14th St Bridge to GW Parkway Bike Trail Detour Still Wanted

Fence opened allowing access to what was a temporary detour

When construction work closed off the regular route (now restored - see photo below) a presumably temporary detour was put in that was eventually paved (see photo above). Now that a detour isn't needed, the Park Service has installed temporary fencing along the top of short "cut-through" to prevent its further use, but people who like the idea of a shortcut (perhaps cyclists, perhaps walkers/runners) keep opening the fence up. Last night when I rode home, it was closed. By now I'm sure it's open again.


The USPS "authorized" route

It would make sense, I think, to have stairs (or something bicycles wouldn't try to use) instead of the old detour to pull some of the foot traffic away from the busy intersection (admittedly not busy at this time of the morning) shown in the photo above. In the meantime, we have this silly situation where there is a "sometimes" option that wasn't very good as a detour and isn't any better as a shortcut for combined bicycle-foot traffic.

I didn't get a photo of it, I'm sad to say, but one morning a cyclist had ridden up the cut-through only to realize that the fencing closed him off, and instead of disconnecting the fencing (or turning around), he had put his bike over the fence and was in the process of climbing over to join it. Hmm . . .

Two Years Blogging on Bikes

Screen shot of Blogspot most visited posts for this blog, for "all time"

Total pageviews are given as one number (available for various intervals) - this includes pageviews of individual posts and to the blog as a whole (wheelbike.blogspot.com). In my case, 80 percent, 90 percent, and sometimes even more of the pageviews are for individual posts.

I now have several hundred posts. Some are on fairly obscure things, but it turns out that my blog posts on these perhaps obscure topics will pop up fairly high on a Google search, such as the one on Arthur Conan Doyle's full quote on the benefits of cycling, so every couple of weeks, more regularly than I would have guessed, I can see that someone looks at that page having searched for its content with Google. My version is better (says I) than most "quote sites" because I have the full quote (typically it is reported only in part), and it is both transcribed and I have a page image of the Scientific American where it appeared in the first place.

So, for most of my pages traffic comes from Google searches (although often not just Google.com but Google-dot-some-other-country's-domain). I suppose it doesn't hurt that I use Google's Blogger and also have built up some content (with my 200 posts) and of course some of the stuff about cycling in the 1890s isn't that commonly written about.

Most the leading posts, however, have reached that status because a light went on in my head and I wrote the owner of some other, more popular blog and they published a link to one of my pages. Jan Heine's blog published a link as part of a sort of joke about fat-tired bikes to my post about a giant tricycle in 1896 and his hefty popularity (in certain circles) meant that this post had hundreds of page views in a few days and over time, went above 500 pageviews.

Similarly, I wrote to the guy behind the Washcycle blog about a lovely newspaper article about cycling in D.C. that included a great map and it has almost 300 pageviews. Several other high posts are mostly references from Washcycle.

Two posts about women cyclists of the 1890s are the top performers for posts I have done where the pageviews are driven almost entirely by Google (and other) searches and not be links from other blogs. Google searches have also driven higher-than-average pageviews for my posts on unusual old tandems and my description of my 29 year old Bridgestone. I have observed from the traffic source information that a fair percentage of page views come from Google image searches, so I generally try to include an image with my posts - or really, I guess at this point I am mostly inspired to post about topics that will have an associated image.


The traffic sources information confirms the importance of (a) other blogs, and (b) Google

A couple of these are oddballs. Someone once tweeted a link to a page with a photo of a bicycle built for four leading to several dozen page views and "pingywebedition" and a couple of other sources are simply a mystery.

My numbers are certainly not very large, but having figured out certain things about cycling, both today and yesterday, I find the evidence that these discoveries have been shared to pleasing. Also, I have built up traffic over time. The first year it was really quite negligible. After 24 months I have had 5,500+ page views total but over the past month, 800+, which seems respectable.

So, for anyone who has read this far, thank you!

New Stop Sign, GW Bike Trail

New stop sign added for traffic coming off the 14th St Bridge (from DC) - sorry, lousy phone camera photo

A new stop sign has been added where traffic coming from DC on the 14th St Bridges meets the north-south George Washington Parkway bike trail. They have also added some helpful (I suppose) directional information - "trail north" and "trail south" for example.

The stop sign is in a somewhat unorthodox location - instead of being on the near side of the intersection, to the right, it is across the intersection, in the middle. I don't see that this clarifies the situation and it may just confuse things.


My favorite - "dismount before crossing"

For bike traffic northbound, there is a "dismount before crossing" sign, apparently pertaining to the humpback bridge a 100 yards on. The Park Service seems to have lots of these "dismount" signs to put up (to no purpose). Also, the sign is on the left side rather than the more conventional right side (presuming I am understanding who it is intended for correctly).

Aside from all this signage, this intersection is a mess for the kind of mixed cycling/walking/running going on here. Neither the north-south trail nor the one coming from the 14th St Bridge are wide enough.

Voice of America Covers DC Bike to Work

A good set of photographs from this month's Bike to Work day in Washington DC is on the Russian language VOA site - scroll down and the slide show launches. Knowledge of Russian not required.

As associated article in Russian isn't much for non-Russian speakers, but Google translate will render something like (but not exactly like) English - certainly it is understandable, if quirky.

Often in machine translation, the story becomes more dramatic in the telling, such as, "Move along the wide roads designed for a more dimensional and fast cars with gasoline engines - it's not only scary but dangerous. Therefore, local authorities began to pay greater attention to road safety. Cyclists immediately responded to these steps, rushing into the streets en masse."

I will be on the lookout for these cyclists storming the streets of DC.

(Not even slightly connected with bicycles, the translation business reminds me of the infamous Time article about Madonna's interview supposedly translated from English to Hungarian and back - which turns out to be an urban legend.)

"Complete Streets" Video

Complete Streets: It's About More Than Just Bike Lanes from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

Very well done video about implementation of bike lanes as part of a "complete streets" strategy. Local political types, journalists, drivers, pedestrians, business owners, and bike riders all comment. Well worth watching.

This simple video makes it clear that the argument in favor of bike lanes needs to be about how everyone can benefit, not just the bike riders. That everything about the roads shouldn't be about people in cars.

Stated as though obvious (and OK) is that slowing down speeding motorists as part of the general strategy benefits everyone, even the motorists (who are no longer terrorizing pedestrians and cyclists). Narrower lanes? They slow the cars down. Islands? The encourage the motorists to stop and wait for pedestrians.

Nice 1912 Columbia Bicycle Catalog

A nice catalog, digitized by the Smithsonian

Here is a link to the
catalog's cover and from there you can navigate to the rest of the pages as individual page image thumbnails. Columbia bicycles, from the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut.

The catalog is quite text-heavy for the first few pages, arguing heavily for the benefits of bicycles in various ways - economical, reliable, and health benefits as well (with a quote from a physician, as was often done in the 1890s).

Bicycle Built for Four (1898)

Orient Quad bicycle built for four, from the Library of Congress photograph collections.

Just for fun. Can't figure out why I hadn't see this before ~

Apparently Orient was known particularly for making tandem and other multiple riders bikes, such as this quad. There is a picture of an Orient "built for ten" that was presumably a stunt of sorts.