Photo by Matt Cohen.

After pissing off basically the entire D.C. bike community with a single column that, among other things, likened local cyclists to “terrorists” and suggested that it might be worth the $500 fine for motorists to just go ahead and hit cyclists, Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy went on a—gasp—bike ride with Black Women Bike’s Veronica Davis.

As predicted, Milloy wrote about his experience and reflected on the D.C. biking community in light of his previous column. Has his mind changed? Eh, not really.

With a helmet and Go-Pro strapped on, Milloy took to the mean streets of downtown D.C. to see just how terrorizing local cyclists are. Turns out, he doesn’t think they’re terrorists at all, but mostly just “clueless” on a bicycle, like Milloy himself. After missing Davis pointing out a driver not yielding to cyclists because he was “fidgeting with the gear shifts,” his new problem with cyclists is that “too many of them bike like [him.] They are clueless. Wouldn’t know a ‘cycle track’ from an Amtrak.”

He goes on to criticize Capital Bikeshare riders as perhaps the worst offenders of “clueless” cycling:

I’ve even seen rusty old bikers succumb to nostalgia and spontaneously grab one of those “Leave It to Beaver”-looking Capital Bikeshare bikes. They’ll straddle the thing, then hop around on one foot to keep from toppling over. The next thing you know, they are wobbling into traffic, plodding along busy city streets as if they were on some dirt road in Beaver Cleaver’s Mayfield.

But Davis rebutted Milloy’s scoffing of Bikeshare riders by saying that “they have a right to ride in the street.”

Elsewhere on his hour-long ride, Milloy pondered the sometimes confusing (at least to biking newbies) biking infrastructure of downtown D.C., and was introduced first-hand to proper bike etiquette when he indadvertedly shoaled his biking group.

But what was the takeaway from Milloy’s big bike ride? Does he regret everything he said in his infamous column? Did he drink the bike Kool-Aid and is a born-again cycling advocate?

Of course not. But he does writes that he “came away with a deep appreciation for Davis and her group’s dedication to biking safety,” and that he “also [has] a tad more sympathy for bikers in general.”

Small victories.

Oh wait, but then there’s this:

I noticed that in some places their bike lanes are being overrun with Segway riders, rollerskaters, skateboarders and joggers. Even people using motorized wheelchairs have taken a liking to the lanes. Near the Treasury Department, the bike lanes contained manure from a U.S. Park Police horse.

Who knows? A biker just might decide that enough is enough and buy a car.

Sigh.