You can’t take a folding bike on Metro during rush hour unless it’s in a bag. Even if you’re Office of Planning director and Brompton acolyte Harriet Tregoning.
Tregoning tried to bring her Brompton onto a Metro train last Friday, on her way to a meeting in Virginia Square. Lo and behold:
“I had some hardass station manager who didn’t even give me a warning and told me, ‘You have to get out of there,'” she says. She went to another station, where a station manager let her through the turnstile but did warn her that she was breaking the rules.
Folding bikes, unlike full-size bikes, can be brought on Metro during rush hour. But they need to be folded up and in a bag. This is, as Tregoning points out, rather silly: “Foldable bikes don’t come with bags because they’re intended to be compact anyway.”
She says she knew she was breaking the regulations, but her unbagged Brompton hasn’t been a problem in the past. Tregoning has asked WMATA to reconsider its policy. A Metro spokesman didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Folding bikes are allowed on MARC, VRE, and Amtrak trains without bags.
Photo by Alex Baca