Local

Meet the Bike Man who brought the trucker convoy to a crawl

By Ellie Silverman
Yesterday at 1:01 p.m. EDT

The sound reached Daniel Adler first: a chorus of honks that seemed to be moving closer. ... “This is quite loud,” thought Adler, an Australia native who has lived in the Dupont Circle neighborhood for a decade. On a bike ride for groceries at the time, he decided to take a detour toward the circle to see the commotion.

The choices that Adler, 49, made in the ensuing minutes led him to the front of a section of the “People’s Convoy,” the coalition of drivers that has espoused far-right beliefs and disrupted Washingtonians’ lives for two weeks. Amid this protest of vaccine mandates — which also encapsulates a range of other grievances — residents have grown tired of drivers treating the District as their playground.

So, as a group of semi-tractors that Saturday afternoon blared their horns on 17th Street and became separated by traffic, Adler slipped in front of a few of them. Then, taking up an entire lane, he started pedaling as slowly as he could. ... “I heard the stories of the traffic on the Beltway breaking up the convoy,” he said, “and I thought I, too, could break up the convoy.”



An environmentalist, Adler said the fact that the convoy trucks were burning diesel fuel throughout the city frustrated him. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Adler, a father of two school-aged children, brought it to a crawl — and, for his efforts, became known across the Internet by a moniker somehow heroic and commonplace at once: “Bike Man.”

Link to tweet

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Daniel Adler outside his Dupont Circle home on Tuesday. “A 10-ton diesel truck, that’s not an expression of a person’s views. That’s a problem,” he said. “It’s an intimidating prop.” (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

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By Ellie Silverman
Ellie Silverman covers protest movements, activism and local news. At The Post, she has also covered local crime and courts. She has previously reported on retail, breaking news and general assignment stories for the Philadelphia Inquirer, her hometown paper. She graduated from the University of Maryland, where she reported for the Diamondback. Twitter https://twitter.com/esilverman11