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Old 03-02-15 | 11:03 AM
  #36  
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Jim from Boston
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Joined: May 2008
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Originally Posted by wphamilton
You may know from reading many of my earlier posts, this is exactly how I did it 7 years ago. No experience, no studying, no experts, I just started doing it and learned as I went. I can't say that it's the best way to go about it but I can say that it's feasible and not nearly so difficult and dangerous as it may appear. In the past 5 years that I've logged daily, I have commuted by bike a bit over 1,000 workdays so I think I can reasonably say it's been successful.
I recently came upon this gracious comment on a previous Comuting thread. ”Seasoned road warriors -- help me navigate this intersection on my commute home”

Originally Posted by Stun
My experience is that people drive differently in every city and treat cyclists very differently. The best advice often comes from cyclists that live the closest to you (maybe JPHamilton [sic] in this case). The exception here would also be Jim from Boston--anyone that can successfully commute around Boston has my full respect and probably knows how to deal with about every intersection imaginable!
I once took a recumbent cyclist from a (presumed) small town Ohio on a tour of Boston, and gingerly showed him around, riding as carefully as possible.

Originally Posted by Jim from Boston
…I had promised myself as I did last year, that I would not take the participants out onto the streets of Boston, since I live downtown. ..

As mentioned, Dick had come with a low-riding recumbent trike, from Fairborn, Ohio, small, probably rural town I imagined, and now at the end of the Path we were facing the busy mean streets of downtown Boston at rush hour. I myself had never ridden most of that on-street route to the Navy Yard, but I knew we could take sidewalks. Dick, as he was during the entire weekend, said “Fine, you lead the way.”

So we made our way, mostly on crowded sidewalks with some hazardous street crossings. Eventually I had to give up and go onto the streets. Dick had no problems with street riding, and actually seemed to prefer it. Later on he said it’s really no problem, and has cycled streets around the world such as Munich and London, so I realized, “What’s Boston?”

[The next day] Finally he revealed that he is a certified Cycling Instructor by the League of American Cyclists and taught safe, including urban, cycling to adults and children. As a decades-long, year-round urban cyclist, I proudly told him I learned by experience, and he replied, “It shows. You made some mistakes out there.”
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