DC creates "temporary" cycletrack around construction

The 15th Street NW cycletrack was the first major cycletrack in the city, starting as a pilot.  While it's had some teething issues, it's now highly used.  When construction first started on the site of the old Washington Post building, on the 1100 block (between L and M Streets), I wasn't surprised that the cycletrack was blocked off because of the construction.

But I was over there yesterday and I was surprised to see that the lane configuration for the block had been changed--regularly, it has more lane capacity than traffic, which is why the cycletrack hasn't been an extraordinary impediment to motor vehicles--in a manner that shifted the cycletrack around the construction site, by taking away a traffic lane.

This is in keeping with the general discussion of the March piece, "Making cycling irresistible in DC 2.0 | Revisiting a post from 2008," which posits that the year by year improvements to bicycle infrastructure are significant.

That the city is maintaining bike infrastructure during a construction project, rather than letting it go away "temporarily" for the duration of the construction is a big deal.