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You were much better at recalling the detail than myself…but reading your description brought it all back to me. Thank you!

One fault I had with the ride was the rampant blowing through traffic lights and stop signs! We relied on following those who knew the route as this was our first time and we are TOTAL NYC newbies. So we didn’t want to lose our lead and also had to blow through traffic, leading to one very close call.

I’m not sure what I would recommend as a solution but this was a significant damper on what was otherwise a great ride.

Don

You obviously caught the most striking part of the ride which is saved for the last 25 miles and that is the B-X, or Bronx as it’s known. The hilliest of the boros but I always tell people the ONE boro
where you will be cheered and always get a “GOOD JOB” cheer from the folks.

Glad that your tires did the job as I think I changed 4 tires that day and handed off another 3 tubes.

It’s also worth repeating Kasey Klimes’ excellent point, at http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/nextamcity/25116/real-reason-why-bicycles-are-key-better-cities -

“Invite a motorist for a bike ride through your city and you’ll be cycling with an urbanist by the end of the day. Even the most eloquent of lectures about livable cities and sustainable design can’t compete with the experience from atop a bicycle saddle.”

The Century gives you an appreciation of the benefits of real, Class A, cycling infrastructure such as slower streets and cycle tracks, versus the somewhat dubious (but also much needed) markings like sharrows. A class can’t teach that.

In my golden years I realize I was completely out of my friggin’ mind.

What seems to be dawning on more and more of us, including policy makers, is how perfectly adapted the bicycle is to the city.

It uses the existing street grid without needing invasive, expensive, and destructive highways. It can be stored almost anywhere without requiring disfiguring demolitions or colossal ramp garages. It emits no noise or pollution and requires no service stations, junkyards, washing facilities, and all the rest of the automotive infrastructure that everyone demands but no one wants next door. It causes precious few fatalities, freeing up law enforcement, courts, medical personnel, and insurers for other problems. It doesn’t require a massive state bureaucracy to manage its owners and uses.

And for the rider, it offers unparalleled agility, nimbleness, sociability, and immersion in one’s environment. On a bicycle, you see hundreds of things and have hundreds of interactions that you can’t have when sealed in a two-ton steel chamber.

It makes the automobile look like an elephant trying to play in a dollhouse.

I’ve started to think of the Century as being simultaneously an advertisement for city bicycling, and a subtle critique of New York’s bike infrastructure. The tour shows you everything–the beautiful parks and luxurious bike lanes, but also the torn up pavement and sketchy intersections, and the sometimes harrowing joints between different segments of the bike network (i.e., that exit from the Henry Hudson greenway that deposits you in the mouth of what’s essentially a highway offramp). Maybe this is unintentional, and just an inevitable consequence of trying to string together a 100-mile route, but I’m always struck by the way the Century makes NYC’s bike network look, at large scale, like a series of impressive set pieces amateurishly joined together.

Also, is it just me or was this the Century of Confusion? So many times, I saw big groups of riders miss the “C” marks and veer off in the wrong direction–a couple of times they drew me with them. In previous years I only saw that happen once or twice. Maybe it’s because the route was changed pretty substantially this year, but it seemed to be happening even on the unchanged portions.