I had to work on Inauguration Day... which prevented me from sharing in this day with my familywhile I was at work my family experienced a bit of a meltdown
four year old Grant did not want to ride his bike down to The Mall... Momma Lisa could not sway him
he was requesting the trail-a-bike... but lisa was not sure how to set it up
and well... I was not so sure she should have her inaugural trail-a-bike ride on this crowded inauguration day...
yesterday when I picked the boys up from school I grilled Dean on his Inauguration Day experience
the ride down and the Obama speech on the megatron were his highlights
there was mention of it being a bit cold and a tad boring except for those highlights was understandable
then Dean started digging... like any good story tell Dean knew his audience
out of Dean's pocket came a WABA BIKE VALET SPOKE CARD and a story about the bike check!
very cool
here are some words of the WABA Director Eric Gilliland...
Here’s a quick wrap up from the Inaugural Bike Valets:
All in all I think everything went incredibly well. We parked 1127 bikes at the 16th Street location and even h
ad to build a separate enclosure with spare crowd control fencing to handle overflow. We parked 827 bikes at the Jefferson Memorial which was just at capacity. These numbers do not include WABA and DDOT staff or volunteers. When you add them all together we parked 2040 bikes which, to my knowledge, is the most ever valet parked in one day in the US. We didn’t lose a single bike and the one helmet that went missing was eventually found. Everyone loved the service we provided and were extremely patient with the lines that formed during drop off and pick up. Had it been 10 degrees warmer I think we would have been overwhelmed. We could not have done it without two things: the full support of DDOT and the amazing army of volunteers that chose to spend that special day us. They stood outside in the cold for hours and really worked hard to make it as pleasant an experience as possible for those that came with bikes.
We are all exhausted, but happy with the way it went. We have some photos posted at http://flickr.com/photos/waba/sets/72157612778271825/.
Eric