For Stanley Seiden, the journey of 790 Capital Bikeshare stops began with a single push notification. “One day, probably in November 2022, I got a text that said I had reached 6 percent of all Capital Bikeshare stations,” Seiden says. “And so I said: challenge accepted.”
Seiden, a contractor with the State Department, spent the next two years traveling to far-flung corners of the DMV, on a quest to visit every single Capital Bikeshare station. While the app stopped giving him push notifications after about 13 percent, Seiden kept pedaling, and last Saturday he reached his goal, docking at station no. 790 in Shaw.
One problem Seiden encountered: He found himself playing whack-a-mole with the expansion of Capital Bikeshare, which has added 107 stations since the last documented completion of the challenge in 2022. (Update: In 2023, a duo of Washington City Paper contributors made it to 723.)
Another issue involved docking. For the station to “count” on the app, he had to physically dock his bike there, and some proved to be in hard-to-access locations. One was in a cul-de-sac cutting into a Reston golf course. Another, in the Capitol Hill area, was roped off when Seiden arrived. A Congress Heights stop required a grueling uphill trek. But mostly, the effort was enjoyable. “Anywhere near those running trails or near Four Mile Run, those are always great, because they’re often a little bit more in the woods,” he says. “It’s like you’re escaping the city for a little bit.”
Seiden also had to put a temporary hold on the project after a bike accident left him with a broken wrist. “I’m just grateful that DC is working on creating new bike lanes for riders,” says Seiden, who wants the project to draw attention to efforts to make the city safer for bikers and pedestrians. “The answer is just keep protecting those lanes, and keep putting them in places where they don’t exist.”
This wasn’t the first self-imposed challenge for the longtime cyclist. When Seiden moved to the DC area more a decade ago, his first task was to bike down all of DC’s avenues named after US states. “That was a great way to explore DC itself,” he says. “This really was about getting outside of DC.”
