Thursday Morning Commute - New Bridge

Good morning. The new 11th Street local bridge opens today. It should be a better ride than the old bridge.

• The Montgomery County fiscal 2013-18 capital improvement program is scheduled for formal adoption Thursday after receiving tentative approval from the nine-member county council this past week. The budget includes $49.5 million for the Capital Crescent Trail and funding for the Metropolitan Branch Trail. There's more at the County website. It lists the following: "Funded the design and construction of the Capital Crescent Trail, costing $49.5 million. Retained construction funding for the Metropolitan Branch Trail and the Silver Spring Green Trail.  Funded construction of new bike trails along Frederick Road in Clarksburg, Needwood Road in Derwood, and Gold Mine Road east of Brookeville."
• Streetsblog has a story about how bicycle registration is used for profiling, which is part of the reason registration was ended in DC. I'll say that I used to get results from leagle.com in my automatic searches ( but not anymore) and that 95% of them were drug or weapon busts that started with a cyclist [almost always male and black or hispanic] being stopped for not having a light or a bell or a helmet or some trivial law that you didn't even realize the police enforced.
• "a man on a Bikeshare cycle punched a pedestrian and snatched her iPhone during daylight hours on a busy Capitol Hill street." You'd think they could narrow down who it was to a pretty small number of people. Everyone who had a bike checked out at that time and could reasonably have gotten to the place of the crime.
• Olney's Ride of Silence took on special meaning after a recent bicycle fatality in the community. Diane Whitman's crash is still under investigation. Also, it appears that DC had a Ride of Silence and I apologize for not advertising it here, but I didn't know about it.
• A junior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School wants to make sure that every kid at Rachel Carson Elementary School in Gaithersburg has a bike. And so he's repairing donated bikes for those who don't.
• TE is an issue for Tea Party members in the House working on the new transportation bill. Though the Senate bill is a step backwards for the program, some members just want it killed.

Comments

[Eric_W.]

The CaBi story was on the front page of the Washington Post and the full article on the front page of the Metro section.

Man bites dog!

[MM]

I bet the robber wasn't even wearing a helmet...that's the real crime here.