[paytonc]

Tried to cut through today, and there was a guard posted at the west entrance limiting access to members. Might be only on warm weekends. What a silly situation.

[paytonc]

@ursus 163730 wrote:

Of course soon thereafter Phase 2 construction of the Wharf will start messing up Maine Avenue some more.

The cycletrack has been surprisingly passable most times I’ve used it, with just some minor bell-ringing to warn pedestrians. (I’ve heard that permanent signs are on their way, but given the number of tourists present it’ll always be a challenge.) However, it abruptly ends at the 1000 Maine construction site, with no detour. One possibility is to zig-zag over to the water side, then through the fish market.

There will be a respite of about a year until Phase 2 construction starts. At least from my POV (coming from south of M/Maine) it’ll be a left onto Maine from 6th (at Arena Stage), then another left back onto the cycletrack at 7th.

[paytonc]

I did this as a weekday ride once, staying south of 50 (overlapping with ewilliams’ route). From Largo Town Center, it was basically Woodmore Road to Bowie, then Governors Bridge Road to Riva. The hairiest part was getting from Riva to Annapolis; bridge doesn’t have a shoulder, the numerous inlets result in very poor street connectivity, and it dumps you into the awful sprawl of Parole.

In Maryland, I’ve often had good luck looking for “XYZ Bridge Road” paralleling a highway — seems like these were the original through-routes. Brock Bridge Road, for instance, is a nice parallel to I-95/BW through Laurel.

[paytonc]

Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. I took the Capitol Limited with my bike just after it started last fall.

1. There’s LOTS of luggage storage room aboard the train. Pretty much: if you can carry it on yourself, you can bring it aboard. There are luggage racks next to the “bike room” downstairs, where you can leave the panniers. Then you can bring your handlebar bag up to your seat, where you can put it under the seat in front of you or in the huge overhead rack. (Spacious enough, you could climb inside.)

2. You hang your bike vertically from wall-mounted racks that Amtrak provides. Speaking of which, more power to you if you can lift your bike onto the train with panniers attached, but otherwise you can put the panniers aboard, then lift the bike. Since you’re boarding at the first station, you should have plenty of time to arrange everything; it took me less than a minute, and I was boarding in Harpers Ferry.

(Photos of the bike room and the lower-level luggage racks.)

3. At Washington Union Station, there are lots of staff on hand to direct you to the right train car — only one is equipped with bike racks. You won’t get lost. When traveling Amtrak, there will usually be a lot of people around telling you what to do.

4. During busier times, the conductors assign seats to you; at other times, you get to choose your own seat. If you don’t get your preferred side, you can always go to the lounge car and admire the view from its bigger windows. Note that seats are not reserved in the lounge car, so go there as soon as the conductor’s taken your ticket. (Photo)

I hope I answered all of your questions, as it’s a bit difficult to find them embedded amidst the other text.

[paytonc]

Crystal City still has free weekend garage parking, if you don’t necessarily need to be right at Gravelly.

[paytonc]

Drat. Now it brings me to a splash page.

[paytonc]

I marshaled one last year or so, as part of BikingTownDC, and I stood in the rain to guard the bikes so’s they didn’t get out of hand

That year, they were all Counter Culture shops, which was kind of a letdown; glad to see this ride has more variety. Very exuberant crowd, as you can imagine, and BikingTown required pre-registration so it was a manageable 20-odd riders.

[paytonc]

Well, for someone like me who doesn’t use the route frequently, having to remember:
– hours that the Fort part is open
– hours that the Cemetery part is open
– proper credentials
– weird place names like “such and such gate”
– unmarked street names
– proper directionality (which still leaves someone climbing Columbia Pike westbound)
– Will I Be Stopped By Someone Heavily Armed?
…all qualify as “weird access restrictions” = “might as well not go there.”

Distance-wise, it also doesn’t help someone on Columbia Pike to go north around the cemetery and into Rosslyn, not when in theory it’s almost a straight shot to the 14th St. bridges.

[paytonc]

@JustinW 4789 wrote:

Where are you on Columbia Pike? Can you pop up to Rt 50 and use that eastbound?

50 just dead-ends into the cemetery, though, with its weird access restrictions.

For all intents and purposes, there are three ways to bike into Arlington from the east (never mind the Potomac bridges): Custis Trail, Rosslyn streets, and the Four Mile Run trail. Otherwise, the cemetery and I-395 are insurmountable barriers. In the next few years, the new Washington Blvd/Columbia Pike interchange will have wider sidewalks and won’t be quite so awful for bikes.

In the very long term, a combination of the Country Club Bypass and a fully linked-up 12th St. S. (as shown in the Columbia Pike area plan) will create a low-traffic east-west link paralleling Columbia Pike over to Pentagon City, and by that time Long Bridge Park will connect to a new Potomac bridge, and perhaps pigs will fly.

[paytonc]

Revealed route choice preference is an emerging field that really will change transportation planning, and I’m glad to see it applied to cycling. The particular theoretical approach used here is also pretty interesting, with everything posed in terms of trade-offs.

I’m also happy to see that my preferred cycling facility, the bike boulevard, does quite well even among the experienced cyclists in this analysis. On a bike boulevard, unlike on most streets here, bikes are not obligated to come to a full stop (under the broiling summer sun) every 30 seconds; unlike a bike lane, you’re not constantly dodging buses and car doors and taxis.

@Riley: Actually, the study population was specifically weighted to be exactly the opposite. “Compared with a random phone survey of adults about bicycling in the region (Dill and Voros, 2007), the GPS participants were slightly older, were more likely to have a college degree, had higher incomes, and were more likely to have full-time jobs than other regular cyclists. They were also more likely to live in a two-person household. Only 7% lived in a household without a car. This was by design.”

@TwoWheelsDC 34326 wrote:

This actually had quite a bit of bearing on my decision to buy a house in ArlCo rather than staying on the Hill…If I want to go for a long ride, or for my commute, I have to first navigate my way through SE/SW, or through downtown.

At least for recreational rides, the completed Anacostia trail and Metropolitan Branch Trail will directly link Capitol Hill with many miles of recreational trails. Now, if only there were bike boulevards traversing the neighborhood’s umpteen stop lights…

[paytonc]

@vvill 32593 wrote:

Agreed. I think it’d also be helpful to post the basic rules of the races beforehand on the website. It was a little hard for me to hear/pay full attention to the announcer and it took me a little while to figure out what a manifest was (I started at the very back of the pack so was one of the last to be handed one).

Dang, you guys need to get to a few more messenger races. Sheer speed isn’t all there is to life.

I, for one, was a little disappointed that the manifest was so obvious this year — I suspect that my higher rank last year was largely because other racers overlooked a lot of the checkpoints. (Plus, rigid U-locks are much easier to toss than floppy tires.) Remember: one checkpoint visit = one+ full lap, and it’s waaay less work!

[paytonc]

@acc 29615 wrote:

it was a bit of a shock to open up the Derby web page, click on the Gallery of photos, and see myself captioned, Spectacle.

I consider it a challenge.

And I am captioned Obstacles.

[paytonc]

See, the thing is that heat index doesn’t mean anything to me: a 102 heat index could mean 99F+30% humidity (DP 62) or 90F+65% humidity (DP 76). I’ve done some strenuous hiking out west in the former conditions and been just fine, albeit with way more water than I first thought necessary. I’ve also walked the two blocks to Metro in the latter conditions and ended up sticky with sweat. Heat index is well nigh useless.

Heck, even temperature doesn’t even matter that much to me. The key isn’t whether I sweat — I seem to sweat whenever active outdoors above 80F or so — the key is whether that sweat evaporates into the breeze or just drips down my brow. And the quickest way to determine that is the dew point, with the caveat that 100F+ isn’t healthy.

What I’m saying is that I look at dew point first to determine comfort, then temperature. It’s not like I’m looking at more “details” than you — still just two data points — just different (and, for me, more useful) ones.

(Commuting daily in Chicago will turn you into a weather hawk. I also learned that, with basic winter gear, wind robs body heat a lot faster than still cold air will.)

There is something you can do about the weather: you can decide what to wear when biking, or (horrors) draw the line and say “no, not today.”

[paytonc]

@PotomacCyclist 24539 wrote:

(I know there are differences between relative humidity, dew points, etc. But even though I’ve read explanations about it, I’ve never been motivated to figure it out. There are a few items in life that I really don’t care about. This is one of them. I’m not sure why. Usually I like learning about things.)

Relative humidity is just about useless — as air heats, it can hold much more moisture. Dew point is much more useful since it’s a fixed reference point, and can’t exceed the current temperature. That way, quite like you have a “70F = nice, 90F = hot” equivalency chart in your brain, you can also remember this:
< 60 = it's dry and sweat evaporates
60-70 = mildly sticky to very sticky
70-75 = feels tropical
75+ = swimming through the air

In many ways, dew point and wind speed are more important to whether I go biking than temperature. You can dress for just about any temperature, but there is nothing you can do to accommodate an 80-degree dew point or a 30 MPH headwind.

[paytonc]

@mstone 22726 wrote:

good grief, what were you doing with your bell?

I have almost never gotten a *negative* reaction for ringing a bell, even when doing so very insistently. Plenty of people ignore it at first, but eventually get the message (and move to the side — either left or right — as appropriate).

The only negative reaction from a pedestrian I remember in the past year or so of near-daily riding in city streets and/or MVT is that once I was attempting to chide a driver (nearly right-hooked me in a bike lane) by ringing my bell. Some halfwit on the sidewalk, who apparently has a very different view of civility than I or most civilized people do, thought my gentle protestations were funny in an emasculating way and pointed and exaggeratedly har-de-har-har-ed. But the point is, he noticed the bell and registered that it was a bicycle, and that the bell was seen as timid rather than aggressive.

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