Notes on Bicycle Commuting

I've been commuting by bicycle since 1993, when I was a college rower getting from the dorms to the boathouse. That was like 3 miles at 5:30 am. Naturally, I barely remember it, except for one dark morning when turning right onto Grant Ave downtown in a rainstorm. The ornate stone pavers are ultra-slick and I went down and butt-slid all the way across to the far sidewalk. Fortunately no cars were coming at me. Grant Street still gives me the willies when it's wet.

Without a doubt I do my best thinking when I'm riding. Unfortunately a vast majority of those thoughts vanish by the end of the ride. The ones that survive often come back to me incomplete. If only there was some kind of thought-recording device.

You see a lot when you ride on the side roads.

• I bought a Specialized Allez road bike in August of 1994 with the paycheck from my summer job as a camp counselor. I rode that bike out and back on Skyline Drive in VA when it was less than a month old. Over the past 20 years I've replaced parts on that bike, including the frame, and now the only remaining original part is the handlebar. It's bent but I resist replacing it. Those are the handlebars I have held onto day after day for two decades.
• Commuting via trails is a nice and pleasant way to start the day but it doesn't really wake me up. However, a 7-mile road race against city buses, big SUVs, erratic drivers, and slowly morphing clouds of college students and business people is a seriously intense way to start the day. I prefer the latter, hands down. 
• I've been hit by cars exactly three times. The first was the worst because it totaled that road bike I bought in 1994. The thing was only a few months old. The other two times I didn't even get knocked off my bike.
• I've figured out most of the traffic signals I ride through each day. So I know what's going on as I approach (this is particularly useful if you intend to run the red light). Some of them have 4-way walk signals, some have walk signals that only correspond to the green light. However, pedestrians are my eyes and ears. If I see pedestrians crossing that means that there are no cars coming that way. It's like a green light. The scariest traffic signal I know of from a bicycling perspective is the one at Dallas and Forbes, when I'm riding down Forbes away from Sq. Hill.
• In 1996 I took a job as a bike messenger downtown. I was new, and I was working for a brand new messenger service. I had a cyclometer on my bike, and was able to see that I was averaging 75 miles daily. Asking around, I discovered that I was naively being taken advantage of. Everybody else was riding less than 30 miles a day. I lasted two months, and was cheated out of $50 on my last paycheck that I haven't forgotten.
• I get a lot of hot air from drivers for running red lights and skipping ahead of sitting cars in traffic (which I admit are not legal and ill-advised for most). I don't pretend to be entitled to it, and it annoys me when I'm driving too, but I have a response to those who don't like it. Here goes: if there was essentially zero likelihood that you'd get in trouble for disobeying traffic laws, you'd do it in your car. But, you can't because a car is too big and because the likelihood is substantially greater than zero. So, please try to understand that I, just like every other human, strive to take the path of least resistance (like the path between lanes of cars sitting in traffic), or get on a bike yourself. At least I'm not taking up a coveted parking spot.
• I was yielded the right of way appropriately by a bus exactly one time in 20 years. Thanks to the driver of PatTransit #67 who was coming up 5th Ave through the Hill District at about 8:30 am on a Tuesday in March of 2014.
• I've had several bikes stolen in my life, but only one really hurt. It was very special to me because it was the bike I rode from DC to LA in 1995 and then from Oregon to Delaware in 1999. It was locked to a fence under the Star City bridge outside of Morgantown, and I had left it there for an entire weekend. The frame was given to me by a friend after mine was destroyed after being hit by a car (see above).
• In the week after September 11, 2001 I was commuting from Alexandria, VA to northwest DC where I was in grad school. I hung an American flag from my bike and for a short time it felt good to be patriotic as I rode past the Pentagon and the National Mall.  It's the only time I made any kind of statement while riding. I have a feeling that I was the only one who noticed.
• Trucks idle entirely too much. It chokes us up, and uses up resources that are limited. http://www.edf.org/transportation/reports/idling
• There's an lady in Squirrel Hill who is out nearly every single morning, in all kinds of weather, cleaning up litter off the sidewalks. She wears rubber gloves and carries a fistful of plastic grocery bags for the trash. It strikes me as a superb way to (1) productively spend your retirement, (2) get outside, (3) get some exercise, and (4) use up an old grocery bag. 
• We're lucky to have all these new bike lanes here in Pittsburgh, but there are some unexpected problems. First of all, many of them appear to not be serviceable by a snow plow. We'll have to see what happens, I suppose. Similarly, the bike path that I use regularly (Pocusset) was formerly a road. However, now it's exclusively a bike path and the street sweeper never cleans it. Because of that, the sharper turns are now dangerously caked with mud, leaves, and debris.

Git r dun.