I loved the article, even more when people said it made them want to get on their bikes.
I get recognized all the time ... everybody knows my funky Xtracycle Now, a slight correction is that the cool thing about hte Xtracycle and helping the lady with her groceries was that putting your stuff *in* somebody else's bike bag is not something most folks will do, but the Xtracycle has the back deck and I told her "You can just put it up here -- you don't even have to let go." Well, actually she *couldn't* let go of it -- it was heavy enough it took two of us to lift it and she had to keep a hand on it to keep it stable.
I had seen her putting the bags on her shoulders when I went by going West, and thought "is there a story here..." wasn't suitcases ... now, since my entire intent and purpose going down that road was to get my mileage over 2.5 miles on my errand and to see what the "one lane ahead" was referring to, I turned around in a few hundred feet. The road construction was pothole repair -- bus damage.
So, I saw that she'd gone about 75 feet and was stopped again. I popped the bike onto the sidewalk, and dismounted.

“How far are you going?” …
“to the corner (bout a quarter mile), where the bus *usually* stops.”

See, it was such a nice day that she'd walked the mile and a half to Meijer and done major shopping, and got the bus... which was re-routed because of the construction. She lived right there on the bus stop corner so humping the bags that far would have just been a chore-to-the-door ... but the walk from the other corner was at least a quarter mile. (I know, I was counting :P )

I reckon she'd have made it stopping about 10 more times, but it would have sucked. It was really nice to be able to make somebody's day Not Suck without complicating anything, with five minutes walk