Originally Posted by Monument Man

cycling in boston/cambridge is my personal hell.

i live downtown and am a vehicular cyclist as well as a roadie. The motorists in the area are ridiculously bad, the roads have potholes that can swallow your entire bike, and the "bike lane" on Mass Ave must be one of THE most dangerous places to ride in the entire country. Seriously, don't ride there. It's not safe. Just go a block over and take Prospect or one of the other streets instead of mass ave.

Saying that, one of my favorite road rides is to leave my apartment and ride down the charles towards harvard, then ride up through harvard square and out towards belmont on the bike path. riding through harvard square can be insanely fun if you do it right because you are SO much faster than traffic due to the extreme congestion. Messenger style, uber urban riding is a thrill, but you really have to watch out.

But I have been hit by two cars in Harvard Square (one taxi, one suv), and have been knocked off my bike by pedestrians twice (once on each bike path - Charles and Minuteman) I have destroyed three wheels/rims on potholes, had my front derailer ripped off the bike by a tree's root system that had ripped through the pavement, and nearly killed a small girl who popped into Mass Ave without warning from inbetween two cars, and guess what, I was in the bike lane. She suffered a serious concussion and was twitching, lying in a pool of her own blood unconscious under my bike. I was unconscious about 30 yards down the road. The guy who drove the ambulance told me that she was 12. I've had a guy stop his car in the middle of the bike path on Alewife Brook Parkway and I had to dump my bike while going over 20mph. It was like sliding into third base, except I was skidding across pavement with a thin layer of lycra rapidly shredding under my legs, butt, shoulder, and side. My wheel taco'd under the tire of his car as he sped away, and I got many odd looks as I rode the T home covered in blood with a destroyed bike over my shoulder.

These are the things that will happen to you if you continue to ride in Cambridge. It's a hard place to get around, the T isn't so helpful and driving a car is a joke . Tons of students = tons of bikes. It's not a good place to ride. I used to love the city frenzy but now I hate it.