Utilizing a recent Living Social to try out the Capital Bikeshare, which seems to have had a lot of success since popping up last fall. Now that the weather is reasonably nice, it's turning into a great way to get to and from work.
I'm only using month membership right now since I'm going to be gone for basically all of June. Considering the price of the bus, I'd have to use the bikeshare eight times to break even on a pure cost basis. That equals four work days. Anything after that is pure savings, baby.
It took a couple days to figure out the best time to leave the apartment, the best corral from which to leave and to drop off the bike in both directions, and all of that stuff, but I've basically perfected it now. Approximate timings are below:
Bus
25 minutes door to door (relatively large standard deviation)
Bike
Downhill
16 minutes on bike
25 minutes door to door
Uphill
17 minutes on bike
24 minutes door to door
Not really sure why going uphill doesn't eat up more time. I guess the 16th St hill doesn't slow me down as much as I was expecting.
Anyway, even aside from the time and money, it's been pretty nice starting out and ending the work day with an easy bike ride. Traffic isn't bad, the breeze feels nice, and it gets the blood moving. I might change my tune a little bit once it reaches proper summertime temperatures in the District, but so far so good.
It's rather handy not needing to worry about the actual bike as well. Ideally, the bikes would have a few more higher gears, enabling it to be worthwhile to pedal going faster than fifteen mph, but for street purposes it works pretty well.
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