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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Drivers or bikers: who sucks more?

By Megan McArdle
Jul 8 2008, 4:08 PM ET Comment

Predictibly, drivers are complaining about the bikers being all unsafe and illegal and everything. The bikers are biting back. Who's more dangerous?

I commute by both bike and car, and it's no contest: cars. Bikers are keenly alive to their own safety, and tend to pay a lot more attention to the cars than the cars pay to them. Moreover, many drivers in DC seem to believe that it is against the law to be in a mode of transportation that goes more slowly than their own, and therefore complain about such "violations" as trying to merge into the exit lane of a traffic circle. Memo to drivers: whether it's a car or a bike, you're supposed to yield to someone trying to exit. Yes, I know that this means you'll get to your destination a full TEN SECONDS later, Princess Precious. We all have our crosses to bear; let this be yours.

Speaking as a car owner, the aura of entitlement around car commuters here is really amazing to behold. They're positively outraged that DC is moving to demand pricing for parking, and to close fast-moving arteries that shunt commuters to their destination at the expense of making the neighborhoods virtually unwalkable at rush hour. They don't even have the excuse of New York commuters--that their jobs and entertainment bring the city a lot of revenue. Government agencies don't pay any sort of taxes; nor do think tanks, NGOs, or most money-losing media organizations. And suburbanites tend to hang out in the suburbs at night, and shop their on weekends. In short, they want us to pay them for the privilege of hosting their cars 12 hours a day, and picking up the lucrative sandwich shop revenue which they apparently believe is the sole fiscal support of the city.

They are also terrible, terrible drivers. I don't know what it is about DC, but the city hosts a kind of driver that I have never encountered before: aggressive, yet hesitant. Usually you get one or the other.

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