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@jnva 26464 wrote:

Evel Knievel could do it.

Most summers it gets to the point you can just walk.

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the weight weenies won’t like that one!

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@krazygl00 26311 wrote:

Remember the “Multi” part of “Multi Use Path”. People use it for strolling, walking, running, teaching the kids to ride, leisure riding and yes, fast road-riding. No one has a moral claim greater than anyone elses; just because roadies are seen as elitist doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to use a MUP for race-training or just posing at being fast.[/quote]

Many of the local trails have a speed limit, so no, they don’t generally have the right to use the MUP for race training. Most of the trails also have posted rules including signaling before passing.

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Now of course they have to do it safely, but it very well may be that the roadies definition of a safe pass and a leisure cyclist’s definition could be very different.

I don’t really care whether someone thinks they’re safe (more likely they’re just impatient/arrogant) when they pass in the “middle lane” — they’re not safe, because they’ve left no margin for error or unexpected behavior on the part of several people. It’s really not that hard to tap the brakes, and if you don’t want to have to slow down and speed back up again, you need to be riding somewhere other than a MUP.

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Hmm. There was a single orange cone in the middle of 66 by vienna this afternoon. I wonder if it migrated.

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@DaveK 26186 wrote:

If you can’t drive, you can’t drive.

You must be new ’round here…in my experience it’s not only “you can”, but “you will”…

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Yeah, haters don’t want to hear all that.

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@DismalScientist 26164 wrote:

Why should “we” have all the general fund money currently spent on subsidizing cars? Hate to tell you, but active cyclists constitute a lot smaller percentage of the population than auto drivers.

1) Chicken and egg.
2) Why should I have to justify being greedy if the other side doesn’t?

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@DismalScientist 26137 wrote:

And what would be the source of this multi-billion dollar funding stream?

Well, what I wrote above is that I’d be perfectly happy if gas tax proceeds were used only for cars and not “bike paths” and other “waste” that makes the tea party froth, as long as only the gas tax were used for cars and we can have all the general fund money currently spent on subsidizing cars. If some wacko wants to start ranting about “their” tax money, see their crazy and double down.

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@KLizotte 26111 wrote:

Actually, this past year the Highway Trust Fund needed to be bailed out by the General Fund for the first time because it ran out of money.

The trust fund has required transfers from the general fund for years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. On the state level the gas tax covers even less of the funding, and most of the maintenance cost of the road system is financed at the state level.

@DismalScientist 26112 wrote:

I imagine much damage is simply a function of time and not use. I notice that the area trails need to be repaved over time.

Road damage is a non-linear function directly related to the weight of a vehicle; heavier vehicles do vastly more damage than lighter ones. The worst issue with the trails is tree roots buckling them, which is a function both of having trees much closer to bike trails than best practices suggest, and of having trails with a much shallower roadbed than you find on roads. This is much less of an issue with the parts of the W&OD that are built in the old rail bed than (e.g.) the Fairfax County Parkway MUP or other shallow asphalt paths. The flip side is that if we had any maintenance money at all, it wouldn’t cost that much to repave these things on a regular basis, given how little there is to do (compared to the every-couple-of-years grinding & repaving on roads with heavy vehicle traffic).

@DismalScientist 26103 wrote:

Ummm. Do we not ride on roads?

Sure we do. But if we had a multi-billion dollar funding stream, we could get some really nice dedicated infrastructure instead. Which will be nice, as the roads will be completely falling apart in this hypothetical due to a lack of maintenance once they’re restricted to using only gas tax revenue.

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@pfunkallstar 26067 wrote:

But what about helper robots?! Should they be tagged?

Are they government helper robots, or small business helper robots?

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@Jason 26064 wrote:

[HR][/HR]

With all due respect, those are pros on cleared out roads. We are commuters dealing with wet, sand, gravel, snow, ect. Wider tires with the appropriate pressure help with all this, especially when riding downtown. If someone is on a hard trail for 18 miles, thats one thing, but for some of us, we ride more downtown in and around traffic than not. Thinner isnt always better.

I think you misread it…

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@TwoWheelsDC 25964 wrote:

Sorry for the confusion…I was just assuming the 3.0 was the more expensive of the two when I was looking at the specs. Fuji may need to work on it’s naming scheme…

Fuji call the top-end model in each line 1.0, and the numbers increase as the price-point goes down, sorta like “first place, second place, etc.”

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@JorgeGortex 25981 wrote:

I imagine my 82yo father who is on a fixed income fielding yet another tax just so that he can go to places to do the things that he enjoys doing[…]Why should he have to take on yet another tax just to live his life? Or any of us for that matter?

Umm, because the roads don’t pay for themselves? As an option, he can pay no taxes, and enjoy his car by sitting in it while it’s parked in his driveway.

What is it with this fantasy notion–so popular these days–that people can get stuff without actually paying for it.

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I’d be perfectly happy with that option, as long as it was bundled with the requirement that nothing but gas taxes or tolls could be used to pay for motor vehicle facilities. Us cyclists would somehow manage to get by on the windfall from the general fund money previously spent on cars.

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Why would someone ride with less than the maximum possible pressure? Well, if hard tires were the best solution, more people would trade in their pneumatics for steel disks, right? The tires are designed to have a certain amount of deflection, and the optimal pressure will be lower than the max unless the bike + rider are on the heavy end of the spectrum. There are people who like to have a crazy hard tire, but the science and the psychology seem to diverge on whether that’s a benefit.

Swapping wheels gets old. You often end up needing to fiddle with brakes, etc. I’d rather have a second bike, even a beater, than swap wheels every week.

+1000 on all the suggestions to ditch a backpack if you’re wearing one.

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