A goofy fun party song. Also, most of the lyrics can describe Abby, our female dog, when she’s panting and wants her dinner.

I mean, think about it… right? “You’re a good girl,” “I know you want it [dinner],” “tried to domesticate ya, but you’re an animal”?

Heck, the line “you the hottest bitch in this place” is often thermically and etymologically accurate in our house..

The nights are hot, humid, and sultry these days. The heat seems to enforce its own mellow slowness as the night stretches on, and the breezes waft in through the open windows. This jazz track is a bright but slightly minor take on a Brubeck standard, and seems to fit the mood perfectly.

The version on iTunes is twice as long with more improvisation.

On a gorgeous summer evening in Washington D.C., the windows are open well after sunset, and the southerly breezes are keeping us warm. It’s been a seemingly never-ending cold spring.

“Summer Vibe” by Walk Off the Earth seems a perfect fit to a warm evening that stretches into the night. Punctuated by the group’s normal anthemic choruses, this little ditty features an irresistible vocal performance and a simple guitar.

Summer can’t be too far away.

John Brown’s Body, new album. Download a free MP3 at left.

Earlier today, the group that is quickly becoming my favorite reggae band released a preview of their next album Kings & Queens, and it is a really excellent tune. I’ll link to a 50-second preview YouTube version here – but do yourself a favor and head to their Facebook page an hit “Preview” to download an MP3 file yourself.

I’ve always enjoyed John Brown’s Body’s studio work – I think it brings a lot of clarity and precision to their very complex and intricate melodies, vocal harmonies, and horn instrumentations that can sometimes get lost in live recordings – for tunes like Zion Triad, The Gold (Runnin’ Remix), and their collaborations like The Cyclops.  The one negative to their studio stuff has often been energy – energy that I’ve witnessed emerge with infectious ferocity in their live materials.

Enter “Old John Brown” – a track that begins with the bare-bones drum beat, and hangs off of it an incredibly melodic and energetic bass line from 10 seconds into the track.  When the horn section melodies enter after 15 seconds, the energy is palpable – and the stage is set to blend the best of studio intricacy with the free-flowing vigor of live music.

The song is not too light to be dismissed as typical reggae fluff; nor too heavy to be overly dubby or dubstep (or any of its heavy incarnations). Lead-singer Elliot Martin’s voice is pure, controlled, and steady throughout. Guitar, rhythm and horns are snappy and clean. Vocal harmonies have a produced varnish, but they’re right-on. The bass line and the horns are really the stars of the show, particularly the bass.  It becomes its own countermelody to the horns and the rhythm guitar, and often changes places with the horns and takes the lead melody - reminiscent of Widespread Panic tunes like Radio Child. The song structure is complex as usual, with at least a couple chorus variations and bridges. I like how the chord progressions in the chorus resolve in a couple different ways.

It’s also interesting that the lyrics directly address the band’s namesake and history.  Not sure what this means, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.

This is really a fantastic tune, and a harbinger of good things to come on their next album. I’m looking forward to April.

Sometimes, I just like a good upbeat reggae beat. Even if I have to think too hard about the lyrics that I kinda gloss over them. This song is set at a peppy pace and a happy lilt. The perfect antidote for cold winter weather.

Freezing Saddles

When the signup first came up on the Washington Area Bike Forum, I thought, “oh what the heck, I’ll sign up, and log whatever riding I would’ve normally done.” So I threw my hat in the ring, and forgot about it as Christmas approached. January and February are usually months when I withdraw into my shell and generally exercise a lot less –  dreaming of the day we set our clocks forward by an hour.

But after the holidays, I was looking for things to look forward to, and Freezing Saddles was there. In the past week plus, it has definitely motivated me to ride a lot more this winter so far than I ever would have. I’ve found myself tacking on an hour or more of riding to my evening commute, like it was the summer.

Good bike lights have helped a lot. This fall I invested in a solid, see-by-it light in addition to the normal be-seen blinkies, and it has helped immensely. Nighttime riding is now really comfortable for me.

Strava has helped – both for motivation, and to discover new routes. I love to learn about how other people in this town get around by bike, and to see other people’s riding habits. In a sometimes solitary endeavor, Strava has been a great way to add camaraderie, albeit virtual (until the next Happy Hour, forum folks). For all of Strava’s focus on competitive speed and sprinting up hills for KOMs, the biggest advantage I see in the software is its socialability, route-sharing, and collaboration.

But mostly, I’m happy for the motivation to get off my duff and get outside even in the freezing cold, and for the community that comes along with all this friendly competition.  Kudos to the organizers, and I look forward to many Pointless Prizes and happy hours to come!

“Where do you ride?” My last post had some analysis on when, how far, and how often I rode a bike. But missing was – where? Thanks to Strava, and some cool 3rd-party software by Jonathan O’Keefe, I can overlay nearly 1,000 bike rides on one map. Darker lines mean I rode it more, and lighter less. Here are a few samples.

I love how this shows preferences about route choice – the tradeoff between comfort, safety, speed, available bike facilities, and direct-ness that every biker makes when deciding how to ride from A to B. For bicyclists (like me, I think), this decision depends on all kinds of things, from weather, to time of day, to plain old personal preference. Sometimes, for example, on weekends or off-hours I just want to ride straight down an arterial to downtown. At rush-hour, I’d rather take side routes.

These maps encapsulate an entire year’s worth of those decisions.

All rides inside the Beltway. Outside of my neighborhood (Capitol Hill) and downtown, the major trails emerge. Also, I tend to bike west and north, rather than east and south.

Long rides in 2012, from DC. The route through Reston is the W&OD trail. To the west, mostly.

All 2012 rides through downtown Washington.

Capitol Hill and eastern downtown are pretty well covered. Also interesting to see where I never rode – like apparently I don’t like A St. NE (no offense, 20002-ers)

For fun – this was a great 5-day trip in southern France we took this summer. About 60 miles a day left plenty of time to shamelessly devour French food.

Also for fun – a 4-day ride through great Burgundy wine country.

A quick rundown of my 2012 bike riding, by the numbers. Armed with a good dataset from RunMeter and my phone on nearly 900 rides of over 6,100 miles in the last year, and my tendency to totally geek out with numbers and visual analysis, here’s a look at how I spent in the saddle this year.

The year was a great one, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I really got into riding more than past years – joining group rides, exploring new paths and routes in Washington, taking the long way home on weekday evenings, and even a bike-themed vacation in June. But this post isn’t a reflection on the REAL reason I love to ride – the scenery, friends, adventures, mishaps, wine, or cups of coffee – it’s about the numbers. Every time I got on a bike this year, I hit stop and start on my phone’s GPS –  mostly in hopes of creating a fun dataset to analyze and track my progress. So here goes.

I ride more in the summer, but still try to keep it going in the winter. Bikeshare is a small part of my riding these days. August is vacation time!

Most of my riding is short utilitarian transportation stuff.  Average trip length was 7.0 miles on the year. I go on longer rides and commute less in the summer.

Commuting is a small part of my base mileage. I apparently don’t like riding on Mondays, and may have other things to do on Fridays. On Wednesdays and Fridays I sometimes double-commute.

P.S. Commutes are only where I go straight from home to work or vice versa. A commute plus errands or joy-riding isn’t a “commute.”

Every bar is a day, including zero days. September and October were really FUN! I rode 315 of 365 days of 2012.

Commuting straight to work gives me maybe 100 miles a month. Mainly though, commuting gives me an excuse to ride home the long way in the evenings!

I’m getting slower. Am I more cautious in my old age? Or choosing slower routes? Who knows. That 16+ mph day was the Seagull Century, and the 9 mph days were usually short errands on rainy days.

Bike commuting is still incredibly reliable for me. Out of nearly 600 commutes in 2011 and 2012, 88% of them took me between 13 and 16 minutes.

Although I had some long rides, biking is still primarily transportation for me. Most of the time I hop on my bike, I’m going short distances for utilitarian stuff. This chart excludes commutes, too.

L Street Cycletrack (image courtesy Zach Rausnitz)

I normally try to avoid wading into the fray of bike advocacy in the mainstream press, but this article seemed so close to a breakthrough that I felt the need to write. The author, the president of the Washingtonian magazine, basically says that a bike lane has made made it worse to drive east-west through downtown DC. Along the way, she ends up making excellent arguments for the very same bike infrastructure she apparently opposes. The answer is right at her fingertips, yet she lets it slip away. Let’s take a closer look:

I applaud our city for embracing bikes. I, too, like to bike to work on occasion.

Great! Then surely you know firsthand how easy, cheap, and fun cycling in the city can be. And, you know how bike lanes and cycletracks in DC have made it much more attractive to newbies, doubling or tripling ridership.

Ever try to go from Georgetown to Penn Quarter in rush hour? Good luck. And have you tried it lately?

Yes, the trip is pretty easy, actually. There’s a great new protected bike lane on L Street nearly the whole way, and you can safely zip along much faster than the jammed car traffic. I’m surprised more people don’t ride, especially given how bad traffic is.

I’ve sat on the corner of 19th and L and watched each evening as the backup has gotten worse and worse with the addition of the new bike lanes—and I watch as the smog from stopped cars pollutes while nary a bike goes by on cold winter evenings. Only 3% of commuters bike. More than 70% still drive or take the bus.

I agree – traffic is terrible. That’s why I think it’s crazy that so many of us still sit in it, wasting time and polluting the air. Especially when there’s a traffic-free bike lane that goes the same places you want to go, or that can lead you to a nearby transit station. L Street opened a few weeks ago, but statistics show that lanes dramatically increase ridership in a year or so.

Busy Pennsylvania Ave. cycletracks

Many of us drive, but that’s not a reason we shouldn’t change. A century ago we were at 0% car usage, and we adapted our roads to cars. Now, realizing that cars have their drawbacks, we are adapting a small portion of our roads to bicycles. Times change.

I also agree that air pollution is bad and we should do something about it. Encouraging people to take transit and ride zero-emission bikes is a great way to do it.

Are you suggesting we should take away the bike lane to reduce emissions? We have 50 years of experience adding roadway capacity, and in study after study, expanding roads leads to more driving. If you’re arguing that more driving will somehow help air quality, I’m at a loss. Traffic reaches equilibrium – and soon enough drivers will begin to adapt to L and M Streets the same way they adapt to any normal constraint on the roadway network.

One has to wonder if there is any strategy to our bike-obsessed city. Did it occur to anyone to perhaps put the east-west bike lanes on H, N, or I Streets? Streets with significantly less traffic than L or M.

Yes, bike facilities take a lot of careful planning- planning that our city carefully began 8 years ago and has been strategizing since. Also, watch your numbers – DDOT statistics could tell you that H and I Streets move the same or more number of cars than L and M. (L Street moves around 14,000 cars per day, and M Street around 10,000. H and I move between 14,000 and 15,000 per day.) H and I also carry a phenomenal number of buses – nearly a bus per minute at rush hour, or 40% of the people in 2% of the vehicles – meaning they likely carry way more people than L and M.

Is anyone measuring how many bikes use the lanes in rush hour to determine whether they warrant the increased traffic backup?

Yes, DDOT records counts periodically. In fact, they just released numbers on two bike facilities installed a couple years ago, and found that installing bike lanes and cycletracks increased bicycling by 175%. Expanding bike capacity leads to higher bike ridership… sounds kind of like, well, roads, right?

…Except that more bicycling leads to exactly the kind of outcomes you said you wanted – less congestion and pollution. So, you’re making a great case for more bike lanes.

The red light at 15th and Penn. NW, which drivers apparently should be allowed to run?

Recently I came across this signal. I assumed it meant to watch for bikers when turning, which I explained to MPD officer who pulled me over–yet I was still fined $100 for “Disobeying A Traffic Control Device.” No warning, no matter that this is not in the DC Driver Study Guide, which lists eleven other signal types.

I agree that the “Bike” symbol should be included in the DC Driver Study Guide. It’s uncommon, and drivers should learn about it. But if you saw that red light and thought it meant you could go, I don’t know what to say.

Finally, let’s keep things in perspective here. The vast majority of our city remains paved for the the nearly-exclusive use of cars. D.C. is home to 3,500 lane-miles of roads for cars, and about 60 miles of bike lanes. The L Street cycletrack is 1.3 miles of one lane – that’s less than one tenth of one percent of the total roadway network. Even the next 10 or 20 miles of bike lanes signal neither the end of days, nor “bike obsession.” Frankly, they’re a drop in the bucket.

To the author: next time you drive from Georgetown to Penn Quarter at rush hour, you’ve got some great reasons in your article here why you, and your fellow drivers sitting in traffic jams, should ditch the car and ride a bike. It’ll get you there faster, reduce air pollution, cost less, and who knows – you might have fun too.

Hot coffee: the cornerstone of any cold morning bike commute.

Bike commuting this time of year, when the cold morning winds make my eyes tear up, I am reminded once again of the awesomeness that is hot coffee. In a thermos, stashed in the water bottle cage, and always easily available at any red light.

The days haven’t yet gotten too cold, so the afternoon ride home has been pretty tame so far, but the mornings have been chilly. But seriously, the warmth of a hot bevvy on a cold commute dramatically improves any winter morning.

Oh yeah – and while you were enjoying that sip of java, it was so tasty that the idea of running that red light never even crossed your mind. Well done, you.