Streetsblog Los Angeles

The 2013 Mayoral Election ends tomorrow. We’ve been covering the election for almost a year and a half. As Laura Nelson’s piece in the Los Angeles Times today shows, one has to look closely to find the differences between Council Member Eric Garcetti and Controller Wendy Greuel on transportation and Livable Streets issues. Both support completing Bike Plan projects, but neither would commit to a specific one. Both support speeding up Measure R transit projects, but neither offer a new idea beyond 30/10 and Measure J II. Both want more CicLAvias. Neither want to double-deck the 405.

Nevertheless, we present the Streetsblog voter guide.

Best of luck voting tomorrow. I look forward to reading the results Wednesday morning in a Holiday Inn in West Virginia.

First, let’s start with the obvious. If you’re reading this piece, you probably support Eric Garcetti. When we polled readers in the primary, Garcetti earned a clear majority 50.2%, just enough that we’re not polling again this time (he won our primary straight out.) In addition, he’s won smaller polls where we asked you who gave the better anwers to questions in televised debates, even when I though Greuel gave a better  answer. And why not? After all, he does have a decent track record as a Council Member and President and even helps wounded pedestrians in his free time.

Just to round things out, he filled out our candidate survey. Greuel didn’t. Even if his answers were so generic they made my eyes roll to the back of my head, at least he answered them…

Which isn’t to say that one can’t make a compelling case for Greuel. Decorated Streetsblog contributor Dana Gabbard makes the case for Wendy Greuel and the Crenshaw Subway Coalition smells a rat in Garcetti’s support for a grade-separated Crenshaw Line. In the aforementioned L.A. Times piece, Sunyoung Yang of the Bus Riders Union implies that Greuel was more supportive of efforts on Wilshire and farebox recovery ratio as Transportation Committee Chair than Garcetti was as Council President. Read more…

(Note: In place of our usual Week in Livable Streets Events, we’re focusing on some of the best, non government sponsored, bike events in the region. Just because Metro and LADOT aren’t sponsoring events, doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. If the column proves popular, we’ll continue it in June – DN.)

What to do on your bike now that National Bike Week is over? Los Angeles’ Bike Community is an all year round, non-stop sprawling cement roadways of FUN! I am starting a new weekly blog to inform you of the whats and the happenings you can do on two wheels.

Monday nights on the East Side, if you think you have what it takes to go up with the best of the best than Wolfpack Hustle  is who you should be mashing your legs with. Never having missed a Monday night, roadies, fixie foos, spandex, mountain bikers, bike riders from all over the county participate in 40 plus miles of pure adrenaline rush. From Tang’s Donuts at Sunset and Fountain, you’ll find the fearless crew making their way into the valley or to the beach, through LAX, down to Watts, around downtown and back. Recommended that you bring a bike that can keep up, lots of lights, a helmet, stuffs to fix your own flat, etc., etc.

I’ve personally completed ONE. It’s doable. It’s fun. You will see parts of LA that you’ve never even heard of and experience a confidence in yourself you’ve never felt before the next morning. No doubt, it’s tough. But the payoff is priceless. BRING YOUR HUSTLE

Photo: John Prolley/Wolfpack Hustle

Wednesday night, in DTLA, Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition aka LACBC, will be hosting BIKE SAFE: California Rules of the Road. Starting at 7pm, five speakers will be presenting their insight on California’s Bicycle rules and how those affect you, what you should know, as well as your rights and responsibilities as bicyclist. Offering Healthy snacks and refreshments along with free bicycle parking, this LACBC event is free to their members, $10 for general public.  Read more…

Every year, we struggle with how best to cover Bike Week. The series of special events, culminating in Bike to Work Day, is always something to behold. But at the same time, without a small army dedicating to covering the event, how does a website such as Streetsblog give fair and equal coverage? Is The Blessing of the Bikes more important than Pasadena’s Ladies Night or just getting hug from Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster? Who knows?

So this year, we asked you to get us pictures, or video, from Bike Week and you responded. The above picture collection includes images from our own Gary Kavanagh, South L.A.’s Community Health Council, Metro and even the L.A. Times’ transportation writer, Laura Nelson (the view over the handle bars.) We couldn’t include all of the pictures, although we did our best to include at least one shot from everyone who submitted.

But even as I was uploading this video, I was getting more submissions. So in addition to hitting play, read on after the jump for even more Bike to Work imagery. Read more…

In a debate that seems oddly reminiscant of the Wilbur Bike Lanes controversy from last year, motorists in the South Bay are fuming that a new road diet is “creating traffic” for forty minutes a day and “unsafe conditions” because unsafe drivers are driving even more unsafely.

At Biking in L.A., Ted Rogers explains the controversy:

A pair of underused streets — Westmont and Capitol Drives — recently underwent reductions to calm high-speed traffic, dropping one lane in each direction and installing the typical door zone bike lanes.

And needless to say, motorists are up in arms, even though the streets are almost always empty. And even though it should be bike riders complaining about the lack of buffers between them and flinging car doors.

Meanwhile, the Neighborhood Council has asked Council Member Joe Buscaino’s office to investigate the congestion “caused” by the diet. Apparently the video of Buscaino driving around the area letting everyone know thing’s are o.k. isn’t doing the trick. Not that we should pick on his office for the try, it’s hard to imagine either former Valley Councilman Greig Smith or current Councilman Mitch Englander doing the same.

Tonight, those opposing the lanes plan a scripted media event at 4 pm to draw attention to, I’m not sure what they think they’re going to draw attention to. Meanwhile, a group of local cyclists is planning a short ride up and down the lanes during the protest, so that any media that happen upon the scene can that there are many people who find the lanes safe and important.

If you ride in the San Pedro area, you’re strongly encouraged to meet at the Albertson’s parking lot a tWestmont Drive and S. Western Ave at 3:45 pm this afternoon.

Research has shown that women are more comfortable biking on protected bike lanes, but the male-dominated engineering profession has discouraged this type of street design. Photo copyright Dmitry Gudkov

A study published in this month’s American Journal of Public Health finds that highly influential transportation engineers relied on shoddy research to defend policies that discourage the development of protected bike lanes in the U.S. In their paper, the researchers point out that male-dominated engineering panels have repeatedly torpedoed street designs that have greater appeal to female cyclists.

The research team, led by Harvard public health researcher Anne Lusk, examines four engineering guides published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials between 1974 and 1999. All of these guides, treated like gospel by engineers across the country, either discourage or offer no advice about protected bike lanes, despite the fact that research has shown that women, in particular, are much more likely to bike given facilities that provide some separation from vehicle traffic.

Lusk found that many of AASHTO’s official claims regarding the purported safety problems of protected bike lanes were offered without supporting evidence. AASHTO refused to consider data demonstrating the proven safety record of protected bike lanes outside of the United States. And since there have been almost no protected bike lanes in the U.S. until quite recently, AASHTO based its position against protected bikeways on domestic street designs like sidewalk bikeways, not real bike lanes designed specifically to integrate physically protected bicycling into the roadway.

The researchers came to this rather damning conclusion: “State-adopted recommendations against cycle tracks, primarily the recommendations of AASHTO, are not explicitly based on rigorous and up-to-date research.”

Lusk and her team carried out a safety study of their own, examining crash reports on protected bike lanes in 19 U.S. cities. They found that protected bike lanes had a collision rate of about 2.3 per million kilometers biked — lower than the crash rates other researchers have observed on streets without any bike lanes. (Those rates vary from 3.75 to 54 crashes per million kilometers.)

Lusk’s research also suggests the lack of gender balance in the engineering profession may have contributed to the resistance to protected bike infrastructure. Researchers found that in 1991 and 1999, AASHTO’s Bikeway Planning Criteria and Guidelines were written by a committee made up of 91 and 97 percent men, respectively.

“The AASHTO recommendations may have been influenced by the predominantly male composition (more than 90%) of the report’s authors,” Lusk writes.

Read more…

TTI may try to paint a picture of ever-worsening congestion, but their own data show that reduced VMT is having a positive impact. Image: TTI

There’s so much to unpack in the landmark report released by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group earlier this week on transportation trends. Tuesday, we focused on the disparity between government transportation forecasts and recent realities. We also took a look at a few reasons to believe that the millennial generation – those aged 13 to 30 right now — will continue to drive less than previous generations. One of those reasons is that technology has reduced our need to drive in many different ways.

The report also makes clear the need to recalibrate our strategies around congestion. When roads get congested, calls for highway expansion grow to a deafening pitch. The reality that transit and road pricing are better solutions for congestion don’t compute amid the panic.

The most recent Texas Transportation Institute congestion report came out under the headline, “As Traffic Jams Worsen, Commuters Allowing Extra Time for Urgent Trips.” Lots of doom-and-gloom language when what they really mean is that congestion is easing.

That’s right. Reduced congestion has been one of many benefits of the reduction in miles driven over the past eight years. As of 2011 – the latest year for which data is available – congestion was about as light as it was in 1998. And it had been down at that level for four years. The annual toll on car commuters went from 43.1 hours of delay to 42 hours in 2007 and then dipped way down to 37.6 – and stayed there for the next three years. In 2011 it inched up by less than half an hour to 38.0 [PDF].

So where is all this “urgency” about “worsening” congestion coming from?

Read more…

• Bus Stop at Mental Health Center Could Be Literal Life Saver (Daily News)
• Los Angeles “Grows Up” (WWLA)
• Will Connector Mess with Acoustics for Disney Hall? (LAT)
• Scaled Back Design Approved for Santa Monica Esplande (Daily Press via Curbed)
• Ridership Growing on Orange Line, Zev Is Happy (ZevWeb)
• Waxman Upset About Pace of 405 Construction, Still Totally Worth It (Malibu Times)
• More Poor Living in Suburbs Than Cities (LAT)
• Polls Show Race Is Garcetti’s to Lose (LAT)
• Campaigning on Parks Record Is a “Dismal Joke” for Garcetti or Greuel (City Watch)
• Gas Prices Drop in SoCal (Daily News)
• Daily Carnage: Big Rig Hits Cyclist, 15th Bike Fatality in L.A. County This Year (Biking in L.A.)

A typical pit stop on the Westside

Don’t get me wrong.

I love Bike to Work Day. I had a blast yesterday trying to hit as many Westside pit stops as I could before making my way back to my home office to get down to work.

Which isn’t exactly the point, I know.

The idea is to encourage people who would otherwise drive to their places of employment to try bicycling by providing incentives and information, in the hope that once they try it, they’ll like it. And hopefully, keep doing it.

I get that.

And I enjoyed the opportunity to partake in a free rolling breakfast and gather up mini-Clif Bars and other assorted bike swag, while talking with other riders I might not otherwise meet on the roadway. As well as offering my insights to anyone looking for a little advice on bike commuting while, sadly, finding no takers.

Everyone I met seemed to know as much about the subject as I do.

Which is part of the problem.

As with many bike advocacy efforts, we too often find ourselves preaching to the choir; rewarding those who already ride rather than getting more people to leave their cars behind, if only for one day.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Bicycling, and bicyclists, should be celebrated.

Whether or not some impatient drivers, or even the wider community at large chooses to acknowledge it at times — particularly when it involves removing a traffic lane in order to carve out a little space for those of us on two wheels. Read more…

Isaiah (center) speaks with Malcolm Carson (L), Tafarai Bayne (R) and Andres Ramirez (far right) at a bike-to-work-day pit stop sponsored by Community Health Councils and TRUST South L.A. Sahra Sulaiman/LA Streetsblog

Stop any cyclist in South L.A. and ask them their thoughts on bike-to-work day and I can almost guarantee you’ll get a snort, a dismissive hand wave, and an, “Aw, man, I do this every day!”

It certainly describes the reaction I got from most people I spoke with who were riding in the area yesterday. And, it describes a lot of the reactions we got while handing out snacks, maps, and patch kits to commuters heading home on their bikes last night at the corner of Vermont Ave. and Martin Luther King Blvd. in South L.A.

So used to their daily ride were the commuters, in fact, Andres Ramirez and Malcolm Carson of Community Health Councils (CHC) — sponsors of the bike-to-work-day pit stop along with TRUST South L.A. — often found themselves chasing after cyclists and trying to convince them to stop, sometimes without luck.

Andres Ramirez (CHC) points to where new lanes will be along MLK Blvd. to a flower vendor on a bike. Sahra Sulaiman/LA Streetsblog

“It’s FREE!” usually did the trick.

Once they managed to get them to stop, it was the cyclists’ turn to be curious about what we were doing there.

“So, bike-to-work-day is…um…it’s a thing?” a puzzled Isaiah asked, pulling out his calendar.

He regularly rides his bike or the bus between his home in Hyde Park and the south edge of downtown, where he works.

We tried explaining it was a once-a-year thing to encourage people to try cycling.

“Oh,” he said, putting his calendar back in his backpack.

He was suddenly more interested in the “Every Lane is a Bike Lane” bumper sticker.

Malcolm Carson (CHC) speaks with a woman taking her son out to run some errands at a Bike-to-Work-Day pit stop. Sahra Sulaiman/LA Streetsblog

“Can I put this on my bag?” he asked excitedly.

He was tired of people harassing him as he rode along MLK Blvd, he said. Especially because there wasn’t really anywhere else he could ride — he’d recently been cited for riding on the sidewalk near Crenshaw.

“I’ve seen these big billboards saying I can use the lane,” he said, “but people still honk at me to get out of the road.”

He was glad to hear that bike lanes were going in along MLK. Maybe he’d finally be able to ride in peace.

Yes, cars don’t respect cyclists at all, agreed a bicycle flower vendor (above). More lanes were definitely needed in the area.

Even with lanes, one woman (left) with her adorable son in tow wasn’t sure she’d feel safe enough to get in the road.

“My husband rides on the road,” she said. “But I stay on the sidewalks. It’s much safer that way.”

* * * * * *

"This is my car!" Moammar said, patting the handlebars of his bike. We caught him on his way home to Culver City after apartment hunting south of USC. Sahra Sulaiman/LA Streetsblog

We did meet a few people who were cycling by choice. Read more…

Walk Score's heat map Bike Score of Santa Monica gives an 83/100

Santa Monica was just awarded a bump in it’s Bicycle Friendly Community (BFC) classification by the League of American Bicycling, from bronze to silver. Coinciding with that news the walkability web application Walk Score released a new round of Bike Score rankings which now includes Santa Monica, which received an average score of 82.5 (rounded up to 83), high enough to come 5th in analyzed cities. Now there are probably few people more excited than myself about the real progress being made toward normalizing bicycling in Santa Monica, but I feel compelled to maintain some skepticism toward popular systems of classification for bicycle friendliness.

Relative to other cities ranked in the LAB system, the sliver may be an appropriate and deserved award, but about that bike score putting us in the same league as the platinum awarded cities of Davis,CA and Boulder, CO, I think it’s a little early to pop the champagne bottles just yet. Some e-mail blasts, Facebook shares, and a locals news post have already circulating touting Santa Monica ranking #5 on Bike Score, so I think it’s worth putting this in some needed context.

The first and most obvious issue here is cities are not all alike, and trying to compare them as such often ends up as in exercise in trying to put square blocks in round holes. Santa Monica has a higher score overall than Portland, OR, but Santa Monica is a small city boxed in by the city of Los Angeles in the patchwork of municipalities that form L.A. county. Our score covers a smaller foot print without any isolated sprawl or hilly regions. So while the core of Portland actually scores higher, the number that spits out for each city includes in some cases very disparate areas like steep hillside homes that are tanked with topography penalties in the Bike Score methodology. Even among cities more approximate to each other, comparing averages will always leave out important details.

What is bicycle friendly or bikability, is inherently subjective, and can mean very different things for different people. What’s bikable enough for me is not good enough for many others. We should be asking bikeability for whom? Are we making it accessible for all who wish to, or just certain groups. Do parents feel comfortable allowing their kids to bike to school? At what age? Are facilities only accessible to certain neighborhoods and not other? Are political, social, racial, gender or economic inequities or other differences apparent in where a city makes investment in improving bicycling conditions or who feels they can ride? These questions and many others are critically important, but nuanced and defy simplistic efforts to rank a city as a whole or comparing one city to another. Read more…