Everyone is familiar with the urban cyclist stereotype—he or she is skinny, wears spandex but not a helmet, and is usually plotting a way to slip through a red light, only to be narrowly missed by oncoming SUVs. I’ll admit I have a certain fascination with these law-defying speed demons. Because rather than zooming past them in a car or observing them from a clunky Circulator bus, I generally find myself in front of them, then blocking their path, and finally watching them zip through an intersection, barely avoiding traffic, as they rush ahead of me.
My experience more resembles the average urban bicycle commuter—part of the sane majority of cyclists who drivers used to dealing with a minority of risk-taking extremists unfairly malign. If I can convey only one thing in this piece it would be this: don’t let the spandex-clad bike messengers scare you from the road. The decision to begin cycling in an urban environment is one of the best I’ve made in college.
One of the best reasons to make the leap to city cycling is the fact the D.C. is a prime city for biking. The District of Columbia is surprisingly small and has an unusually low population density for a metropolitan area, due to its unique zoning regulations. Buildings can only be 20 feet higher than the width of the street they line, and so downtown D.C. has one-sixth the population density of Manhattan. This primarily means wide streets—but it also results in fewer drivers to contend with.
Most likely, your destinations in the city are probably geographically closer than you realize. My twice-a-week commute to an internship at the Treasury Department is only 2.6 miles, but I have to budget at least 45 minutes for my trip if I opt to take the Dupont GUTS bus and then the red line to Metro Center. By bike, however, the commute has taken me as little as 10 minutes, when I am lucky enough to be biking in great weather and hitting a good run of green lights.
On top of that, the recently-departed Mayor Adrian Fenty more than doubled the number of bike lanes in the city, from 19 miles in 2006 to over 47 miles when he left office in January. Although few lanes are completely protected from the street, such as those on Pennsylvania Avenue near the National Mall, these small lanes are a huge improvement over the alternative, riding directly with cars. The security of having so many spaces specifically designated for bikers has the potential to substantially increase the number of D.C.’s urban cyclists—which would be a real advantage, as the safest cities for cyclists, statistically, are those with a higher proportion of bikers. Drivers become used to accommodating cyclists when they share the road with them all the time. Although D.C. has not reached the point where cars are always looking out for bikers and adjusting their driving accordingly, the city is nearing this point, especially in neighborhoods like Columbia Heights or Logan Circle.
But the top reasons to give urban cycling a try is the sheer joy of riding and the dramatic freedom of movement cycling offers. Once you get the hang of traveling with the flow of traffic—keeping to the side where cars can safely pass and staying in the middle of a lane when they cannot—you can come to appreciate everything that is going on in a city like Washington. From a bus, you’d probably never see the street art that abounds in some neighborhoods or the wacky fashion senses of pedestrians, details of the city I’ve been able to appreciate in the last two years. What’s more, you can make the trip to social and cultural destinations like U Street or Chinatown in 15 to 20 minutes. So the next time you’re sitting in a Dupont GUTS bus as it rattles past the Naval Observatory, consider joining the ranks of urban cyclists.
