There’s a whole lot going on in the Bikeosphere lately, what with DOT secretary Ray LaHood’s announcements, and Mayor Menino’s declaration of intent concerning bicycle advocacy in Boston. I almost feel as if all our hard work making noise for the bike community has actually been fruitful. Maybe this small bit of complacency is why I haven’t been keeping up with this ranty blog, but it’s also the fact that this April is treating us so very very well in terms of weather. Do you remember last April in the Boston area? Yeah, we had nine whole days without rain all month. That’s right, 21 days of rain in one month. I think that’s about the time I started planning to move the hell out of New England, preferably to somewhere VERY DRY, like Arizona, New Mexico, or Hell. This year we’ve gotten a couple serious rain days, but it’s been mostly blush and flowers, and breezy days of sun. Fucking spectacular. To the point, I’ve been more preoccupied with riding than with blogging about riding.

But of course, the war isn’t even close to won, despite our victory in battles here and there. I’m still seeing the same negligence on the part of the MBTA drivers, and I’m still seeing dangerous riding practices (though I have noticed an uptick in the number of helmets being worn by casual cyclists).

In personal bikey notes: my roommate Sadiya is learning to ride a bike. She had started learning last year, on a tiny but heavy as hell 10 speed. It was… not very successful. Recently however, the Goondocks has become home to a delightful little coaster-brake Schwinn stingray. I urged her to try this as a training bike – her feet can easily touch the ground, and the coaster brake is intuitive and dependable to a noob biker. My logic is essentially grounded in the idea that this is the type of bike we learned to ride on as kids. She’s doing really well with it. I am so proud!

Tags: aggressively uncool, leisure, solidarity

This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 10:36 am and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.