Someone has cannibalized the artfully suspended bike on the corner of Champlain and Euclid Streets NW, removing its wheels. Hey, wheelsets are expensive. If this is your bike, you better come get it before its frame, cryptically locked in mid-air, is all that remains. And if you don’t mind, please leave a note explaining your motivation because I’m going coconuts trying to figure it out.

Photo by Ted Scheinman

Some action in the comments section of David Montgomery’s Saturday Post story about bicycle commuting. I thought the piece was fine, even if it’s not the freshest idea out there. A lot of commenters are freaked about the lede (not about its florid style, mind you):

This is the summer of women on bicycles riding around town free as anything, wearing long dresses or skirts, sandals or even high heels, hair flowing helmet-free, pedaling not-too-hard and sitting upright on their old-school bikes, the kind with front baskets where they put their laptops, and handlebars that curve gently back in a bow shaped like the upper line of someone’s perfectly drawn red lipstick.

Specifically, the trouble is with the the “hair flowing helmet-free” part. I find the helmet vs. non-helmet debate dreary; people who pish-posh helmet use offer us a rare opportunity to test the theory of evolution at every sticky intersection.

The reason I hate this debate is that it turns a necessary conversation—should people in cities get around more by bike, and if so, how—into a mere safety question.

Plus, c’mon, it doesn’t take many trips through town to expose how flimsy the anti-helmet position is. A straight shot up 17th Street NW is rife with terror, from car doors opening (surprise!) to trucks in the bike lanes, to people who SCARE THE BEJESUS OUT OF YOU BY HONKING FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. And then there’s the vehicles that don’t see you before they back up (two times last month), the pedestrians who cross at you daring you not to swerve (though maybe that’s just my neighborhood), the pitted streets that threaten to turn you into a human cannonball…

But hey, argue about that all you like. We don’t have bike boxes, or car-free-streets days, or any number of good ideas for integrating cycling into daily life, but people droning on about helmets or cyclists running stop signs? Always available.

Photo by Flickr user kendra e

I know we’ve been warned, but I am an impossible klutz. I was wearing flip-flops (I know, I know) last night when I clipped the edge of a step on the Rosslyn escalator with my big toe. I went home and self-medicated with peroxide and Spaced. My doctor told me today I needed stitches, but it’s too late now. I think I can live with the scar. I just hope my toe doesn’t fall off.

Is it just me or do Metro escalators have bigger teeth than other city’s underground moving staircases? Compare the London Underground’s escalators with ours.  I have a picture of my toe, but no one wants to see that.

This might be my final installment into the saga that is the life of Captain Melvin Gresham—a D.C. Police Department official who appears to always be in the center of intrigue and controversy. According to his civil-suit complaint filed in June, Gresham is a hero/whistle blower/all-around standup cop. To cop sources, he’s a supervisor who needs some leadership training asap.

“I had to bang heads with him, very disagreeable is the way he investigated things. He never has any proof. When we go to arbitration against him, he loses most of the arbitrations. We’ve had several arbitration hearings with our members and he’s lost. All the evidence is, ‘What I heard.’ Nothing ever of substance. He never has any real evidence against anybody. When you’re a policeman, you have to have solid facts,” says one veteran officer.

Gresham has his followers. Many of whom have commented on this post and our last installment.

The current Gresham dustup stems from a traffic accident. The allegation: Gresham got into a fender bender and pressured an officer to change the accident report in his favor.

In Gresham’s complaint, he addresses the accident on page 10, bullet-point No. 23. Or rather, he dances around the allegations, focusing mainly on picking apart the testimony and character of Lt. Mike Smith.

The complaint hones in on anonymous letter (was it written by Smith?), Smith’s believing that Gresham is a very rich man, and the allegation that Smith admitted to “tampering” with evidence. “Lt. Smith was off duty and had no actual basis for interjecting himself into the investigation,” the complaint states.

The complaint notes that the police department withdrew the charges against Gresham. “However, Chief Lanier insisted on serving Cpt. Gresham an official reprimand.” The reprimand addresses the very serious allegation of witness intimidation:

According to the complaint, the reprimand reads:

“Internal Affairs Agent Denise Garrett investigated the alleged misconduct. Agent Garrett determined that your demeanor and subsequent confrontation with the reporting officer was intimidating and may have jeopardized the impartiality of the accident investigation.”

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I give up. What’s with the bike fixed to the fence at Euclid and Champlain Streets NW? Is it a protest against Christian Science? A demonstration of the little-heralded cantilevering abilities of U-locks? A prank played on a drunk friend? Telllllll meeeeeeeeee.

Last Thursday, Eastern Senior High School’s marching band paraded through the streets of Capitol Hill, west to Lincoln Park and then back on East Capitol Street. There was no actual event going on. The band was just practicing.

“Honestly, we do it a lot,” says staff band leader James Perry. “A lot of the times, the cars don’t mind. We never get any honks. They roll down the window and bop along.”

Although it’s the dead of summer, Eastern’s band convened every weekday last week, according to Perry. The reason: next Saturday, August 2, the group is expected to play in a parade for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinement Festival in Canton, Ohio.

The key word here is “expected.”

This year, six people will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Two of them are known for their time with the Washington Redskins: cornerback Darrell Green, and wide receiver Art Monk.

In April, the Eastern band was contacted by a parade coordinator, and asked to apply “to represent D.C.” as part of the festivities, says Perry. After the group was selected to play in the parade, Eastern students began raising money holding car washes and selling candy in school. The band does not plan to stay over in Canton. They’re just fund-raising for the bus ride, which amounts to $3,900. Roughly 65 to 70 musicians, as well as six dancers and six flag girls, will be going. Each student is responsible for raising $70 for his or her passage, says Perry.

The group was relying on paychecks from students’ jobs with the Department of Employment Services’ Summer Youth Program. But, when the District’s payment system failed, many were left with insufficient funds to cover their shares. As of the last count, the group had $500 total. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve gotten several reports of D.C. police issuing tickets to bicyclists going the wrong way down one-way portions of New Hampshire Avenue NW near the intersection of 16th and U Streets yesterday and this morning.

A bystander took a picture of about 10 cyclists being ticketed north of the intersection at about 9 a.m. this morning:

We’ve heard the tickets came with a $25 fine. A police spokesperson said he hadn’t heard of any enforcement effort, but is currently checking into it. The ticketing effort comes about two weeks after the tragic death of cyclist Alice Swanson in Dupont Circle; it can’t be said enough that Swanson appears to have broken no laws when she was struck by a private trash truck, but the incident focused attention on issues of bike safety and road-sharing.

If you saw the ticketing or, gasp, got a ticket, tell us in the comments.

Flickr photo by p373

UPDATE, 1:05 P.M.: Pete Welsch, who lives near the intersection, is the fellow who took the photo. He calls in to report that police were waving down cyclists as they approached the 16th-and-U intersection from the north. “People were whipping out camera phones and things like that,” he says.

LL is going to take the departure of D.C. Department of Transportation Director Emeka Moneme as an opportunity to mention a problem that he knows is being solved by Moneme’s old agency in a thoughtful and thorough manner but has been such a longstanding menace to LL’s quality of life that he feel compelled to rant about it to no particular end.

Seriously, what the hell is up with Columbus Circle?

OK, DDOT, LL knows that you’re aware of the problems and you’ve done a painstaking redesign, but let me tell you: As he rides his bike across the cracked and bus-deformed asphalt in front of Union Station, almost popping his tire there for the 900th time in his life, He had to wonder: What in AASHTO is taking so long?

The thing isn’t just a menace to cyclists (which it has been for years). When LL drives through there at night, he can never tell if he’s in the proper lane, seeing as (a) the lane markings are severely worn and (b) the lighting is piss-poor. Seriously, coming off Mass Ave from the west after dusk, it’s suddenly like you’re on a desolate stretch of rural interstate highway at 3 a.m. (That probably has something with special lighting regs for the federal core, but Jesus, it’s dark!)

A WTOP article from last summer suggested this whole thing could be done by 2009. DDOT spokesperson Karyn LeBlanc says design work on the plan—which isn’t just about repaving, but re aligning lanes, including “intermodal” features, etc—is now 90 percent complete, and designs will be presented for approval by the federal Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission in September. Best case scenario, reconstruction starts in January; most likely, LeBlanc says, it won’t kick off till later in spring.

Yarrrgh!

The Washington Post has a nice story today by Paul Schwartzman about the dangers of riding on top of the double-decker buses operated by Open Top Sightseeing—low-hanging tree branches, power lines, etc.

I liked the story even better, though, when I watched it on the WUSA-TV 11 p.m. newscast last Monday:

Good job, Channel 9! All of this attention, of course, has been prompted by the tragic deaths of Joshua Stoll and Michael Feiock last Friday en route to a Nats game.

Schwartzman, to his credit, added some more factual meat to the story, including the fact that Open Top itself has trimmed tree branches to prevent injuries. Still, the Post is notoriously stingy about acknowledging other press outlets’ coverage, and that’s especially true when it comes to TV and radio newscasts.

I’m probably the last person to see this, but I still think it’s worth posting. This video provides enough reason for people to use better bike locks (and use them correctly).

Metro accidentally releases workers’ Social Security numbers

Transit agency offers identity theft monitoring services to affected employees

Metro has advised nearly 4,700 past and present employees that their social security numbers were published accidentally on the transit agency’s Web site last month.

The information was posted between June 9 and 25 as part of a solicitation from Metro to companies interested in providing worker’s compensation and risk management services. The document mistakenly included the social security numbers of 4,675 employees. A smaller group of employees had their names and social security numbers posted in the lengthy document. Metro officials continue to analyze the information for any other data breaches.

In the sad aftermath of Alice Swanson’s death, blogs left and right have been awash in comments about the great urban biking vs. urban driving debate, which inevitably drills down to versions of the following claim (from Megan McArdle’s Atlantic blog): “if bicyclists want to be respected like other vehicles, they have to obey the same rules.”

Allow me to voice the unspoken secret of urban bicycling: No, we don’t. The whole fun and profit of riding your bike in the city is breaking the rules when safe and possible. That’s why I can get from my office in Adams Morgan down to city hall in 10 minutes or less during even the worst times of day traffic-wise. It’s what makes riding a bike around this city worthwhile.

I ride pretty much everywhere I need to go in the city, averaging about 50 miles a week, not counting any recreational/fitness rides. I also own a car, which I drive an average of twice a week. I’ve been in exactly one bike accident in nine years in town, when a driver made an illegal U-turn in front of me mid-block.

That said, I thought I’d share my “sensible scofflaw” strategies:

1. Running stop signs. My usual MO is this: As I approach a four-way stop, I assess traffic and slow down so that I take my turn while still rolling. If I can piggyback on a car moving through the intersection, I do. Actually stopping would mean wasting a considerable amount of energy getting back up to speed, especially seeing as I rarely downshift as I approach. Pet peeve: Fairly often, drivers will stop and wave me through at four-way stops. I can’t tell you how much I hate this: Do not make exceptions for me. When drivers make exceptions to the rules of the road, that’s when accidents happen. Take your turn, I’ll take mine.

2. Running traffic lights. I generally don’t do it when there’s heavy traffic or at complicated intersections with multiple protected left turns. But, when traffic is light, I’ll jump the gun after looking left-right-left and watching closely to see if any cars stopped with me are signaling or contemplating turns. Another thing I tend to do is wait to cross in the middle of the lane, edged almost into the intersection, where I can be easily seen.

3. Going the wrong way down one-way streets. Try to avoid it, with one big exception. I live on the 1400 block of W Street NW, which is one way heading east. Every day I have to head west to work, so I generally ride west on the sidewalk to the intersection with 15th Street and Florida Avenue, ride through the intersection (after going through it four or more times a day for more than a year, I’ve got the signal timing down), then continue across the 1500 block of W/Florida, still going the wrong way. If I didn’t do this, I’d have to detour east and south to V Street NW, which would just be stupid.

4. Sliding past cars stopped at intersections. Don’t know if this is even illegal, but this is the whole reason why you ride your bike around town! In fact, I dare a driver to cite a time they saw a cyclist actually wait in line with traffic. The secret to doing this safely and successfully is to be defensive. Generally, as I approach the intersection, I’ll slide to the inside of the waiting cars to avoid the right hook, then while waiting for the light, ride in front of the right-most lane to the outside, making eye contact with the driver. If the light changes while I approach the intersection, I slow down, allow a car to pass and slip in just behind.

Any other cyclists out there care to share their own sensible-scofflaw strategies?

This is a bike-friendly workplace. A lot of CP employees bike to work, or at least keep their bikes in the office. And I think it’s safe to say we’re all pretty freaked out about Alice Swanson’s death.

That tragedy has been discussed, with predictable results, on a lot of blogs. The comments tend to break along two lines: 1) cyclists need to obey the rules more; 2) vehicles need to watch out for cyclists more. So what do you do when there’s a case where, at the moment, it’s not clear that either Swanson or the truck that hit her were necessarily to blame?

Today on my way to work I was crossing the P Street NW bridge. An SUV with Maryland tags was waiting at the egress from the Rock Creek Parkway. The driver waited for me to cross but didn’t look the other way and hit a cyclist crossing from the other side. The cyclist shouted “Woah!” and hit the SUV’s grille; fortunately it seemed the car had just rocked forward and hadn’t gotten going. I called back to the cyclist to see if he was OK, and he said he was. At the next light I had to pull in front of the stopped SUV to turn left when it turned green. I gave him the stinkeye but he was very absorbed in whatever he was drinking through a straw.

I’m jumpy. I think everyone on two wheels is. And I don’t think there are any easy answers here.

The Post reports that a cyclist was killed just north of Dupont Circle this morning. A garbage truck “just ran completely over her,” according to D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services spokesperson Alan Etter.