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Ick. This glosses over way too many subtleties to be useful.

1) Living next to the Capital Crescent trail or Metropolitan Branch Trail doesn't mean that you can actually access said trails. Ditto for glossing over bridge elevation.

2) There doesn't seem to be much discussion about bicycle-friendly roads without dedicated lanes. Realistically, this describes most of DC. There are only a small number of roads that you really need to avoid.

3) On that note, there is no bicycle-eating vortex in Foggy Bottom. No idea how that got on the map. Is there really such a distinct gap in bicycle infrastructure over there?

4) Bikeshare and bike parking should weigh in. I spent the weekend in Boston, and let me tell you that CaBi is a much more useful system than Hubway thanks to the many locations, and....

5) Layout of the city. Boston's a notoriously difficult city to navigate. Doubly so on a bicycle. DC's bike routes are well-marked, pretty easy to figure out, and have some semblance of fitting together into a coherent network that follows the grid. Yeah, there are still some pretty big gaps, but it's a start.

by andrew on May 14, 2012 1:39 pm • link • report