Bikes are not the problem.

This article in the Washington Times was supposed to be clever, but the title is a bit annoying. It's short so here it is.

  A gentleman riding a bicycle, briefcase in its basket, huffed and puffed while pedaling up the right-hand lane of 18th Street Northwest near the White House, the gradual incline making his commute home rather difficult, while causing cars directly behind him to creep along in the evening rush.
    We're not certain whether those drivers who sounded their horns were sending a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the cyclist after reading what was printed on the back of his shirt: "One Less Car."

Above it is written "Buy a Hybrid." Yes. It's bikes that make the evening commute so bad. It's bikes that cause cars to creep along in rush hour traffic. Bikes are the problem, not all the people driving cars by themselves, but bikes. If we could just somehow convince these bike commuters to drive a hybrid we could fix the whole thing.

OT:So I grab a lot of my photos off of flickr. I learned that people leave photos for DCist on flickr labeled "DCist." That got my wheels spinning. If you'd like to have a photo on TheWashCycle, just put it on flickr with the label "washcycle."

Comments

[Contrarian]

The nature of reporting (I wouldn't call what he does journalism) is that you spend a lot of time traveling to meet sources, which means you spend a lot of time stuck in traffic, which means reporters are more sensitized to traffic than average people. I'm sure the reason this item got into the paper was that McAslin found himself caught behind the cyclist in question. Probably the only car honking was him. This is a classic example of the mindset that if you believe that bikes don't belong on the road, then you find their presence really annoying. How inconvenienced could he really have been -- 18th street is one way, three lanes. All he had to do to get around the cyclist was change lanes -- but it's not like traffic there moves much faster than a cyclist anyway.