Not only did Brooklyn get its first ever recorded tornado, but it also got the equivalent of a snow day yesterday when the rain caused a system-wide shutdown of the subway. I had a nice leisurely lunch in a cafe and then rode my bicycle into work for a couple of hours because I felt like it, not because I had to.

Last night on NPR, there was a guy from Transportation Alternatives talking up bicycles by saying that he had heard from people who rode their bicycles into work and didn’t know that there were any problems at all until they got to work and there was nobody else there. Personally, I found this hard to believe. You can tell when transit is down even if you don’t use the subway. Traffic backs up horribly and there’s tons of bewildered people wandering around on the streets.

Wanna know how I knew the trains were running again? It was when I realized that the cacophonous honking had stopped.