Will the bus ever appear? (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Megabus has always promised cheap, mostly awesome trips for people, but apparently the bus service suffered a few glitches in D.C. this morning, resulting in what are apparently staggeringly long waits, according to this depressing video from WUSA and broadcast journalist Greg Guise. Megabus customers even passed out in the summer heat! It's a terrific video, bouncing from interview to interview with properly dramatic flair. Shots veer from ambulances to hopeless citizens waiting to restless Megabus employees to shots of some customers simply abandoning the lot with their luggage. We get the occasional cheesily hilarious lines about tempers that "come to a boil." All these poor, exhausted people.

I've taken the Megabus from D.C. to New York before, but I was able to walk right on, with no wait whatsoever. The parking lot in Chinatown was always easy to find, and the buses showed up on time. I generally like the service. Comfy enough seats, outlets for my laptop, usually some decent wireless. What this video revealed was a whole other side, however. God help the D.C. residents burning in this Megabus purgatory. Watch the video.

"We've been waiting for three hours!" one woman says in exasperation in the report.

Apparently service essentially stopped as Megabus ran out of buses, Guise tells us, and people can get their tickets refunded as well as receive tickets for the future. Just watch the WUSA clip after the jump, and pray you never experience similar waits.

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How green was my trolley. (Photo: flickr/Mr. T in DC)

Today's planners are talking about environmental impact — from streetcars to electric-car plug-in stations to Capital Bikeshare's expansion into Arlington to a Metro station at Potomac Yard. What unifies these projects, aside from the countless meetings and often, as with the case of the streetcars on H Street, quibbles and delays, is a profound attention to how their development would affect the environment. Just yesterday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood announced $101.4 million in federal funds for "innovative, clean-fuel technologies in transit."

To proceed with plans for a new Potomac Yard Metro station, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) spent the past half year developing an Environmental Impact Statement, finally released this June (PDF). The process has consumed all of 2011 in the FTA's efforts to create this new Metro station along the Blue and Yellow lines. People had the chance to participate in two public "scoping meetings" in recent months, at which they could voice concerns over the natural and community impact a new rail station would bring. The meetings and analysis brought many environmental dimensions to light, including soil contamination, the possibility that methane could be released from disturbed wetlands, effect on air quality, vibrations, and more. Tonight there will be a 6:30 p.m. meeting at Alexandria City Hall to discuss all this as well as how the Potomac Yard Metro station can proceed now that the EIS statement has been completed.

That dialogue of environmental concern permeates most of D.C.'s other transportation projects, too. Last night there was a meeting about how the streetcar proposals are going, and sure enough, a look at the team's presentation (Powerpoint) shows countless instances of deference to environmental issues. An environmental review is the reason that the Anacostia cars' progress is delayed, according to WTOP. Today Union Station received a new location at which you can charge an electric car, part of an underlying cultural movement guiding drivers away from fossil fuels. The dialogue continues among D.C.'s growing community of bikers, of course, as associations promote health benefits and lower pollution while the government invests in bikesharing (if not, perhaps, in the L and M cycletracks).

This environmental rhetoric has come to accompany all major transit projects and initiatives in the last 20 years or so, but what does the reality of our impact really look like? The answer's a double-edged sword.

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Have you seen this ad? (Photo: Portland Cement Assocation)

The ire of portland cementers now fills our capital, and yes, you heard me right. Yesterday I received word of a couple angry advertisements featured in CQ Daily and Roll Call making their way around D.C. put out by the Portland Cement Association. It's based in Skokie, Illinois, was founded in 1916, and represents cementing companies throughout the U.S. and Canada (the name refers not to the Oregon city at all, but rather the ordinary, simple form of "portland cement"). The group has pushed similar ad campaigns in May. Their big message is better infrastructure, and specifically, the need to take life-cycle analysis into account when funding it.

What specifically are these ads so mad about? They blast "short-sighted budgeting practices" and encourage people to support the Fiscal Accountability and Transparency in Infrastructure Spending Act of 2011. Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana) introduced the bill back in March and its status can be found here. At the moment, the bill's still floating around in committee. Fundamentally, the bill expresses great fear over government spending and a misuse of executive funds, a fear dominating all our politics for decades as Democrats and Republicans fight over the nation's pursestrings. According to the bill's proposed measure, any executive agency would have to conduct a "life-cycle cost analysis for each major infrastructure project" that's proposed before getting any funds. The minimum amount of time ascribed to such a life-cycle is 50 years, by the bill's language, and the agency would need to publish the results of the budget analysis within 72 hours of receiving it. Vitter's language is all about taxpayer dollars and efficiency.

Again we confront the politics of mass transit, where transportation projects come to the forefront of the budget battle between Democrats and Republicans. You can imagine the association's vested commercial interest in infrastructure and all the legislation. I imagine the business interests of the proposed bill, not to mention its ramifications and motivations, go beyond that.

According to their site, the ads will run in print and online for the next couple weeks. This advertisement, shown below, was featured on the back of Roll Call yesterday. Have you spotted these around town?

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The GAO report is almost as long as this train. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Years since Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) requested the study, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has issued its long-anticipated report (PDF) on how WMATA manages itself, where it falls short, and all the different actions it should be taking in response to these shorts. The 69-page document breaks down the Metro system's management, why it conducted the document, how Metro's board of directors comports itself, past critiques, and then lays in hard on what WMATA should be doing now as the system looks toward the next decade and hopefully a more strategic way of thinking.

Here's 10 quick reactions, containing what on first read seem to be some of the juiciest details lost in the pages:

• "Inadequate delineation and documentation of the
board’s responsibilities, as well as inadequate communication among
board members," the report says about WMATA's board of directors. GAO says that board members, stakeholders, and other officials have referred to an emphasis on day-to-day reactions rather than long-term strategic planning and policy attention. No great surprise there

• A malaise of meetings. Metro's board met 84 times in less than a year, GAO said. Great, right? Meetings! Except no because, as GAO phrases it, the practice is "inefficient and symptomatic of a lack of a strategic focus."

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Shh! It's the quiet car. (Photo: flickr/wheat_in_your_hair)

What's the idea? Transit authorities all over the country have long pondered the idea of "quiet cars," places where riders can go for some peace and quiet away from blaring music, chatter, and other ambient distractions that some D.C. commuters may have encountered. Just this morning, I sat on the Green Line overhearing virtually every beat to the song of the guy sitting next to me.

The big quiet-car city of 2011 happens to be Chicago, where every train line now features quiet cars during rush hour. The city has been experimenting for months, and rolled out the initiative to all of the Metra's 11 lines on June 6 after a deliberate, thoughtful test of one line that yielded positive feedback. The transit authority there has even employed mimes as part of their education outreach to the public. Mimes! (Apparently this is nothing new either – Boston tried it in 2010 as you can read in "A Day in the Life of a Public Transit Mime" but that's for another post.) Given the recession, I imagine the Midwestern mimes are more than thrilled for any work, but still ... is this possibility of the quiet car for real? And more importantly, would D.C. benefit from adopting a similar policy? D.C.'s already got a rather quiet set of Metro cars as is, but the idea could still have some merit, especially depending on what happens in Chicago. We've already seen quiet cars on the MARC train and other commuter lines, but what would it be like to add them on everyday lines like the El or D.C.'s Metro?

Let's consider the pros, cons, and most practically, the complications:

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Carmen Turner shortly after becoming Metro's general manager (Photo: Ebony)

Carmen Turner ascended to become acting general manager of WMATA in 1983, a milestone in our nation's transportation history. She quickly transitioned from acting general manager to the general manager in earnest. She ultimately served for seven years, and today a Metro location even bears her name: the WMATA Carmen Turner Center in Hyattsville, Maryland. Our city's transit experienced a 40% expansion during her years.

 As On Foot's new vision evolves, I'd like to take the occasional moment to look back at different moments in Washington D.C.'s Metro and transportation history, moments big and small, some more than half a century in the past and some from the last few years.

Carmen Turner's ascendancy falls somewhere in between – close to 30 years in the past. In the spirit of recognizing and appreciating D.C. transportation's broader history, let's look at the March 1984 issue of Ebony magazine, freely available via Google Books and providing a terrific profile of the pioneer who was Turner, written less than a year after she assumed what must have been then, as now, a tremendously difficult job.

The New Jersey native never expected to lead Metro. She'd worked her way through the system for two and a half decades and had a diabetic husband who had fallen especially ill shortly around the time she rose to general manager. Once in power, she spoke of respect, affordability, and recognized the racial imbalances throughout the system without letting her own skin color set her apart. The photos in the '84 Ebony profile below tell their own story. "She is passionate about 800-page books, Chinese food, and Nat King Cole records," the profile tells us.

Read through the piece below and appreciate the foundational elements of history – of D.C. as well as our country's transit systems – that have come together to form our transportation world today.

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A vision of Metro lovers' bliss. (Photo: flickr/TheeErin)

Summer – season of love, heat, and a new announcement that the D.C. Metro Orange Line stop at Vienna/Fairfax GMU ranks as the country's "most romantic" Metro station, according to the folks at Craigslist. They announced the news a couple weeks back, basing the conclusion on a year-long study of missed connection messages. On Craigslist, any person can post an anonymous note in which they longingly pine for another, often a stranger spotted or briefly encountered out in the wild, in the site's Missed Connection section. If the stranger sees the note, he or she can e-mail the original poster back ... yet so many of the postings likely go unseen and unanswered.

A stunning number of D.C. missed connections do seem to revolve around our city's many avenues of transportation, especially on the Metro system. On a long commute, a flirtatious glance may be inevitable for many, and Craigslist becomes the next step for those who can't manage to forget an attractive commuter spotted on the way home.

The psychology of commuter flirtation strikes me as especially fascinating. A packed Metro train throws countless people within a centimeters of one another, yet etiquette often calls for respectful detachment. Eye contact is limited as people sit with their books, their free newspapers, perhaps an iPod or a kindle. One intriguing element of the Craigslist designation is the fact that the Vienna station sits at the end of the line, as one of my colleagues pointed out this morning. Why there? Perhaps the attraction grows over a long commute home, the minutes growing and the train slowly emptying out, eventually leaving just a few people at the final stop, their imaginations running wild. Maybe? Craigslist points to the romance of the name Vienna, to the presence of GMU. Or perhaps it's the very distance of Vienna from downtown D.C., a sense of longing and loneliness that fires a sense of fantasy?

In any case, strangers are posting on the Internet about all their feelings and compulsions, and we've rounded up some of the recent missed connections of D.C. transit, all from the last couple weeks of June. TBD has examined this Missed Connections world before, and now seems like a perfect moment to dive back in for a glance. Men and women, straight and gay, all these D.C. residents have woken up to the idea that love may be waiting just at the next Metro station:

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A fan to ease your summer pain (Photo: John Hendel)

The other day I began noticing something new in the Georgia-Avenue Petworth station--giant fans, two of them at least. The first I noticed when stepping off the Metro train, loudly blowing cool breezes along the Metro station platform. The second I saw out near the ticket machines, offering reprieve to any riders walking up the long hallway toward the gates.

Where were these fans before, I wondered, and why had they appeared now? The D.C. summer heat was certainly nothing new, as I remember from the sweaty revelation that was May. Perhaps a problem with the station's chillers prompted the fans or maybe just good will? How common were these fans throughout Metro's stations overall?

A Metro fan near Georgia-Avenue's ticket kiosks (Photo: John Hendel)

I called Metro to see about what stations these types of big, boxy, breezy fans might be in, and they say they'll be able to tell me later in the day. I suspect these might be in a few of the stations notoriously struggling with summer heat (such as Bethesda, as the tweet below notes today). Stations typically use chillers to keep cool rather than conventional air conditioning and sometimes share two or three. These chillers can keep a station around 20 degrees cooler than the temperatures outside and were generally built in the 1970s with '70s energy standards. Sometimes, however, Metro riders just need a little more cooling in the form of a good fan, I guess.

How many of these have you noticed? And would you call yourself--so to speak and forgive me in advance--a fan?

I'll let you know as I learn more. Update, 1:41 p.m.: Metro has given me some updates! Read those after the jump.

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Will cycletracks ever reach L and M? (Photo: flickr/Dylan Passmore)

All right, everyone. I held back from talking about the L and M cycletracks so far but I can't resist commenting. For those unaware, the status of the anticipated bike tracks along L and M suddenly became unclear during the District Department of Transportation's confirmation hearing of Terry Bellamy. As the Washington Area Bicycle Association noted in a June 24th blog post that sent chills throughout the D.C. biking world, the tracks were "on hold," we learned. They "might not happen."

Uh oh. Commence the freakouts.

The association asked a bunch of good questions in response, like who's objecting to the displacement of parking spaces and will the public be invited to offer their feedback. I saw this post earlier this week, and have put in three calls to clarify the status of the L and M tracks with the DDOT's acting director Terry Bellamy. I sent an e-mail. No response, just the promise that I would hear back within 24 hours. In the meantime, D.C. bikers rallied in indignation. On Greater Greater Washington, one anonymous commenter suggested the move came straight from Mayor Vincent Gray. A petition emerged to save the tracks, even.

This afternoon, the District Department of Transportation finally responded--and lo and behold, the answer came in the form of a blog post!

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Are these buses safe? (Photo: flickr/styro)

Metro sees  the question of transit security as a priority, the organization's chief spokesperson tells me. Yeah?

"We don't want to see any of our employees hurt while trying to do their jobs," says Dan Stessel, the calm voice of Metro in the last month. He evenly describes the three recent attacks on bus drivers. He calls the attacks "brutal." One driver was punched in the face because he asked for the appropriate bus fare. A female driver was punched after asking a customer to move a stroller. Juveniles beat another. "All of this is unacceptable," Stessel says. "We are taking steps to protect our bus operators."

Stessel is reacting to the recent intense buzz regarding Metro security, particularly on bus drivers. Specifically, he wants to provide a calm institutional response to Amalgamated Local 689's "Operation: Safety First," set to launch tomorrow. Earlier today, I spoke with the union's recording secretary Anthony Garland and learned the details of their efforts, such as meetings over the bus's surveillance equipment as well as later this week with Metro Transit Police. Most significantly, the union plans to distribute upwards of 5,000 cards and a survey about Metro security to bus passengers tomorrow. See images of the cards here. 

But Metro, Stessel stresses, is aware of the situation and acting accordingly. Much of what he said was wise, on point, and what one would hope a Metro spokesperson would say, from sharing the union's concerns to explaining how the institution is trying to address these different concerns. He also takes issue with some of the statistics the union is using and emphasizes the need for greater context surrounding them--such as the number of police that Metro assigns to protect bus drivers.

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What you'll find on the bus tomorrow (Photo: Courtesy of Amalgamated Local 689)

Tomorrow "more than 5,000" of these cards will distributed across the buses of Washington D.C., according to Amalgamated Union 689's recording secretary Anthony Garland. The union of WMATA employees has been increasingly concerned about safety, and offering these cards as well as a rider survey on security, launches "Operation: Safety First." The cards ask riders to "stand for safety" and mail in their support for the initiative to Richard Sarles, Metro's general manager, and Jack Requa, Metro's direct of bus transportation.

Read my initial posting on the initiative from earlier today here, with thoughts from the union's Anthony Garland, and expect another post later this afternoon with thoughts from Metro spokesman Dan Stessel, who I just got off the phone with now (Update: Read WMATA's thoughts here).

For now, here's what you should expect to find on your Metrobus tomorrow. The front of the card:

The front of ATU 689's safety card(Photo: Courtesy of Amalgamated Union 689)

And here's an image of the back of the card:

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Some enemies of mass transit work here.

This week, 25 U.S. senators issued a call for more transportation funding throughout America. "We implore the [Senate Finance] Committee to strengthen the Mass Transit Account's fair share of funding in the next surface transportation authorization to guarantee that our economic recovery continues," the senators' letter declares (PDF). The note speaks of how mass transit systems create jobs, how they connect the rural with the urban, the high gas prices and how demand for public transit systems is higher than ever--and will likely continue to soar. Finally, the letter notes, downcast, that upward of 80% of public transit systems have seen flat or declining funds from various government sources, according to the American Public Transportation Association.

All struck me as a compelling enough plea, but one fact stood out to me as I read the letter ... 24 of the 25 signatories were Democrats, and the 25th senator was an Independent. Again the age-old question returns: Why does the subject of mass transit split so often on party lines?

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Amalgamated Local 689, Metro's largest union with more than 10,000 members, has one message for D.C.'s transportation world: safety first. They care about it so much they've named their new public outreach initiative after the concept. The union plans to distribute "more than 5,000" cards as well as a survey on buses throughout Washington D.C. tomorrow as part of "Operation: Safety First," AL 689's recording secretary (and a former bus operator of more than 20 years himself) Anthony Garland told me. And the concern about safety goes beyond just Metro employees', despite the attention recently paid to attacks on bus drivers' and other struggles, voiced in the union's town hall meeting with the public last week.

The security awareness is "not so much about employees," Garland said, "but the community in general."

The Metro union has been especially active in promoting transit safety as of the past week and a half, though as Garland points out, the struggle has been "ongoing for years." Yesterday union officials met with WMATA on the issue of surveillance cameras on the buses, a subject which arose in last Monday's meeting. One-third of the bus surveillance cameras are inoperable, Garland told me this morning, but Metro officials have been open to a dialogue. The Royal Street buses "didn't have surveillance cameras--maybe one or two," Garland said. Since last night, Metro has worked to resolve the lack and sent over some other, better-equipped buses. Garland believes that this has happened as of this morning. He calls the Royal Street action a "good sign" in the conversation with Metro.

"We've gotten a lot of attention from Jackson Graham," Garland said, referring to Metro's headquarters.

The campaign for safety awareness will need to continue in other ways, he said. Here's an image of the fact sheet that the Metro union plans to distribute as part of Operation Safety First:

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Courtesy of Bike Arlington

Tonight Bike Arlington is hosting a public meeting at 7 p.m. to ask the public for their thoughts on where to put Arlington's 30 new bikeshare stations, as On Foot explained earlier (see the meeting's details and the full list of potential stations here). This afternoon I spoke with Chris Eatough, program manager for Bike Arlington for the past two years after a career in professional mountain biking, and he shared his thoughts about how the bikeshare service is growing throughout northern Virginia.

On the forces driving the bikeshare expansion

"It started out with a demand map," Eautough explained, referring to the way Bike Arlington has created the list of 30 potential sites through employment and residential data. Other neighborhood factors play a role as well, such as attractions such as libraries and shopping centers. "Finances drive the process somewhat, too," Eatough said.

How Capital Bikeshare entered Arlington and the importance of clustering stations

Capital Bikeshare, launched on September 2010, has entered Arlington in deliberate ways and in specific neighborhoods. "You need to build these things out in little blocks," Eatough said, explaining that bikeshare stations operate more effectively in clusters. The first clusters occupied what Bike Arlington would phrase the "urban villages" of Pentagon City, Crystal City, Potomac Yard, and Rosslyn in a little under 20 stations.

In 2011, Bike Arlington plans to add these 200 bikes across 30 new stations and is focusing primarily on the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, according to Eatough. "We've known for a while that the R-B corridor was the next logical place," he said. He and others started scouting the potential sites in late winter because "we wanted to give the community something to get started with." The team examined everything from manhole covers to how shadows fell from certain buildings. The process is very much "ongoing," and Eatough encourages people to check out Bike Arlington's crowdsourcing map, where you can suggest and comment on the potential station sites.

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What will transportation be like for D.C., northern Virginia, and suburban Maryland in 2030? Will there be a killer Purple Line stretching into Maryland, perhaps, or Trolley Cars in the District? Imagine that future year and see if you can think of the priorities that Metro officials and others have discussed. The future of the next 20 years may be mysterious for many of us, but let me suggest another question: Do you think the region's transportation authorities have a sense of long-term transportation priorities and plans?

Here's a sad fact, riders. Based on a recent and fascinating survey of 45 of the region's transportation experts (engineers, urban planners, and traffic experts with generally more than two decades' experience), no one has any faith or sense of the long-term priorities of Metro and other transportation institutions, looking toward 2030. The survey, conducted by the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance and the Suburban Maryland Transportation Alliance on behalf of the 2030 Group, examines what these experts saw as the region's appropriate priorities and a lack of coherent, consistent vision guiding authorities currently (PDF).

What they called the most striking conclusion was the following: "The vast majority of the very people who should be most informed about regional transportation priorities agree that no such list for the Metropolitan Washington Region exists today." It gets worse from there.

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Are D.C.'s hybrid buses ever going to run smoothly? The new fleet continues to suffer, this time from what Metro's called a "fleet defect" in the engines of about three-fourth of the hybrid buses, according to Kytja Weir at The Washington Examiner. The buses are still running on D.C. roads and are considered safe (as far as that goes) but will need to be fixed over the course of the next year.

These latest engine problems are "routine," we learn, and Metro officials assure us that the fleet is still the best available. The problems are also, The Examiner, notes, not the first that the hybrid buses have run into. Technical glitches are bound to happen in a system so large and especially with our transit technology expanding as much as it has, but it's a shame. The hybrid buses promise so much and are a vital step in moving our public transportation systems away from fossil fuels. President Obama recently sent his deputy secretary of transportation to Baltimore to praise that city's recent adoption of hybrid buses. Maryland's Governor O'Malley hopes to have around 600 electric-diesel hybrids in operation by 2014. As with all good ideas, however, the headaches are in the technical glitches.

Yet the real bus problem may not be technical so much as social. Bus drivers have been attacked multiple times recently, among their many other problems. The growing insecurity over D.C.s' transit security could result in a strike or something worse. Metro security has always been a top priority, but awareness of the problem's extent is growing, whether it's at last Friday's hearing on Capitol Hill or last Monday's union Q&A. Consider a weekend report from Baltimore, in which a 28-year-old MTA bus driver allegedly stabbed a passenger early Saturday morning. Might this violence happen in D.C. if conditions and frustrations continue?

Weir sums up the ongoing struggles with D.C.'s  hybrid buses here:

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Bike Arlington

Here's transit crowdsourcing at its finest: Arlington County is holding an open meeting tonight to figure out where its biking residents want the next kiosks for the Capital Bikeshare program established. There are around 30 proposed sites now, created in accordance with this sweet Bikeshare Demand Map that analyzed the population and employment density (check out that PDF here). Read On Foot's interview with Bike Arlington's program manager Chris Eatough here.

The meeting, according to Bike Arlington, will happen tonight at 7 p.m. at 2100 Clarendon Boulevard in the Cherry/Dogwood meeting room (located on the lobby level of the building), and people interested in attending should RSVP at info@BikeArlington.com. Bike Arlington also gives the criteria for these potential biking kiosks, which include more than four hours of direct sunlight and a distance of at least two to five blocks from the nearest station.

The Capital Bikeshare program has continued to expand since its founding last September and plans to add 200 bikes in addition to these 30 stations throughout 2011. The service currently has 110 stations located through the District and Arlington, which allows members to rent out any of its 11,000 bikes from its kiosks for a small fee. It hit 500,000 trips at the beginning of this summer--a great sign, given the apparent connection between a region's biking population and overall happiness. Chris Holben, the Bikeshare program manager for the D.C. Department of Transportation, said he expected the service could reach a million rides by the program's first anniversary on September 20, 2011.

There's wisdom in seeking public input early, and drawing on data as well as the area's citizens is exactly what needs to be happening as the program expands. One of the greatest concerns at last week's Metro union meeting was a lack of appropriate public input on the location of bus stations. Hopefully tonight's forum should help Capital Bikeshare avoid any similar pitfalls.

Here's the 30 new location sites (alternates bring the number to 33) as well as Capital Bikeshare's official video on how the system works, if you're considering joining yourself:

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No lie, readers--this has been one busy week in the D.C. transportation world. Let's review some of what happened over the course of the past few days and consider what we've learned:

• Metro's biggest union (with more than 10,000 WMATA employees in its ranks) wants to get directly into the PR business with its riders

• D.C. bus drivers have it rough--to the point where one wants a shotgun

• Zipcar's first big competitor is on the way to the market for car-sharing services in D.C., the first since 2007

• Metro revealed its sweet Fourth of July schedule

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Every good commute calls for a good playlist. Forget long waits for Metro trains, crowded jostling on the cars, walks that seem endless, and the bus stops to what feel like nowhere—this weekend, just sit back and enjoy the songs on your iPod or MP3 player. The right song kills all the travel stress, and in honor of that fact, TBD's On Foot blog offers you a weekly transit-themed track for your Metro playlist. The destination will come eventually, after all. In the meantime, just enjoy the ride and the music.

This week's traffic jam: "Trains to Brazil" by the Guillemots (2006)

Hear more songs for your commuting playlist here.

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Have you ever met a grumpy bicyclist? Me neither, and the data now supports the notion that bicyclists are, in fact, happier people overall.

The size of a city's bicycling commuter population positively correlates with its diversity, affluence, and most interestingly, well-being, according to the statistical analysis of researcher and author Richard Florida. Commuting to work also makes people fitter, Florida notes in The Atlantic (where, in full disclosure, I helped produce his articles before coming to TBD), and seems to harmonize with greater creativity. 

 How did Florida come to these correlations? He took a look at the city data from the government's American Community Survey (specifically, how many of the cities' residents reported biking to work), and then compared those figures with the cities' stats for fitness, affluence, diversity, and well-being. Florida's assessment of cities' sense of well-being comes from Gallup surveys, and this measure strikes me as the most interesting.

Collectively, the measures make enough intuitive sense. Biking commuters would typically be a little richer, a little fitter, and perhaps--as a result of both prior factors from as much as the biking itself--be a little happier than the rest of us. Regular bikers tend to be more aware of the social and health benefits that biking can bring, and it's as much leisure as convenience. Although the analysis falls far short of suggesting that biking to work causes these other benefits, the numbers are a positive sign for bikers.

And where does the capital fall among the nation's top biking towns? D.C. sadly doesn't fall too high on the list of bike-commuting cities. Let's look first at some of the census transportation data for D.C.

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