TheWashCycle

How to help out Southeast Texas

If you don't already know, I'm from Beaumont, TX the town that's lost its water supply and had to have its hospital evacuated due to Hurricane Harvey. My mom and sister and her family still live there as do many of my friends. My family is doing well (they've had no flooding, and they have plenty of water for now), but they know of many friends and colleagues who've lost everything, so it's been emotionally draining for them.

If you're looking for ways to help Texans recover from the storm my sister has three suggestions that I thought I would pass on, since there are stories of unreliable organizations.

The Southeast Texas Food Bank -  Leading the fight against hunger in Southeast Texas

Some Other Place was founded in 1968 by the local religious community to meet the unfulfilled emergency needs of the poor and "hurting" residents of the Beaumont community. When no one could help, they were told they had to go to some other place...thus, the name Some Other Place. It allows people to have somewhere to go when all else fails. All S.O.P. services are offered at no charge to the recipient.

The Texas Diaper Bank - working to meet the basic needs of vulnerable babies, children with disabilities and seniors. The organization’s mission of: to address the diaper gap and its impact on individuals in crisis  has led the organization to provide a continuum of basic needs services combined with educational opportunities that strengthen a family’s self-reliance.

A quick note on advertisements

Some people seem really upset that I've run some ads lately so I thought I would address them.

The reason I've done so is to cover the cost of the blog and other efforts. It costs money to host and to use typepad at the level I do, there are occasional FOIA requests [which in DC are free but for which I often have to pay for printing and in other places are not always free] and things like the Velocipede Race (which was a total bust, but left me with a box full of trophies that I donated to a worthy cause). So I'm hoping people don't begrudge me for trying to break even on all of that. And I feel better taking money from advertisers than through a tip jar. If bike shops and bicycle lawyers were beating down my door to advertise with me, I'd much rather go with them, but there you have it. 

As for the DUI lawyer, I thought long and hard about that ad. In the end my thinking was that an ad for DUI lawyers makes the case that 1) Getting a DUI is serious business - you don't need a lawyer for a parking ticket 2) Lots of people get caught - so many that it's worthwhile for a lawyer from out of state to advertise on DC's 4th-8th best biking blog to get their name out there. I figured that ads for DUI lawyers probably make people think "I should not drink and drive" not "Wow, I can drink and drive and totally get away with it." I would not have run an ad for a license plate cover meant to allow one to thwart red-light and speeding cameras, but a lawyer is not meant to help you get away with a crime, even if that's sometimes what happens. 

In the end, if the ads feel like a distraction, just don't read them. 

Comment silence

Sorry about not replying to comments. Gmail suddenly decided that all comment emails from Typepad were spam and I just now figured that out - here I thought everyone had just quit commenting.

Also, typepad has seemingly gotten rid of their app - in a continuing effort to be the worst blog service provider - and so blogging photos from my phone is ever-so-less convenient. 

Bleg: WAGBRAD Cue Sheet

Now that WAGBRAD is famous again, people are interested in doing the ride. I had the map and cue sheet available at bikely, but bikely doesn't have the paper cue sheet option anymore (just GPS and KML). Does anyone perchance have the old paper cue sheet saved as a document or in paper format that they scan and send to me ([email protected]). I'd much appreciate it, as I put a lot of work into it.

Thanks for the warning email bikely!

Washcycle: now with a new, and significantly worse format

As many of you have noted in the comments, Washcycle has been a little quiet lately. This is because the blog has gone to it's new - and as near as I can tell, permanent - "lite" format. I had originally planned to do this at the end of the year out of an obligation to the Green Lane Project blog, but when that changed it's format the same day I started my new job, it freed me up to do this sooner and seemed like a natural time to make the change.

So, here's what the new format means. Primarily, there will be much much less blogging here (by me at least). About 1/20th as much. There are a lot of reasons for this, which I'll go into below, but primarily I just want to spend my time doing other things - like getting a full night's sleep or hanging out with my family. I wouldn't say I'm burned out, but I'm a little bored and I have a project that I want to finish that has been lingering for some time. As one of my friend's said, "You don't find time, you make time" and so I'm cutting back on the blog to make time for other things. 

Since I won't be blogging very much, what I do write will almost always be local and almost always original. Ironically, this will free me up to go to more public meetings - most of which are unreported by the MSM. One of the reasons I started this blog was that so much bike-related news was going unreported. Richard Layman covered some of it at his blog, and the Bike Washington website was good, but often out of date, so there just wasn't any place to know what was happening or why things weren't happening. That's no longer the case. WABA has it's own blog run by a real journalist. ARlNow and DCist cover a lot of this material. There are blogs for VaBike, Montgomery County biking, FABB, the DC BAC, Silver Spring Trails, the Capital Crescent Trail etc...I feel like the Post and the Gazette cover biking more now than they used to, plus there are all the versions of the Patch and of course there's GreaterGreaterWashington. I'm not sure this subject is under-reported anymore, but to whatever extent it is I'll try to hit those subjects from now on rather than just doing intelligent search and link dumping. 

I'm also going to follow some of my own advice. Periodically other bike advocates in the area have wanted to start their own blogs and I've tried to encourage them to write here instead. I argue that due to the network effect, one DC-area bike advocacy blog is better than 12. No one ever listens. Not to flatter myself, but for a while there I think this was - as I liked to joke - the Premier DC-area bike advocacy blog - mostly due to a lack of contenders for the title. But I don't say that anymore. Let's face it, that title now belongs to GreaterGreaterWashington. And so I plan to write there more than I do now. Writing here is easier, because there's no editor and I can call people an asshole in the comment section (I've found that some people just need it), but I've made a pretty strong argument about the value of pooling efforts and I've finally convinced myself.

And I'm going to try to write more at my other blog Nothing More Powerful, where I propose ideas that (I think) have a very high "good idea to possible" ratio, quantify politics and engage in other quixotic endeavors. That blog doesn't have much readership, but it makes me happy.

If you miss the morning and afternoon link dumps, I will be tweeting that same kind of content on my twitter feed (and if you follow that you've probably noticed an uptick in my tweets as a result). That feed is @Wash_cycle. It will have the same content, but likely less comment discussion. 

That having been said, if there is someone out there who has been chomping at the bit to step in as the main writiner of an existing Washington, DC-area focused bike advocacy blog, well then, this is your chance. Contact me at [email protected] and I can help you get started here. There might even be a trivial amount of money in it for you. Though, if you wanted my advice, I'd say you should probably just write for GGW. 

Bleg - Let's talk about links baby

So, on the sides of the blog (if you aren't reading this in a reader) are a bunch of links - most of which were added in the early years of the blog and then forgotten/ignored. I would like to crowdsource the cleanup of those. So if you are interested in helping in this effort you can

1. Look at the 5 categories of links that I want to scrub (they are - on the right - tools, other locations, blogs and links; and - on the left - charity rides) and, in the comments, volunteer to check a category or part of one (links from A-D or something) and make sure no one else has already volunteered for it to avoid repeating work. Then make sure that those links are not dead, are to active websites etc... and then email me at [email protected] with any things that need to be changed
2. Suggest new or better items to include, at the same email address.

Thanks. It's just too much for me to handle on mine own right now. 

Bike for sale

I'm selling one of my bikes. This was the bike I used to get around DC. I could leave it parked in public unlike my commuter, which had too much stuff attached. Now I use CaBi. So I don't need this bike anymore, but it's a good little bike (it's the bike I got from Bicycling Magazine as part of Bike Town). I'd hang on to it, but we need to make room for the au pair. So now it's for sale.

Anyway, if you're interested - or you think I've wildly mispriced it - let me know ([email protected]). This has the advantage of not quite buying from a stranger, and it might be like buying Jon Voigt's car among the limited number of people who equate me with Jon Voight. 

Tandem

Blogging will be light.

Wednesday Morning Commute - Ghost Rider

Good morning

• Bicycling advocates want to know why there's been no progress for two years on extending the proposed path between Union Station and Silver Spring. "Some of what we face is a challenge of resources and dealing with multiple trail projects moving forward at the same time," says Sam Zimbabwe who works in DDOT's planning and policy office. "And this is probably one of the most challenging sections of the trail in terms of dealing with competing needs of the right-of-way."
• Stories of early bicycle fatalities and ghosts on Capitol Hill.
• There was another assault in the Capital Crescent Trail tunnel. "A boy was assaulted Saturday evening by a group of six other juveniles in the Capital Crescent Trail tunnel that runs beneath Wisconsin Avenue, Montgomery County police said Tuesday."
• Ice Cream + Bicycles? Is this heaven? "the bikes are a cheaper alternative to a food truck, and they'll allow him to sell from multiple locations rather than one. He says he was inspired by ice cream bikes he remembers from growing up in Peru."
• Check out another DC bike blog: The Family Pedaler.
• Operating revenue is way up in Arlington, see the graph below, and in June 2012, revenue exceeded operating and marketing costs for only the 2nd time. "Fiscal Year 2011 had a 53% cost recovery ratio and FY12 saw an increase to 64%....Arlington’s portion of the service had $411,000 in revenues from memberships, user fees, and sponsorships and $473,000 in operations expenses, plus $170,000 in management and marketing – totaling $643,000 in expenses. The number of trips starting and ending in Arlington increased by about 280% to 88,613 (trips starting) and 86,438 (trips ending). The number of miles ridden in Arlington increased 343% to about 95,000 miles, which helped remove nearly 64,000 pounds of CO2 from the air. The service also got us more active and we burned over 4.1 million calories to be fit."

Monday Morning Commute - Anniversary

Just found out that a friend of mine was hit by a bus while riding her bike here in DC. She's OK, but shaken up. Scary stuff.

• It's the blog's 7 year anniversary (or it was yesterday). Back then there was talk of some sort of computerized bicycle rental program. 
• On the repairs to Memorial Bridge. "The temporary pedestrian and bicycle bridges on both sides of the bridge are in place to allow pedestrian and bicycle use while repairs are underway.”
• Must-read article out of the Tidewater region. Covers the topics of cyclist-driver relations, the expanding effort to make roads safer and consider cyclists and, of course, who is most often to blame in crashes. In about 1/3 of crashes a ticket is issued "About 58 percent of those tickets went to drivers, according to the data. Cyclists received the rest." Of course, in a hit and run, no ticket is issued. 
• Baltimore adds bike parking near the stadiums.
• "Yes, there are studies that show that if you fall off a bicycle at a certain speed and hit your head, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury. But such falls off bikes are rare — exceedingly so in mature urban cycling systems. On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force or pressure people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles. That means more obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And — Catch-22 — a result is fewer ordinary cyclists on the road, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network."