TheWashCycle

Monday Morning Commute - cash, sex, drugs and bicycles

Good morning. Riding the Met Branch Trail yesterday I noticed they've removed most of one half of the New York Avenue Bridge and it makes the underpass there so much more open and sunny. But I suppose it won't last.

• State Deptartmen CaBi station has been moved a little and expanded by four docks.
• Capitol Heights, MD got a grant to study turning a street into a green street, which could include bike lanes. They're considering three streets: Old Central Avenue; Chamber Avenue, which becomes Capitol Heights Boulevard; and Suffolk Avenue, which becomes Brooke Road. All three of these are just across the District boundary. "A community input meeting to ask residents where they want to see a green street and what it should include is scheduled for 10 a.m. to noon Feb. 25 at the First Baptist Church of Capitol Heights at 6 Capitol Heights Blvd." If they went with Central or Chamber, perhaps they could team up with the District.
• Stafford County cyclist riding at night on US 17 was struck from behind and killed. No charges for the driver and no mention of lights.
• NPR's Marketplace on stolen bikes. "The San Francisco police officers will routinely bust bike thieves, but there's a shameless open-air market. Within a minute of arriving, I was being offered bicycles. I found a kid with a bike that was about the right size for me, a track bike, pretty fancy machine. I tried to bargain with him a little bit, and he said, 'I looked it up, this is a $700 bicycle.' So he wasn't even pretending to own the bike."

Thursday Evening Commute - CSI

Good Evening   

• This past summer, cyclist Marco A. Garcia was hit from behind by a car on Crain Highway near Georgia Avenue in Glen Burnie and died was injured. The driver left the scene. Now, police have identified the car and driver, connecting the car to the crash with DNA evidence. "police said, they received a tip that a car matching their look-out description--which included front end and windshield damage--was in the lot of a Wal-mart in Severn. They contacted the owner. The 2005 silver Chevy Cobalt was towed and searched. Among other items, police collected DNA evidence from the car....The car owner, John Harrison Correlli, 57, of Brookmont Drive in Baltimore, faces numerous traffic violations charges that include failing to stay at the scene, negligent driving, leaving the scene of a collision that caused serious bodily injury without rendering aid and failing to pass safely when overtaking a bicycle." Good work. 
• Family of a NJ cyclist who died after a fall caused by a pothole is unable to sue the county responsible for maintaining the road. 

Monday Afternoon Commute - oxycodone, marijuana, codeine and morphine

Today is the day I was supposed to start the Christmas Wish list posts, but I'm so far behind as it is that I'm just going to have to skip it this year. It didn't help that a big post I'd been working on for a week was accidentally deleted last night.

• Nailed it. This is also a good point - from the comments "In San Francisco, we had a bike rider kill a woman.  Everyone, even former head of the CA Democratic Party claimed that the bike rider should be charged.  Of course, no one bothered to notice that 11 drivers who killed pedestrians in the same year weren’t ever charged." If you kill another road user in a car, you almost need to be this guy to lose your license. 
• More discussion of DC's planned 2012 bike lanes. 
• The univeristy of Maryland is looking for a bicycle coordinator. 

[The title of this post is the list of the very worst reindeer by the way. It will also probably tripple the google search hits I get]

Friday Morning Commute - Historic Low

Good morning

• U.S. Bicyclist fatalities (actually, pedalcyclists...sigh) for 2010 are down 1.6% from 2009 (bottom of page 2). That brings them to the lowest number since they started recording this back in 1975. Estimated injuries remain the same. Pedestrian deaths were up 4.2%, so it may not be because of safer drivers.
• At the right is an old rendering of the Georgetown Boathouse along the trail from 2007. It would have to use the first mile of the CCT as its access road. Georgetown is starting up meetings on this again.
• Are cyclists elitists snobs? Richard Layman argues no.
• WABA is concerned that if MTA concludes that no changes to the tunnel that keep the trail in it are viable, "the County is considering no option to retain grade-separation, and seemingly conducting no study–similar to that requested of MTA on the rail component–addressing the impacts of this major physical change in the trail design on future trail usage or safety. County leaders and trail users deserve to know the feasibility and cost of the next-best grade-separated CCT crossing of Wisconsin Ave., as well as the impact of grade separation on the trail’s future usage and success. To treat the existing tunnel as the only possibility for a grade-separated crossing is to unnecessarily constrain the project’s possibility, and to fail even to study the impact of grade-separation at a high-traffic trail crossing is to ignore the importance of this feature on safety and trail usage, as shown in nationwide best-practices and research. Decision-makers, trail users, and residents deserve to know what they will lose if they choose to forego grade separation, and should attempt to include an alternative grade-separated crossing that does not require the use of the existing tunnel among the options for consideration."
• "In a recent survey of people who ride in Arlington, 75% of respondents bike for all or part of their commute." Is that 75% of all bike riders in the county?
• Arlington County Staff have narrowed the design options for the N.Carlin Springs Road Bridge over N. George Mason Drive down to one (shown below). It is a littel wider and uses space more efficiently to widen sidewalks by 3 feet and 5 foot wide bike lanes. So bike/ped space is going up from 5 feet to 13.  

Thursday Morning Commute - Caboose

Good morning

• Capital Bikeshare won one of Tommy Wells' liveable, walkable awards. And from December 9 through 20, holiday treats exclusively for Capital Bikeshare members are being offered in Georgetown courtesy of the Georgetown BID. And also, CaBi has discounted memberships again.
• The WABA holiday party is next week. Also, WABA teaches kids to bike safely - as part of a Safe Routes to Schools funded program.
• Tree blocks the Marvin Gaye Park Trail. This was one of many weather-related barriers reported yesterday.
• The Holiday Shopping Fun Ride to DC Markets is this Saturday.
• Looking at this map of national traffic fatalities again, I realized that as bad as it looks, it doesn't even include all the fatalities that actually happened - not for cyclists at least. Missing, for example, are Ian Wolfe and Yoram Kaufman. That having been said, if you can name any of the cycling victims in the immediate DC area - especially prior to 2005, please note that in the comments, I try to keep track of these things for the blog. 
• Bicycle facilities in the I-66 corridor. 
• Indian Head and White Plains are arguing over where to put a caboose to be placed along the Indian Head Rail Trail. There's also debate over whether to make it a museum or small shop. Along a trail in Montreal, there was a small bike repair shop in a caboose along the trail. I day go with the shop.
• Park Service's preferred plan for the Blue Ridge Parkway is the least bicycle-friendly one (of three bad choices). 
• In my opinion, this is a bicycle. I wonder how the law would categorize them - sometimes having a small wheel means it isn't a bike, so that kids can be exempt from "no biking on the sidewalk" laws. Also, this is not a bicycle.

Arrest in Natasha Pettigrew Case

Last Wednesday an arrest warrant was issued for the alleged driver of the SUV that struck and killed Natasha Pettigrew, according to her mother, Keniss Henry. These charges had been expected for the last month.  The driver was released on bail on Friday, she added. 

(Jim Titus is a cycling activist from Prince George's County.  The views expressed herein do not represent any organization with which he is affiliated)

Cyclist killed on Friday in compliance with law, still to blame

Since I last wrote about the death of Matthew Young in Millersville, some more information has come out about the crash that caused it.

Police said Young was riding on the right lane of the highway, which did not have a shoulder and had little ambient lighting.

So....that's not true, unless they have the location wrong. As I showed in yesterday's post, Veterans Highway does have a shoulder north of West Benfield Road [Update: but not at that location].

Young was wearing dark non-reflective clothing on his bike that had a makeshift headlight, which was on. The bike also had a red LED-flashing light on the back which police say did not appear to have been turned on, leaving one small reflective lens to make Young visible.

While no one would recommend riding at night while wearing only dark clothes and having no rear light, as Baltimore Spokes points out Maryland does not require the use of a rear light. It allows for the use of a light in lieu of a reflector, but does not require it.

That "one small reflective lens" is our legal requirement and no more is needed to be legal. Are there issues with the national [and local] standards, you bet. And have we tried to change those standards? Again yes but the Consumer Product Safety Commission asserts that this"one small reflective lens" is the "best" standard.

But what you can't do, is overrun your headlights. That actually is illegal, as Baltimore Spokes also points out.

And there is still the question of how they know the taillight wasn't on. I'm not saying they don't, I just don't understand how.

So we have a police statement that the road has no shoulder - when it does, and that the cyclist is at fault even though they didn't break the law, but the driver isn't at fault even when they did. It's Curtis Leymeister all over again.

Also, it seems Mr. Young was homeless, which is irrelevant except that there might not be anyone to push this case - which means the driver can probably avoid the standard $313 fine for these kinds of crashes.

Sunday Morning Ride - WAGBRAD IV

Good morning

• Newly painted bike lanes on 34th Street NW? Do they look a little narrow?
• Surprise! Active commuting is good for you."active commuters cut their odds of obesity by 50 percent. They had lower blood pressure, body mass and triglyceride levels (fat in the blood)"
• According to Dr. Gridlock, despite the lower expected turnout for the rescheduled event, there will still be a bike ban on Metro on the day of the King Memorial dedication. Let them say I'm surprised. 
• A cyclist - 40 year old Matthew Young - riding on Veterans Highway in Severna Park on Friday night (7:30pm) was hit from behind and killed. "Investigators do not believe that either speed or alcohol were factors in the crash. They have cited "bicyclist visibility" as the apparent cause of the accident, and noted the fact that the accident occurred at a particularly dark location on Veterans Highway, as well as the fact that Young was wearing dark non-reflective clothing." There's a pretty wide shoulder there. Was the cyclist on it? More here: "Police said the bike he was riding had a makeshift headlight, but a flashing light on the back of the bike does not appear to have been on." Can they tell after a bike has been hit from behind? Maybe they have witness testimony?

Tuesday Morning Commute - bright orange stickers

Good Morning and congratulations to one of our frequent commenter who had a baby yesterday (or at least his wife did). You know who you are.

• Bike thefts are down at metro stations from last year. There were 95 bikes stolen last year from April to June, and 72 this year (a 24% drop if I'm reading it right). Meanwhile, Metro is rounding up abandoned bikes at its stations and destroying them. Before anyone starts crying, it sounds like it has only happened a dozen times, and only when the bike is pretty picked over. "Police mark the left-behind bikes with bright orange stickers warning the owner. If the bike has not been removed within 10 days, Stessel said, police call maintenance crews to remove the bike. Then, Taborn said, if the agency has no way to contact the owner, officials destroy the bikes." A Metro board member asked them to consider donating them to local groups that refurbish bikes. "The transit agency is considering adding more video cameras in areas where bikes are parked and looking at where it places bike racks, Taborn said. It is also talking to D.C. officials because the city has very few thefts from its public bike racks."

• DDOT is also having a bike rack installation event- the Rack Attack - in the Ballpark district. They're installing 36 bike racks in the SE neighborhood at 3rd and K SE starting at 10am. DC's installed 2000 bike parking spaces in the public space. In a related story, the new GWU School of Public Health and Health Services’ academic building will include 81 bicycle parking spaces (81? That's an unusual number, no?)
• In testing on the name for Capital Bikeshare "people liked the one with 'share' in the title. Holben also says that names like WeBike tested better than names like UBike: 'Most people seemed to like the more inclusive name.'”

• DDOT seeks input on the R Street cycletrack.
• Courtalnd Milloy says "Tell these folks that if they want more Bike Share they could at least learn how to ride the damn bike, stop weaving in and out of traffic. Car bumpers are harder than their butts if not their helmetless heads. Hey, I just want them to live to see another birthday." I think the average bike share rider knows more about riding their bike than the average DC driver does about driving their car.
• It's been one year since Natasha Pettigrew was killed in a traffic crash. "Without an eyewitness to the crash, it's not clear that a charge of manslaughter by motor vehicle could be filed--there are laws against leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death and failing to render aid in an accident resulting in death."
• A post article on fighting noncommunicable diseases like heart disease and diabetes discusses the larger role government has in the effort. "Prevention of infectious and noncommunicable diseases both require two kinds of interventions. The first target individuals and are usually delivered by doctors and nurses. The second target populations and are delivered by government, or the things that government can influence." It sounds like making it easier to bike and walk falls under the second type. 
• Streetsblog covers the new ACS commuting data. They include a graph showing Population density vs. Commute rate (spoiler: they appear to be related). If I had the time, I'd compare the bike commute rate to the college-student-population percentage. I predict they're related.
• Rails to Trails release a report on different types of bike facilities.

Thursday Morning Commute - Hostess with the Mostest

Happy Car Free Day, and it's the last day of summer. So soak it up. Also, CaBi's birthday bash is this evening at Yards Park.

• This Saturday at 10am, ANC 5C will be discussing the proposed R Street Bike lanes. "Resident’s will have the opportunity to see what a sharrow looks like, learn how contra flow bicycle lanes and sharrows work and how they will be implemented on R Street."
• Capital Bikeshare will be studied as possible therapy for the mentally ill. "Moghimi said he hopes the year-long study will prove that enhanced mobility and physical activity improve the patients’ mental health....The 20 people selected for the study group range from the chronically schizophrenic to those beset by depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress. The only patients excluded from the program are those with cognitive disorders who might not be able to negotiate the bike."
• The Frederick Bicycling Coalition is having a bike swap on October 2nd. 
• AAA is concerned with the large number of hit-and-run crashes lately. Several of them have involved cyclists including this one "A driver fled after severely injuring a 47-year-old Port Tobacco bicyclist Sept. 2, authorities said. The Charles County Sheriff’s Department said the incident occurred on Chapel Point Road near Taurus Lane in Port Tobacco between Thursday at 10 p.m. and Friday at 3 a.m." and this one "A Bulgarian college student who was working as a lifeguard in Maryland this summer was struck by a hit-and-run driver Aug. 23 on Forest Drive in Anne Arundel County. The 20-year-old victim was riding a bicycle when the driver knocked him off his bicycle. He was hospitalized with a broken clavicle." and this one "A teenage cyclist was severely injured by a hit-and-run driver in Southeast Washington on July 10"
• Speaking of which, there was a memorial ride in honor of hit-and-run (though the driver later called in the crash) victim Natasha Pettigrew. "The most Littleford [the driver] could face is a charge for leaving the scene of the crash, but Henry said she doesn't know what penalty she could face. Littleford will not face wrongful death charges because there were no witnesses, Henry said."
• The Transportation Planning Board is launching a study to find out how drivers want to be charged for roads. Of the three options, the congestion charge would likely do the most to increase cycling (In my unstudied opinion). Other options is GPS-based VMT or tolls on major highways. 
• A proposed Silver Spring apartment building on the site of the old Post Office building would include "a surrounding plaza that would include a bike share station and a trail connection to the planned Capital Crescent Trail." The building will back up to the trail.
• The Examiner is very worried about the lack of bike facilities in Tyson's Corner. I share their concern. "And the ballyhooed bike paths,... are still nothing but pipe dreams"
• The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission is trying to educate people about complete streets.
• Oh yeah, that Port Tabacco cyclist mentioned above who was hit by a hit-and-run driver on September 10th, he passed away from his injuries. Police have since located the driver, a 21-year-old Pomfret woman.
• Congratulations to Richmond, VA, host of the 2015 World Cycling Championships. It's the first time they've been in the States in 30 years. "USA Cycling expects more than half a million people to watch in person in the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, along with a global television audience of more than 300 million."
• Chicago launches plans for a new 3,000 bike bike-sharing system. "The enterprise is billed as the city's "first large-scale bike-sharing program.'' A small existing program, called "Chicago B-cycle,'' began last year with about a half-dozen bike rental stations along the lakefront and in the downtown. Chicago B-cycle (chicago.bcycle.com) offers memberships and temporary passes. It attracts mostly tourists and is modeled after bike-sharing programs in Paris and Denver."