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It’s been longer than I intended it to be since my last Bike Lake City post. There are a few reasons for this, the most obvious of which being that the relentless snowfall in Salt Lake City has kept me off my bike and on transit for the bulk of winter. That’s been lovely (tangent: I’m increasingly opting for transit on even the mildest of inclement-weather days, which I didn’t expect to happen. That’s a topic for another day) but it makes for less fodder on a bike-centric blog.

I love doing the crossword and over time, I’ve learned that not everybody understands how crossword puzzles work. Sure, most people are familiar with the basic mechanics—clues give you answers whose letters intersect with each other—but much like the menu at In-N-Out Burger, there’s a lot more going on if you’re in the know. Each crossword clue is a puzzle in itself, and the specifics of how it is written dictate the specifics of the answer.

I first encountered the above quote from Marco Te Brömmelstroet when I was reading the excellent book, Building the Cycling City by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett. It opens a chapter (titled “Use bikes to feed transit”) exploring the synergistic dynamic of combing rail and bicycle travel for transportation. Of all the chapters in Cycling City, it’s the one that has stuck with me the most, and the one I return to the most often.

Mountain biking is what made me fall in love with cycling. It’s also the main reason I held onto owning a car for so long. I knew that I could get around the city pretty well but losing my car would mean losing access to my favorite trailheads—and that was no small thing. When I finally pulled the plug and sold the Subaru, the time I spent on a bike soared but the time I spent on a *mountain* bike plummeted.

On Thursday nights in Salt Lake City, the streets belong to cyclists. Not every street—at least not all at once. But wherever the 999 passes, that street is theirs, and rightfully so. People struggle with this, and particularly people who drive cars. They think the road should be “shared” on Thursday nights, like they perceive it to be during virtually all other hours of all other days of the week.

I don’t remember when I started doing a year-end movies list but whenever it was, I know that since then it’s never taken me until February to complete it. It’s one of those things where the longer I put it off, the larger a monkey on my back it becomes, thus making it harder still to get started. So here I am biting the bullet, and if this post just cuts off after number 7 (I don’t think it will, but who’s to say) then at least I’ll know I tried.