...rather than expecting us to shoehorn ourselves in on the margins of roads built to prioritize the convenience and speed of people in cars.

Running this game has taught me a lot about the wide range of ways people navigate their crappy infrastructure environments, and I'm so grateful for the insights y'all have shared along the way.

I had a blast, and hope you got some entertainment out of it as well.

Happy riding!

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The End!

Thanks to all of you who played along! I spend a lot of time in my day job trying to figure out how to explain to drivers, engineers, and fellow planners what every seasoned bicycle commuter intuitively knows: that getting more people to feel safe riding a bike means designing infrastructure that's built to priortize our needs....

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...and stride into that 8am zoom like the rockstars we are.

Yeah, we pissed some drivers off, but let's be honest, we'd have pissed them off just the same had we been driving.

Your zoom attendees arrive, and you settle in to spend the next hour explaining how most people on bikes aren't selfish jerks with no regard for laws, but are just humans trying to get somewhere safely, same as everybody else.

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And that's it! We did it! We made it to work in one piece, got some exercise, got some fresh air. Our brains are warmed up thanks to running a few thousand monte carlo simulations in our heads trying to figure out the best way to navigate infrastructure that was decidely built to punish us.

Now we're got just enough time to lock up (and bring our #ebike batteries in! It's gonna be hot today!), run some fingers through our hair...

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And now we reach our final dilemma.

Do we park our bike at the uncovered rack 10 steps from our office door, or walk around the corner of the building to the secure, covered bike parking, exchanging 30 seconds of our time for the guarantee of a dry bike seat for our ride home?

No poll here; you decide for yourself how you want to use your reward of free parking just feet from your office door.

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Y'all, we have almost made it! We're well into our university campus environment now, one of the only places in the state where people walking and biking outnumber people in cars. Now that's we've made it through the sketchy bendy stretch, it's smooth sailing. We've got other people on bikes all around us, and we strike up a conversation with a geography professor, comparing our kid-on-bikes set ups.

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For those of you who are understandably not comfortable with this choice, I get it. If you'd rather, there's a well-worn path just behind the curb on the right that you could use to get past this sketchy part. There's also a brick sidewalk on the left side.

Neither alternative is ideal, but if you're not comfortable holding your ground in the middle of the lane here, getting off the street for now is your safest course of action.

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So, we're not leaving it up to them. We're taking the lane, riding smack down the middle of it. We've seen far too many impatient drivers try and pass us here, only to nearly crash head-on into someone coming the other way.

Is taking the lane a controversial choice? Probably. No doubt we're going to piss off the line of drivers behind us.

But this is a risk we're willing to take, because the consequences are too real.

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The first part of this road is also fairly bendy, with blind curves and heavy traffic. There are only a few places with enough visibility for a driver to safely pass a person on a bicycle.

Yet, drivers being fallible humans who are notoriously bad at calculating risk in the moment, the growing line of cars behind is weaving and revving like nascar drivers warming up their tires before the green flag drops.

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