Rich Mintz  

After 2 days in DC I have to say the central city feels more alive and healthy than I’ve ever seen it. Things are clean, infrastructure looks good, public services are visible, and more people seem to be living downtown than ever, with newish apartment buildings all over the place.

I had a conversation last week with someone that went like this — “Do you live in the District?” “Haha, who would live in the District? Services in DC are terrible!” — and all I could think was “dude, are you serious?” Or maybe his definition of “adequate public services” is different from mine. Whatever. In any case, the city looks great to me, clean and well-run, friendly to visitors, with more places to go, things to see, restaurants to try in more parts of the central city than at any time in the last generation or so.

I stayed in a hotel carved out of the 1839 General Post Office building, ate excellent barbecue, had coffee in a neighborhood that 15 years ago I avoided walking through at night, played with a terrier in an adorable pea coat, and of course enjoyed use of the bicycles maintained as a community service.

Besides, DC has the third-awesomest American city emblem, after Chicago and LA.

Thanks to the BSD DC crew for hosting — I’ll be back again soon, I’m sure.

As I’ve said before, I have a special affection for DC in the fall, and despite the fact that the weather this year can’t quite make up its f*cking mind, it is fall, and the trees are starting to turn and it’s starting to get (intermittently) cooler. So today, although I didn’t get a ton of biking in, I did get some, including a nice ride west up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Old Post Office, crossing in front of the White House, then up 20th Street across Connecticut Avenue. What really says “fall in DC” to me is a leisurely ride down a leafy street after the brightest sun of the day has passed, not too hot, not too crowded, a little breezy, which is exactly what this afternoon felt like.

Not really, but I’m going to DC today on the train for 2 nights, I’m taking the Dahon folding bike, and I’ve packed everything in a pair of Bontrager grocery panniers which fit the rear rack. (I bought them cheap-ish on closeout at Jay’s Cycles in Princeton when I was driving through.) That way I’ll have my bike with me, I can move my stuff across town on both ends, and the rear rack won’t look like a hobo wedding cake the way it does when I pile bags on with the bungees. Wish me luck!

On the way back from DC to New York last week, I took the iPhone map’s advice and headed up Georgia Avenue into Silver Spring rather than cutting east along New York Avenue. And I hit so much traffic at the Beltway that rather than circling around that way, I continued up Colesville Road, thinking I’d cut east somewhere (Laurel? Columbia?) and back to the Parkway.

I didn’t stop in downtown Silver Spring, but I did drive through. I haven’t been to Silver Spring in more than a decade.  Obviously downtown Silver Spring has tarted itself up nicely in that time, and in the best light, with its prettiest face to the camera, it now looks to compete with Bethesda for the role of queen of Montgomery County.

I kept expecting traffic to get lighter, but as I headed north further and further without any slackening, getting more and more off course, I lost heart, and decided I’d cut east anyway. And on the spur of the moment, I decided to bypass Baltimore entirely, and turned south on 97 toward Annapolis and the Eastern Shore route. You wouldn’t think it, but once you’re out of DC and moving, travel times via I-95 and via US 13 are roughly comparable, give or take half an hour, and the Eastern Shore route is more interesting.

Annapolis is always worth a stop, and so I stopped. When I lived in DC, I used to drive to Annapolis for a couple of hours just to escape. People who don’t know DC don’t realize that despite being along the “Eastern Seaboard,” the city itself is a zillion (well, like 2) hours from the beach, and heading to a little historic seaport city, with a boat dock and a maritime culture and the Naval Academy and so forth, is a nice little getaway. And so I made my rounds of the places I remember from past trips to Annapolis, like the City Dock Cafe (where I bought a new T-shirt to replace the ancient one that’s falling to pieces), and then got back on the road, heading over the Naval Academy Bridge and east to the Bay Bridge.

On the islands crossing over to the Eastern Shore, I remembered the place I used to stop for crab cakes, but I couldn’t think of its name, so I wondered if I’d find it. I did — it’s Holly’s, serving holidaymakers and locals since 1950 and still very much in business, and looking more or less the same as it did when I was last there in about 1997. I’m not a big crab eater in general, but when you go to the Eastern Shore, you sort of have to, and I did.

The drive up US 13 is so different from the turnpike, passing actual farmhouses and actual farms on a four-lane highway for most of the way, until you cut east through the most awful first-growth suburbia to Delaware Route 1 to the Delaware Memorial Bridge. I had Rdio playing and the time passed much more pleasantly than the turnpike drive does.

From the Delaware to New York, you’re back on the regular route — but now that I’ve tried 295 in place of the New Jersey Turnpike, I don’t think I’ll ever go back. If you can get almost all the way to New Brunswick on a regular Interstate highway, within easy reach of towns and diners and services, rather than in the hermetically sealed travel tube that is the Turnpike, why wouldn’t you?

All in all, with all the delays and all the stops, and a stop for coffee and a stop for crab cakes and a stop for gas (at a gas station in the middle of nowhere near the Maryland-Delaware line, where I was the only customer not on a ginormous motorcycle), and a stop for a milkshake at a New Jersey diner, it was still only a six-hour trip, and even via turnpike with no stops at all it’s hard to do in less than four and a half.  So I think I’ll try this route again.

Annapolis photos:

New Jersey photos:

Behind the basement doorway at left you’ll find my very first Washington apartment, from 1994. My friend TJ, when he moved to DC, lived in the basement apartment two doors down 15 years later; I’m glad to know the “English” (i.e., stoop-ceilinged, dim) basement apartment is still serving new arrivals to DC in the traditional fashion.

Mine was a narrow, nasty, dark little apartment, whose back room was somehow divided into two even narrower bedrooms, and we were moving from a sunny duplex apartment with two terraces in a (cheaply built, but what did I care in my 20s?) stucco building in West Hollywood, so it really was like moving underground.  But it was DC, a big and important but pretty and livable city, at the center of the universe, and I was 10 minutes’ walk from the White House and the cherry blossoms were out and it was warm and comfortable even into the evening and bla bla bla.

I arrived in the early fall, as part of a corporate move (15 people) from California. My boyfriend wasn’t coming for a couple of months, so I had the run of the city. The movers dropped off all our stuff, which I somehow crammed into the place, along with my bike, and I spent the fall riding around town, learning my way around, meeting people, and generally having the kind of fun that you have when you’re exploring a new place. To this day, I still look forward to fall, not because it reminds me of the new school year, but because it reminds me of that September and October in DC, when I was biking around Dupont Circle in the warm evenings getting into trouble.

In retrospect, it was kind of a crappy time. The sewer backed up shortly after I moved in, and the landlord came in, draped everything I owned in plastic, and dug out the front room for three weeks; I had to step over a construction site to get to the bedroom. But did I care? No. I just got on my bike and went somewhere.

I have no idea what happened to that bike. I don’t even remember what kind it was. (Did I wear a helmet? I can’t remember.) But now, when I’m on a bikeshare bike in DC, biking down P Street, I’ll have a momentary flash of memory of biking along this very block 17 years ago in the early evening with a dark orange glow behind the trees.

I was in DC from Sunday to Wednesday, and I decided I would see if it was possible to go everywhere I needed to go via Capital Bikeshare. My conference was at the Hilton (near the 20th and T station), my borrowed apartment was near 17th and Corcoran, and everywhere else I expected to go was within bike reach.

Guess what? I did just fine.  I used the Spotcycle app aggressively to find stations and open docks (although I found its updates lagged a few minutes behind reality), which made everything so much easier.

I stashed the car at 7am Monday morning in a garage near the Hilton, and made 4 trips during the rest of the day, including a long loop (in 2 parts) across town through Logan Circle to Gallery Place, then back past the White House into Georgetown in the rain. 17th and Corcoran was full, but I found an open dock at 15th and P.

On Tuesday, I did a round-trip between the Hilton and the apartment, and then went across town to a station near our office (7th and F was full, but 8th and G had an open dock). After an hour or two in the office, I picked up a bike at 10th and Constitution and took a ride down to Maine Avenue, where I docked the bike near Arena Stage and went in to see Oklahoma! (about which more later). Then, after the show, I picked up a bike at Waterfront station and rode back up to 15th and P (expecting 17th and Corcoran would be full) and thence to bed.

Wednesday was a big biking day — a trip up to the Hilton, then another crosstown trip to Gallery Place and the office, and then a long ride to Rosslyn — down almost the whole length of Constitution Avenue to 23rd Street, over the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge to the Custis Trail, and up Wilson Boulevard as far as the station at Pierce Street, then back down again to Lynn Street at the Rosslyn Metro.

After my Rosslyn meeting I waited out the pouring rain (or thought I did), then picked up a bike to ride back to the Hilton and pick up the car. By the middle of the Key Bridge, I was as thoroughly soaked as I’ve ever been — I hadn’t counted on the fact that what is a light rain when you’re standing still becomes a heavy drumming of rain when you’re moving at 13 mph. But i just sucked it up (what else was I to do?) and rode on, through Georgetown and across the P Street Bridge and up the hill to the Hilton, where our story comes to a happy conclusion.

Grand total: 15 bikes in about 48 hours, somewhere in the range of 25 miles ridden, exactly one problem (the bike I rode back from the theatre kept slipping out of second gear into first, which was more an annoyance than a problem). I carried moderate amounts of cargo in the basket with no trouble. I rode in all kinds of clothes, including a suit. I took 3 long rides, and at least as many with some steep inclines. I rode a mile and a half into Arlington County.  I even rode across the Key Bridge in the rain and lived to tell. And as far as I know, I never exceeded the 30-minute free period, which means that I paid nothing but the basic day rate.

Yes, I got hot, and I got wet. I had to change my shirt a couple times. But you sort of take things like that for granted in DC in the summertime anyway, don’t you?

(And a note for the skeptical: despite appearances, I’m not particularly athletic. I have some recent practice with street riding in New York, which makes me confident in traffic, but I’m a somewhat out-of-shape guy, with no particular fitness history, approaching middle age. And I know almost nothing about how a bicycle actually works, I just know how to spin the pedals and steer. So if I can do this, you can do it!)

DC is a terrific biking town: mostly flat in the central core, wide well-maintained streets, shade trees, very well-marked bike lanes (thanks DDOT!), generally polite drivers, alternate route options everywhere, traffic negligible in most of the city through most of the day, even a contraflow bike lane on 15th Street and a bike expressway in the median of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Could I live this way for real? Absolutely. Being able to grab a bike, ride it, dock it, and then forget about it is incredibly liberating. I can’t wait until the NYC DOT contract is awarded and the new system here at home starts getting buiilt out.

One side effect of my two days on the Bixi bikes is that I’ve realized I prefer a more upright riding position. I also like the fact that the bikes are sturdy (completely stable even in the rain), and the gearing is really good — you’d think that three speeds wouldn’t be enough, but in fact I rarely had the bike in first gear, and was typically in second gear only when starting out from a light. (If they’d had a fourth gear, I would have used it, but your typical leisure rider wouldn’t need it much.)

The Bixi is geared such that if you start off from a stop in second gear, you can raise it to third really quickly and pick up momentum in the upshift — I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but if you’ve driven a manual-transmission Honda Civic (which I have), you’ll recognize the feeling — it’s like you snap from second gear into third, picking up speed as you go. Like you grab onto an elastic band and it pulls you up.

Last night I did what I could to adjust the handlebars on my Gary Fisher to as upright a position as they’ll support, which actually isn’t terrible — it’s much better than it was — but it can’t quite extend enough to put me fully upright (or, to put it another way, my arms are about 3 inches too short). So I might be in the market for a new bike — we’ll see how I do with this new compromise riding position on the Gary Fisher over the next couple of weeks.

I spent most of the day at the conference, in what might as well have been an underground bunker two miles underneath the Washington Hilton. So after the last event of the evening, I was itching to get out for a bike ride. I ran back to the apartment and changed out of my grownup clothes, then picked up a bike in front of the Soviet Safeway a little before 8pm.

The air (as DC air often is at this time of year) was thick and wet and hot, like the exhaust from the climate control system of a shopping center — not foul or dirty, just damp. As I headed east and south into the city, I got damp, too, but there wasn’t much traffic in the fading light of day.  I headed past my old apartment at 15th and P (the second-floor bay window at upper left), past the Whole Foods (!), around Logan Circle and down into downtown.

I made a stop at the City Sports at Gallery Place, because I needed a new pair of running shoes and I was hoping that my favorite salesperson, Naja, could hook me up. She did — in fact, she recognized my face and remembered exactly what shoes she’d sold me eight months ago without my having to say anything.

As I was paying for the shoes, though, the sky opened up and the rain poured down. I sat out the worst of it in the store, and when it dropped down from “God is angry” level to “moderate shower” level, I went out and got my bike again. And here’s where the real fun started.

You know those moments right after a heavy summer shower, when it’s warm but not hot, and everything just a little too wet (including you) but the air isn’t quite oppressive, and there’s the faintest hint of a cool breeze? Those are my very favorite times to be out doing something active, running or biking or just walking around, and the heavy Capital Bikeshare bikes are perfect: with their heavy frames and thick tires, they’re not going to skid or slip, they ride just fine.

From 8th and H I rode west onto New York Avenue and then Pennsylvania, biking past the front of the White House on the long steaming nearly empty promenade, then banking up quiet upper Pennsylvania Avenue, around Washington Circle, over Rock Creek and into Georgetown. Then zigzagging north and west, I found myself in front of Thomas Sweet at Wisconsin and P (was it my plan to head there all along? I’ll never tell).  I had a vanilla fudge ice cream cone on the terrace in a light rain, then biked back across the P Street bridge, riding past my very first DC apartment, in a basement near 21st and P. When I got back to the Soviet Safeway, all the bike docks were filled, but I didn’t mind; that just meant I got to ride on a little further, back to 15th and P where there was one open dock.

Urban walkability is a chicken-and-egg problem. In many cities, municipalities and businesses don’t invest in relatively cheap promoters of pleasant walkability (better sidewalks, street furniture, pedestrian-oriented displays — nevermind things like zoning changes and parking reconfiguration that require political will) because there’s a perception that “nobody walks.” And people are disinclined to walk because there’s a perception that “walking is unpleasant.”

Which is why I’m always excited to see signage like this in American cities, in urban cores and near transit stations and so forth. (This photo courtesy of John Massengale.)

Actually, that’s London, which isn’t an American city, and of course they do it better than we do, but increasingly it’s showing up here, too. Like in this photo — you can see a large, easy-to-use city map on the oblique (left-facing) side of the kiosk at right, which are placed all around the central core of …

… Montreal. Doh! But I swear, Americans are catching up, at their typical slow-but-steady pace. And the quality is improving. WMATA just announced that they’re improving their walk maps in Metro stations. A sample (click map image to enlarge; download full map, 2.7 MB PDF):

That map’s too busy, but it’s a lot better than the current iteration. We need more of this — this sort of thing is part of the evidence people need that changing their longstanding behavior is a rational thing to consider.

One more quick comment about my three days in Baltimore: that Maryland accent is still alive and well. And I don’t just mean in the mouths of old people and diner waitresses, although there is of course that too. Apparently, they’re still making new people, young ones, who talk like they have a mouthful of chewing gum. (I kid, I kid!) Who knew?

Every time I left the hotel — when I went out to Little Italy, for example — I encountered people half my age or younger who spoke in frank, unattenuated Baltimorese. There were one or two (I’m thinking in particular of the host at one restaurant) who I could barely comprehend — and I’m not new to this accent, I lived in DC for years!

This is a marvel to me. These kids live in the same culture I do, absorb largely the same national media, but come out talking in the local way anyway. This despite Baltimore’s being more tightly bound than ever to the vastly more generic DC metro area. For my whole life, people have been griping about the loss of local color in America, but regionalism seems very much alive to me — if anything, it may be stronger now than 15 or 20 years ago.