of ongoing interest to me is how people who are busy manage to fit cycling into their lives.  for me, at this time of year, the answer is often commuting.  the dc area has horrible traffic.  i won't even bother to link to abundant factual resources for that claim.  we spend a ton of time getting from point a to point b and then back again.  and all too often, we do it in gigantic vehicles.  this particular post is not an anti car screed, but rather a celebration of how easy it is to throw your stuff in a bag, throw a leg over a bike and roll out.  i commute from fairfax city to my office which is uncomfortably close to the capitol.  it's about 20 miles, and there are lots of ways to do it.  I can take back roads up towards vienna to catch the wo&d at the vienna community center or at gallows or cedar.  but more often than not, i tend to ride the roads.  it's fast and the traffic is usually so bad that I move faster than the cars which makes me feel uncomfortably smug.  i like my commute and i do it often.  wanna hear about it?  sure you do.  here you go.

it all starts with the magic of leaving the family truckster at home.  here, the general conveyance vehicle for the revolution in cycling earns a well deserved rest day.  this thing is like the farm truck from the suburbs.  but note that the recent addition of my basque cross air fresher (thanks sim!) has made the smell of revolution in my vehicle especially pervasive.

so we roll out the door and onto the roads.  i am your tour guide as we navigate the intricacies of the suburbs.  and the suburbs are nothing if not intracate.  fairfax city and fairfax county have no overall bicycle plan, bicycle map or bicycle lane network.  a number of progressive counties do including arlington county (plan, maps, coordinator), alexandria (plan, map), montgomery county (plan, maps, coordinator) and the district of columbia (plan, maps, coordinator).  fairfax county is coming along.  a groub called fabb is making great headway and it looks like momentum is on their side.  take a minute to check out what fabb is doing and get a feel for how they are shaping their repsonse to make bicycles a standard fixture of commuting.

one of the reasons i support their approach is that fairfax city has an unsual design.  many of the communities have only a single road into them.  it sort of shelters the community from through traffic, but it also makes it harder to crosscut, to get quickly from one place to another.  fairfax city does have a series of connector trails but it is my understandign that the city has been strongly lobbied from releasing a map.  people have concerns about connector trails becoming thoroughfares.  I find this to be really petty nimbyism but it s a reality.  as we reach the perimeter of my neighborhood, you'll see what i mean.  can you spot the connector trail?

how about now?

getting closer?  how about now?

there it is!  and it even has one of our communities upstanding businessmen who is walking towards the vienna metro.  so lifelike.  the city is filled with these little trails, but unless yoiu have the time to explore every nook and cranny, you'd never find them.  and now, gentle reader, yoiu think you're homefree.  hardly.  in an attempt to dissaude people from using the trails, the abutting neighbors routinely dump large amouts of yard waste onto the trails.

this is an action photo headed towards a bridge on one of the connector trails.  I swept this trail just a few days earlier and you can already see that someone has deposited a bunch of leaves and stuff and it has been sort of blown aside and crushed down to make a singletrack on the asphalt.  nice.  but soon enough, we are out on the roads again.  now the probelms change in their nature.  the intersection pictured below has an interesting quirk, it's signal light is fully triggered by magnetic plates. 

that's great if you're a car but my bike doesn't trigger the light.  this is one you basically have to run.  I'll post some extended thoughts on issues like this later.  we all tacitly understand that a lot of cyclists run lights.  some say the whole light system is strictly for cars and if the transportation system was more bike friendly, it almost would not be needed.  but lights and laws are with us for the foreseeable future.  more on this later.

the roads near here are congested. 

dodging through traffic can be an unfortunate reality.  most people don't even realize that a lot of roads don't have shoulders.  you sometimes have to improvise and find some space of your own.

when there is a shoulder, it's often cluttered with sand, gravel and glass.  It may even be less safe than riding between cars.  this action shot is from near merrifield on 29, my standard commuting route.  the cars along this route are generally pretty nice.  i rarely have a bad run it with traffic.

i tend to follow 29 until i get near east falls church and then i jog through the neighborhoods to get to the wo&d.  there are people who ride the roads and people who only ride the trails.  i ride both, and i like both. 

i sometimes find that racers tend to look down their noses at conmmuters and recreational riders and i've never understood that.  a lot of these guys and gals log as many miles as you do and their much less eager to tell you how totally ass-kicking they are on the bike.  pictured above is a nice guy named woody i met that day.  very friendly.  i hope i run into him again.

and before long, we're done.  across the potomac and into dc.  dc traffic is sooo muh easier to ride in. 

i don't know if the cars are just more accustomed to bikes or more tolerant or in less of a hurry.  but the riding tends to be predictable and i would take urban traffic any day over suburban roads with their unpredictablility. 

so that's my commute.  i hope you enjoyed it.  if anyone is reading and regularly rides my route, please feel free to drop a line and we can hook up and ride together and i'll buy the coffee in dc.

posted by scott