This morning, as you begin your day and ponder the weekend, I will be joining an intrepid group of bike riders crossing into the capital city to the east from College Park. Wish me luck – I imagine we’ll be jousting with cars cruising in on Rhode Island Avenue.

This ride is all about jousting with cars or, better yet, avoiding them entirely by building trails for bikers and hikers who endeavor to travel through cities without contending with traffic.

Sounds like a quixotic dream of tree huggers, but a system of trails down the East Coast — from the Canadian border to Florida’s Keys — is being knit together mile by mile.

The trail is called the East Coast Greenway. It parallels the Appalachian Trail, but unlike that forested path, the Greenway slices through cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and points south.

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Which brings me to today’s ride. East Coast Greenway Alliance leaders started in Baltimore on Wednesday.

They biked to Annapolis and then to College Park, where they will begin their tour into D.C. They’ve dubbed the 100-mile route a “Close The Gaps Ride.”

The keystone of the 3,000-mile trail is D.C.’s Metropolitan Branch Trail, which is designed to connect Silver Spring to Union Station, which leads to trails through the National Mall and across the Potomac River.

It is also the Greenway’s most glaring gap.

“The Met Branch trail is critically important,” Greenway Alliance board Chairman Chuck Flink told me as he mounted his bike in Annapolis. “If you want to get into the heart of D.C., the best way is down the Met Branch.”

But you can’t get there from here, as they say in Vermont.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton squeezed $8.5 million from Congress in 1998 to build the seven-mile trail.

Bureaucracy, buildings and squabbles over right-of-way have blocked progress, until this week.

The city finally started the process to design and build a five-mile piece of the trail from New York Avenue to Brookland.

“It’s the single biggest piece of the trail,” says Jim Sebastian, who manages the city’s bicycle and pedestrian programs. And it might even be built by next fall.

That will not be soon enough for Paul Meijer, a retired physics professor who has become grandfather and grand squeaky wheel of the Met Branch Trail.

“Build the damn thing before I die,” Meijer tells me. He’s 85. And healthy. No worries.

Meijer and the Greenway Alliance leaders riding into town today, like Executive Director Karen Votava, are both impatient and quixotic — both traits of trail builders.

But is it an impossible dream to make Washington a biking capital, where masses of riders bike to work on safe urban trails? Perhaps not.

From Maryland, they can ride in now on the Capital Crescent and Rock Creek trails; Met Branch and South Capital Street trails are coming.

From Virginia they can take the Mount Vernon Trail or the Washington & Old Dominion route across Memorial Bridge.

Washington is already becoming the biking capital — once we close a few gaps.

Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at hjaffe@washingtonian.com.