Bike Lane Lamentations
 1 Courtland Milloy's July 9 Metro column, "District biker gang ─ the pedaling kind ─ has a lot of nerve," caught me off guard.
1 Frequently, car doors open as I pass, buses pass a few inches from my handlebars, and motorists yell or honk at me when I am trying to get around double-parked vehicles or cars parking. I try to obey traffic lights, but sometimes it is nice to get a running start and get away from traffic.
The bike lanes have helped enormously. I do not understand why anyone would think they are bad. I have been bicycling in the District since 1984, and motorists appear more impatient with my presence on a bicycle than they did years ago, probably because of the higher volume of traffic. Everyone would be better off riding a bicycle in the city, but it is not for everyone. However, saying that hitting a bicyclist is worth the $500 fine is not a solution.
Jamie Rothschild, Washington
2 The July 11 Style article "In D.C.'s bike wars, here come the spokespeople," peddling civility by and toward bikers downtown, revealed the reason cyclists should be aggressively ticketed by D.C. police when they break the rules: in the one brief capsule of time described in the article, five cyclists sped through a red light. An ambulance, fire engine or police car could have been speeding into the intersection, and the cyclists would have caused a tragedy, among many possibilities. If rude and rulebreaking cyclists start receiving fines for their behavior, maybe they will reconsider their importance over the importance of every other individual on the streets. 2
Linda O'Brien, Takoma Park
3 Courtland Milloy got his facts wrong and essentially advocated vehicular assault. How could The Post advocate violence that pits a driver in a ton of metal against an exposed bicyclist?
As a nation, we are trying to achieve a more sustainable way of living, and integrating multiple modes of transportation in cities is one way to do that. 3
Carolyn Dick Mayes, New Ipswich, N.H.
washingtonpost.com, 2014
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