Sunday slow rolls
At our amazing studio building, we have an attached parking lot. The space is incredible for BBQs, unfurling large works in progress, and making social media content…but we hardly use it for actual car parking. In 2025, this started provoking discussion about how few of us actually drive to work at the studio, and how scary it is to bike along Rhode Island Avenue to approach our front door. For those of us that bike, we each have our own unique bike route hacks to avoid as much of the 6-lane road as possible, but we can’t escape it entirely. We figured, of course others feel this fear and trepidation, right?
Right!
So we partnered with our friends at the Anacostia Trails Heritage Area to organize a monthly community bike ride along the very stretch that scares us. The area as a whole is rich with bike trails, including over 100 miles of commuter trails in Prince George’s County. While a future trail extension of the Trolley Trail built along Rhode Island Avenue is overwhelmingly popular, a feasibility study is in review, and the funding and construction processes ahead are long. A monthly community bike ride helps keep this conversation at the top of city agendas and residents’ minds, to ensure this vision is one day fully realized.
The concept of our Sunday Slow Roll*** is simple: Meet up in the parking lot behind our studio, put on some chill tunes on a loud speaker, and ride north until we feel like turning around and heading back! Our first ride included some educational public art stops, and our second ride included some chill beers afterwards to celebrate the start of spring (it was a dreadfully long winter in DC). Everyone is welcome regardless of ability, age, or type of bike, and there’s no pressure to go fast. Zero. So chill. Sooooo chilllllll. We can’t imagine a better way to spend a sunday afternoon than with friends new and old, chatting about the world and art, cruising on our bikes and taking time to appreciate the world around us.
Right now, we have Sunday Slow Rolls scheduled through June, and then we’ll see where it goes! 3711 4VR
Learn more here: https://www.riatt.net/events/slowrollsundayseries
Here’s some press we got for the first ride! https://dbknews.com/2025/10/27/micromobility-rhode-island-trolley-trail/
***we didn’t know Detroit also had Sunday Slow Roll bike rides until after we THOUGHT we came up with the name! Detroit, we love you, we’re all slow rolling together, we didn’t mean to steal your bike ride name