Close Call

I had a bit of a close call on the bike last night on the way home from work. Details of the encounter are below, but it involved me and one of these Hop On Hop Off DC Double Decker sightseeing buses. I'm including a screenshot image from Google Maps of the place where the encounter occurred.





Click for larger image

I felt threatened enough by it to know instantly I wanted to report it to the company. I did my best to read out and remember the license plate number and stopped to enter it into the notepad on my phone as soon as I could safely get off the road and do so.

So, here's the message I just sent to the company that operates the buses. (Text/format is based on a sample e-mail I'd seen shared one time for contacting Metro or other local transit agencies to report dangerous bus driver behavior.)

To Whom it May Concern,

I would like to document a bus driver (from your company) who passed me, while I was on my bicycle, with only about 1 foot of clearance, nearly running me off the road into the curb. Please note that DC law requires three feet of clearance for safe passing of a bicycle by a motor vehicle. The following are the details of the incident.

Bus license plate: Maryland tags 01P 237 (or 01P D37) I did my best to remember the license plate number and write it down as soon as possible given the circumstances.

Time/date: Approx 5:40pm yesterday, Wednesday, September 28.

Location: East Basin Dr SW near the Jefferson Memorial. (see link for Google Map view of the site of the incident: http://bit.ly/oX4H2x) 

Incident: I was riding in to the right side of the lane on E Basin Dr SW where it forks right away from the entrance ramp to 395. Driver passed me unsafely by passing within my lane and much closer than the legal 3 feet of space. I estimate it at approximately one foot. I was honestly worried that the rear end of the bus was going to brush me if not worse. The driver's maneuver forced me all the way to the curb. I had no extra room to maneuver. 

I request that the driver, and all drivers (if not already standard training) be informed of the 3 feet passing rule and all laws related to sharing the roads with bicycles.

I am an experienced bike commuter, having traveled to work by bicycle along this route almost every day for the last two and a half years. At the time of the incident, I was following all road rules and operating my bicycle in a safe and predictable manner. 

The driver could have waited a few seconds until the the drive becomes two lanes wide to change lanes and safely pass me with more clearance. Instead he chose to pass dangerously close. I appreciate your help in making the roads safer for all parties concerned.

So that's what I sent. I really was worried for a second that the rear end of the bus was going to hit me. In a contest between a bus which ways many tons and a cyclist on a 25 pounds of bike, the bus will always win. The driver literally would have had to go the 15 mph I was traveling for another five seconds before the road widened and he could have passed safely.

He did all this only to come to a stop to drop off passengers Either the driver didn't feel that he needed to afford me a little room and not almost run me off the road to pass or he has an increedibly poor sense of the size of the bus and the way it handles around corners. Either way, something needs to be done. A driver of such a vehicle in a place with crowded, realtively narrow streets and lanes, like DC at rush hour, should know better.

I'll be curious to see what kind of response I get from the company. I'll be sure to post updates on this situation as they develop.

Sad Day in the World of Cartoon Cycling

Yehuda Moon is no more...

Part of my daily routine is to hop over to the best comic strip I've ever read, Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery.

Or shall I say, it was part of my routine for a long time. Sadly today, that time has come to an end. The strip had taken some time off the last couple weeks, but I remained confident it would be back. Instead of a cartoon, I was greeted by the image above when I opened the site today.

The authors of the comic, Rick Smith and Brian Griggs have posted that the strip is being discontinued. I'm gonna miss following the strip and the good storylines. It was also full of great commentary on being a cyclist. Before the site goes down (assuming it will), I urge you to go take a peek and read some of the strips. I may try to download all of them before the site goes eventually down, so I can have an archive of my own to refer to -- it was that good.

In any case, the end of the Yehuda Moon is a sad day. Now we'll never know if Yehuda made it to Interbike in one piece, or the fate of the Grow Bike. I'm glad at least I got to see into Yehuda's past when he was an architect/planner. I liked that bit of his bio, especially given my own current course of study.

Yehuda, Joe, Ghost of Fred, Sister Sprocket, et al. You will be missed.

Bicycle Traffic Report

I regularly have the radio on at work in the background, usually NPR, occasionally sports talk radio. A feature common to all types of stations is the rush hour traffic report. I've never driven to work more than a handful of times a year in DC, and that's usually been on weekends. So selfishly I find these reports annoying. If nothing else, they take away from time that could otherwise be devoted to more informative or entertaining programming.

Never mind the fact that, barring major accidents, they just announce the same bottlenecks and backups over and over and over day after day. For all I know, they've been running the same report recorded two years ago every day. Being a DC traffic reporter reminds me of jokes about how hard it must be to work as a weatherman in San Diego. Weather today? Sunny and 78. Weather tomorrow. Sunny and 78. Weather the next day. 78 and... Traffic in the DC area today? 95 south slow from 14th St Bridge all the way to Occoquan. Tomorrow: 95 south slow from 14th St Bridge all the way to Occoquan. Next day: 95 south... Well, you get the point.

Since I hear these traffic reports so often, I like to imagine what what a bicycle traffic report would be like as I ride home. I think it would go something like this:

Radio Program Anchor Joe: And now for the latest bicycle traffic report we turn to our very own Roland McCogs. Roland.

Roland: Thanks. Well, we've got a few reports of roving groups of tourists on and around the Mall walking five abreast blocking the entire path near the Washington Monument, so you're looking at a slow ride from Constitution Avenue down to the Jefferson Memorial.  

The Mount Vernon Trail is a smooth ride. That rider with a flat near the 14th Street Bridge we reported earlier has courteously moved his bike to the the side of the trail for repairs. You might encounter a minor delay of if you or another rider asks to check and make sure the affected rider has everything he needs to get going again. Delays are five seconds or less.  

Capital Crescent Trail is heavy near the trailhead in Georgetown, but conditions improve as you get closer to Chevy Chase. Beware the joggers with their headphones in, though, who can't hear your bell as you approach to pass. There seem to be quite a few out today.

The sun is bright, but there aren't any sunshine delays heading west on the Custis Trail through Arlington, since the Custis is pleasant and shaded unlike those wide, but still congested, interstate highways.

Should be a nice ride home, everyone. Remember to keep your smug smile on the inside as you speed past the motorists stuck in traffic on the bridge.

Back to you, Joe.

Joe: Thanks, Roland.

It's kind of a fun to pretend anyway...

Bike Commuting Statistics

The League of American Bicyclists' blog had a post on Friday highlighting data from the Census Bureau regarding bicycle commuting. While the data is by no means new and has been hashed and rehashed in lots of blogs, I wanted to delve into the numbers a little myself. This is by no means an exhaustive examination of the numbers, just a couple things that jump out at me. From the post:

more than half of one percent of American workers use a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation to work [...] this number represents nearly 40 percent growth since 2000.

The growth in percentages is good, and I suppose given the tendency in the US to sprawl and build less than bike-friendly roads, even 0.5% isn't too shabby. But, as they point out, lots of work remains to be done to make "our communities truly welcoming to bicyclists".

There is a healthy mix of communities in the top ten or twenty. Davis, CA comes in at 22.4%, by far the highest in the country. Davis is blessed with relatively flat terrain, good weather year round, and some great infrastructure, so it's not a surprise. It's been tops on these kinds of lists for years as far I know. Other cities in the top tier of the rankings may be more surprising to you... places with less hospitable climates like vis-a-vis Davis like Cambridge, Massachusetts; Madison, Wisconsin; Iowa City, Iowa; Missoula, Montana; and Boise, Idaho sprinkled among the top dozen or so and all coming in with over 5% bike commuting rates, with the exception of Boise, which is still at a very respectable 4%.

So, what about the cities in the DC area? Only DC proper makes the list of the 70 largest cities. It comes in fifth nationwide with 3.1% of workers using a bicycle as their primary mode of commuting. Of these 70 biggest cities, it's had the 6th highest percentage growth in bike commuting mode share over the period from 2000 to 2010.

This coincides, probably not by accident, with a commitment from the DC government to expand cycling infrastructure during that time. Miles upon miles of bike lanes have been designated (most visibly the Pennsylvania Avenue lanes, but others as well), new trails have opened (namely the Metropolitan Branch Trail from Union Station eventually to Silver Spring) , Capital Bikeshare was launched, and other experiments like some contraflow lanes and the cycletracks are underway. Several of the items mentioned above weren't completed or implemented until the last year or two, so I would expect that number to grow even more in the coming years as that new infrastructure, particularly CaBi helps to make bike commuting a realistic alternative for many.

Alexandria and Arlington are the only Virginia municipalities in the DC area that are listed in a longer list of 370 cities with over 65,000 residents and available statistics on bike commuting. Arlington comes in at 1.35% bike commuters, and Alexandria at 0.7% in 2010. I'm a little surprised that these municipalities came in as low as they did, since both are making strides to improve cycling infrastructure. But both are relatively well endowed in terms of access to public transportation with Metro running through the heart of both places. Based on the very large number of bikes parked at Braddock Road metro almost any work day I've ever been down there, I'd be curious to see how Alexandria or Arlington stack up in terms of multimodal commuting (e.g., riding to the train station and then taking the train downtown).

A fellow "bike commuter" I know at work would not be counted as such by this survey. She puts her bike on the front rack of the bus from near her house to the Pentagon, and then rides into work from there. For purposes of this survey, she would be counted as a bus/transit commuter, and her bike commute leg would be completely ignored.The expansion of CaBi along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in Arlington and perhaps into Alexandria next year will only help the bike commuting numbers. They are also likely to increase the multimodal share, which would not be reflected in these statistics.

Alexandria and Arlington stand up rather favorably to other Virginia cities, though. Only Richmond is higher than Arlington, at 2.2%. Norfolk and Virginia Beach are more or less on par with Alexandria in the ballpark with 0.8% bike commuting. Other Hampton Roads cities listed, with the exception of Portsmouth, were under 0.2%.

There are issues with the data to be sure, large margin of error being one. But overall, other factors tend to underrepresent bike commuting. As LAB points out:

*Results are based on a survey of a sample of the population. Surveys take place throughout the year. The journey to work question asks respondents about the previous week.

*The journey to work question asks about the primary mode of transportation to work. The wording of the question undercounts the actual amount of bike commuting that occurs. It does not count people who rode once or twice a week or people who bike to transit (if the transit leg is longer than the bike leg). [This goes to my point about multimodal commuting.]

So the numbers themselves may not be perfectly derived or representative, but they do provide some valuable insights and are fun to look at. The big takeaway... bike commuting is up nationwide, and more dramatically in certain cities, like DC. Let's work to keep the trend going.

More CaBi Birthday Coverage

A few links to items about CaBi's one year birthday:

• A Washington Post photo album
• League of American Bicyclists blog post
• More from WashCycle's blog