Photo by Glyn Lowe Photos

Generally speaking, Capital Bikeshare is a success. The region’s bike-sharing network recently hit two million rides, and the oversized red bikes are credited for making cycling in the city significantly more visible and accessible. (They also somewhat served as an inspiration for New York’s own bike-sharing system, set to kick off this summer.)

But if you’re a columnist for The Washington Times, the idea of sharing bicycles to get around town is obviously not just sharing bicycles to get around town, but rather something more insidious, more un-American—it’s “broken-down socialism.” Those are the very words that columnist Charles Hurt used today to describe Capital Bikeshare in a head-scratching rant that largely defies logic. To save everyone the pain of reading the whole thing, we’ll excerpt and respond to some of the choicer claims:

Unlike Sarah Palin or Tina Fey, or whoever it was, I really can see Russia from my front porch. Or, at least, I can see broken-down socialism.

That is because across the street from my house on Capitol Hill is a loud, clanging “Capital Bikeshare” docking station. It is one of the locking ports for those fat, red communal bicycles you see peddled all over town by commune enthusiasts. (Say that fast, and it sounds like you are saying “commun-ists.”)

Russia? Communists? Red bikes? Good God, man. The Cold War ended over 20 years ago. If you’re going to peddle (get it?) fear, at least get with the times. A link between Bikeshare and al Qaeda would have been much more appropriate and effective. Something about sleeper terrorists packing the bikes full of explosives and riding them—slowly—towards sensitive government sites.

For a small membership fee, users can pick up a bike at any of 165 such docking stations and proudly pedal themselves to work, school or to pick up Chinese food. The little black wire basket on the front is sturdy enough to carry a briefcase or a carry-out order of tofu. The bikes are shaped like the old-timey “girl bikes” without the crossbar, making them suitable for un-liberated women in skirts as well as these so-called “metrosexual” males everybody keeps talking about in these parts.

I see what you did there, Charles. Chinese food—as in communist Chinese! Fair enough, I suppose, since I’ve never once seen a Bikeshare user pick up good ol’ American barbecue (USA! USA!) on their way back to the collective farm. And “so-called ‘metrosexual’ males”? Good ol’ 1950s America (USA! USA!) would never have accepted any of those. Back then, men didn’t even bother to put tires on their bikes—they just rode on the metal rims, cause that’s what real American men (USA! USA!) did.

But there are problems.

The most obvious one is that you can check out a bike and pedal yourself anywhere your heart desires — so long as it happens to have a docking station for your bike. (The bikes don’t come with locks, and these geniuses haven’t yet eliminated bike theft — even of crappy, fat red ones.)

Well, this is true. Then again, there are a lot of Bikeshare stations in town. That’s the whole idea—the bigger the system gets, the more convenient it is. And technically you could just as well say the same thing about cars, right? You jump into your car and hope that there will be parking wherever you end up. And no, those “geniuses” haven’t yet eliminated car theft either.

So, what happens is, these noble warriors ride their bikes to work in the morning, only to discover that so has everybody else. And all the docking stations are filled up. So they have to wander around in search of a place to dock their bike so they can get to work.

This leads to another problem where all the bikes end up in a concentration of places. So at the end of the day, a belching environment-killing truck must come around and redistribute the bikes.

Another valid complaint, and we have a term for this—dock-blocking. Yes, it happens. But again, that’s why there are other stations nearby. As for that “belching environment-killing truck” that redistributes bikes when necessary, well, a few of those are probably better than all the belching environment-killing cars on the road that would be needed if we didn’t have a robust public transit network, right?

After early complaints about this problem, central planners did what central planners do. The program didn’t need to be eliminated. It needed to be — made bigger.

Hurt’s a conservative, so he loves small government. (Except when it comes to the military, I bet.) To him, the idea that Bikeshare has expanded is antithetical to American values. If you want Bikeshare, it needs to be small and preferably run by a private contractor! Well, D.C. tried that. It was called SmartBike. Remember it? Yeah, neither do most people, since it was so small that it wasn’t widely used. (It only had 120 bikes at 10 stations, and was paid for by Clear Channel.)

Bike-sharing, like public transit, can only gain mass acceptance when it’s easy to use. Hurt’s logic is all wrong—he wants a smaller bike-sharing network, but a smaller bike-sharing network would and has failed. Oh, now it makes sense. This is evidence that something big and centralized has worked, which is terrifying for him. You know—Capital Bikeshare one day and communist/terrorist/metrosexual America the next.

So far, after the latest expansion, the whole scheme has cost taxpayers more than $8 million. Much of that comes from federal taxpayers, so you, too, can take pride in this.

Well, yes and no. The initial planning and implementation was funded with a $6 million federal grant, but most of the costs since have been covered locally. And let’s be fair—for as much as Hurt wants to complain about the money that’s sunk into Bikeshare, he probably hasn’t ever stopped to demand that his federal and local tax dollars stop building those pesky socialist roads and freeways he drives his car on. And if he thinks that public transit should pay for itself, we’d love to make him pay Metro what it would cost to operate the system on user contributions alone.

My personal pride in the program reached a new level last week after reading about a woman in my neighborhood who was talking on her cellular phone. A thug rode by on a bike, slapped her and swiped her phone.

And proudly pedaled away on the big, fat, red Capital Bikeshare bicycle.

The majority of Hurt’s column is just dumb, but his conclusion is weirdly insulting. So he’s happy that a woman got mugged by a thug riding by on a Bikeshare bike? I guess it would be much more American had he driven alongside his victim in a Ford F-150 and shot her, much like the Second Amendment demands he do, right? Sheesh.

If Hurt would like to discuss Capital Bikeshare further, we’d love to invite him to Busboys and Poets—Bikeshare and Metro accessible!—for a few foreign beers, some plates of shared communist food (Cuban sandwich, anyone?) and a mandatory post-meal pledge of adoration to Vladimir Lenin. That’s how we roll here in D.C., after all.