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Has anyone tried the shimano SH-MW81? It looks just right for staying warm & keeping stuff from dripping inside the shoe, but it looks like one of those “have to buy it blindly off the internet” items.

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The amount of light you need depends on 3 things: 1) how dark it is 2) how fast you’re going 3) how bad your eyes are. You’ll have to figure out for yourself what is sufficient. If you’re in areas with some ambient lighting and not going real fast, a fairly inexpensive AA battery light will probably suffice. The real high lumen stuff is important for night time downhill mountain biking, but overkill for a lot of situations. You need enough light to see a couple of seconds ahead of you, so you’ll need more if you’re going 25 MPH than if you’re going 10 MPH. If you have something now that kinda works, I’d suggest trying to research it online to figure out how bright it is, and then get something just a bit brighter. You can drop $500 on lights, but for most people that’s not a necessity. If what you have now is a handlebar light, a helmet light would be a logical complement. I like my vis360. It’s only 110 lumens, but it’s got a narrower beam pattern so it’s brighter on the ground than some lights that have a wider beam and higher lumens. You can get away with the narrower beam on a helmet light because you can aim the light around, whereas a handlebar light needs to light up a wide static field.

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@eminva 31813 wrote:

The caps under the helmet don’t make your head hot in the warm weather? I’ve always just bought a helmet with a visor, but that kind of limits your selection of helmets, so I might consider other options next time. I just thought the cap would make my head heat up.

I have a visor and don’t need a visor cap, but I always wear a headsweats–much better at keeping cool/non-drippy.

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@ShawnoftheDread 31812 wrote:

Aesthetically, I’d hate to see a bike rack in front of this building. Of couse, I’d also hate to see a parking lot in front of it.

Cynical me assumes that’s an old picture and it now has jersey walls or at least a lot of bollards.

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@dasgeh 31807 wrote:

I want second, third, fourth this point. As someone who’s batteries have died unexpected mid-dark-ride home, you should always have a back up. Riding as a ninja is SCARY.

It seems from observation that you can get used to it. Or maybe no-hands texting ninja guy was just hiding his fear really well.

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much less likely to cause a fish kill in a fountain

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well, that’s not good

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I’ll vote for bright helmet light; the handlebar light is just a backup that’s harder to aim on the fly.

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It’s not a rumble strip, it’s a road boil that needs lancing. As an aside, am I imagining things, or is it rougher westbound than eastbound?

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Great day for gender equality also–all the ELITE cyclists passing in the middle lane today on w&od/custis seemed to be women, which is atypical.

The only bad part of my commute was turning onto chain bridge in the dark and finding grooved pavement. I hadn’t previously tried to ride at speed on grooved pavement, and hope to not do so again. I decided to bail onto the sidewalk, and found myself trapped until there was a large enough gap to stop, dismount, and lift the bike out of the grooved pit onto a curb cut. Mental note: don’t choose that route again for a while.

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@essigmw 31466 wrote:

Hope last night’s rain didn’t cause too many problems on the tow path.

you probably shouldn’t have said that

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@GuyContinental 31201 wrote:

Traffic around there (Cedar?) is really bad and going faster than it looks

I guess VDOT should institute some traffic calming, or maybe a stop sign on that road.

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@Certifried 31296 wrote:

oh yeah, the many dead passengers on the NYC subway, right, forgot about those.

The NYC platform design doesn’t seem to lead to the same sort of dangerous overcrowding. Sure they’re crowded, but the pillars, etc., form natural places for people to just stop or shelter rather than relentlessly sliding closer to the edge. The mezzanines have also turned out to form a clear area where people can make it through the faregate and onto an escalator, then just get shoved into the crowd. In NYC when things fill up you’re not going to make it through the faregate. At least at the core stations, and probably system-wide, metro will probably have to eventually put up automatic doors on the platform. That will cost a ton of money, will require them to figure out to run automatic train control, and will not happen anytime soon. Once that’s done, then it will be reasonable to talk about putting more stuff on the platforms.

It’s facile to just say “someone else did it, we should do it too”; you need to look at each system’s design (and flaws) and plan accordingly. And, as you pointed out yourself, the system is already at capacity, so there’s not a lot of incentive to spend money to lower capacity by replacing packed cars with cars packed with a smaller number of fare-paying customers + bikes.

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@Rod Smith 31284 wrote:

Seatbelt laws discourage driving because they make people think cars are dangerous.

Yup, exactly the same thing. As you know, it is necessary to carry a seat belt with you at all times in case you might get in a car. Also, the science on seat belts is equivocal, and there is not a clear improvement in survival rates when victims are not ejected from their vehicle.

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Re: the little rain comment. We were in a freak weather event last Saturday while not biking, and I’m glad I was able to jump in a parked car and hunker down. Wind came up pretty much out of nowhere, carrying dirt fully horizontally like a sandblaster, then the rain came in (also horizontally) and brought visibility down to zero. My wife couldn’t carry our youngest against the wind, and I had a tough time of it. If it’s something like that again, I’d want to be inside–at least for me, there are too many stretches where I’d be hard pressed to find adequate shelter from trees falling over, branches flying, etc. (Full disclosure: I wasn’t going to ride tomorrow anyway, for unrelated reasons.)

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