol Hill with Maryland plates!

But my latest top-hated car are Teslas. They’re so bloody quiet that you absolutely can’t hear them coming up behind you and they seem to have a terrible problem staying under 25mph!

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@jrenaut 98870 wrote:

I wonder how many drivers would filter to the front at a light if they could get away with it (and fit). Most, I’d imagine.

On my daily commute drivers routinely filter passed cars stopped in the only legal lane of East Capitol at Lincoln Park in order to make an illegal right on red. In order to safely navigate this intersection, I find it necessary to leave the bike lane and merge with car traffic on that block so that I can turn into the left turn lane I need without getting run over from behind. If I’m the first to stop at the red light and have taken the lane, easily 50% of the time the driver that arrives behind me will force their way around me to the right. And since I can keep pace when the light changes, I’ve had to bang more than one window to let them know they can’t then turn into my lane.

I’m also well overdue for the semiannual bike bashing email chain on the neighborhood listserv. Every time I have to hide my phone in another part of the house and remind myself that I actually like most of these people when they’re either at Point A or Point B, and not navigating between the two like a bunch of six year olds who’ve had a couple of pints.

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@Terpfan 98734 wrote:

tood there looking like a silhouette from The Hartford’s logo.

I work with a bunch of folks from the Hartford and am going to have a great time letting them know how well their marketing is working when they’re in town next week! Also I wonder if it’d be preferable to be chased by Trusty, the TRowe Price ram!?!

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Folks seemed to have a good time taking pictures on Halloween. One bike commuter even dropped by on his way home from work to get a shot with his ride before coming back in costume. The Bicycle Space ride also passed by at one point, yelling encouragement on their way to drinks at Bardo.

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@AFHokie 98079 wrote:

Btw, how much torque does a typical e-bike have? A buddy of mine (and not a big guy either) had an old motorcycle that was so anemic it topped out around 45mph on anything more than a gentle uphill grade. I could be wrong, but I don’t expect to see e-bikes roaring up the Custis through Rossyln at 25+mph in the near future.

I have a reasonably nice e-bike setup. It’s a 500Watt continuous (peak 800Watts over a short hill) motor driven by a 36Volt battery. It offers a strong assist up to 20mph on flats (~22mph when fully charged and ~18mph when approaching empty). Fully charged it can haul me up Capitol Hill at ~17mph putting out just over 800Watts, which isn’t nearly enough to show up on the first few pages of Strava’s leaderboards. Also, a full charge lasts ~20miles of hard use and I’ve had a friend borrow it for a road ride and stretch a charge for over 40miles with judicious use of the throttle.

You can also drive the same motor with a 48Volt battery that will provide a max speed of 25mph. This is the most powerful option that’s readily commercially available. However the same ~10lb battery will only have a ~10mile range if used at those speeds.

This is a big reason that I don’t foresee overpowered e-bikes becoming a serious problem. The tradeoffs required to provide an incremental amount of top speed are pretty steep. I’ve seen the battery market focusing on providing increased range and lower weight over slight speed boosts, and I see that being the industry’s continued focus even as technology improves. The 60Volt batteries needed to break the 30mph threshold currently weigh well over 30lbs and have terrible range.

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We live on Capitol Hill and have friends with kids in Brent Elementary and Maury Elementary who RAVE about them. Watkins is reputed to be quite nice as well, but our friend who is a DCPS teacher actually recommended Maury over it. Payne Elementary hasn’t been recommended to us.

Your budget will probably comfortably rent you a large condo or a good sized single family home in-bounds for any of those schools. And anywhere on the Hill is going to have very easy bike connections to the Union Station area (probably a sub-10 minute commute). If you looked for something in-bound for Maury you’d end up closer to the H Street NE restaurant and shops district that I prefer to Barracks Row (near the Eastern Market metro stop and closer to Brent). H Street also has my favorite local shop, the Daily Rider!

Good luck! Happy to answer any questions if you decide to go that route.

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@mstone 97796 wrote:

Merely a flesh wound!

What are you gonna do, bleed on me?!

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I had to drive in to work today to pick up stuff that not even the mightiest of cargobikes would fit. Alas…

But passing by the racks I had to stop and take a picture. Someone managed to have a MUCH worse commute than I did!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]6895[/ATTACH]

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In place of having a second car in the family, I use an e-bike as my town bike. I’ve taken it on the MVT to get to Virginia (since it’s the only real option) on any number of occasions and never had any problems. I’ve only ridden my road bike on the CCT, but based on your descriptions of his riding, I can’t see any reasonable person objecting your friend riding his there.

That just leaves unreasonable people, who are best ignored. Though I’d love to hear NPS’ response if that guy ever does call in to report your friend. Based on my experience calling to report a bunch of kids tear-assing around the Anacostia trails on dirt bikes, I would expect him to be paid polite lip service at best.

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We’ve got company in town this weekend that can’t make a bike trip, but I’ve emailed this around to all my riding buddies. Thanks for the heads up!!!

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The latest wave of tax-avoidance transactions were dreamed up by some guys out for a ride. My riding buddies (who are mostly tax people) have decided that we need to discuss beer, tacos, and other assorted life stuff less on our rides and instead focus on designing the next big thing in tax shelters. If a couple of dudes from Skadden can do it while meandering about the south of France, I see no reason that we can’t too.

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@dasgeh 96456 wrote:

We’re going to Disney this weekend ::shudders:: and all I can think about in the planning is how much easier the trip with be with a bakfiets. Then my husband came up with the idea of a bakfiets bikeshare at Disney. And now that’s all I’m going to be able to think about while we’re there.

A Disneyfiets would be awesome for hauling the family around the sprawling parks!

As a NC native, I love the Charlotte idea! Venues for my major conference are booked through 2018, but I’ve already started lobbying to get more urban locations into the mix. Interestingly, it’s something that many of the younger attendees have also mentioned in their conference evaluations (New Orleans, Denver, and San Fransisco in particular get a lot of mentions). It’s going to be a hard sell though. The ‘Boomer and older Gen-X crowd really like having events at resort properties with on-site golf.

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This year my company added a group ride to our main conference’s schedule that coincides with the typical golf outing. It was really popular, so now I’m trying to get one added to our tax and accounting nerds event as well. The only tricky bit seems to be planning a decent route in typical conference places like Phoenix and … Orlando. ::shudders::

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@dasgeh 96077 wrote:

The issue is that isn’t that two people of different genders treated each other poorly. It’s that one man was treated poorly by multiple people of different genders, and the only one that he tracks down and berates is a woman. It smacks of serious misogyny.

I think it’s crucial to note that the only rider he tracked down and berated was also the specific rider who hit him and kept rolling. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a rider (especially one who isn’t familiar with pack cycling) to focus his anger on the individual who struck him, rather than viewing the whole group as equally culpable. That’s what makes me unwilling to jump immediately on the misogyny bandwagon. But I also can’t watch the videos at work, so I’m missing the particulars of what the OP said and how he said it. So I’m totally open to the possibility that I’m missing color that clearly swings my view toward your side of the argument. Facts, as they say, matter.

In any event, I still object to watering down the term mansplaining.

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