You can check it out (from 2006-2007)
http://www.ladot.lacity.org/pdf/PDF8.pdf

"8 miles of bike lanes" ... ooh wow.
"Partcipated in Bike to Work Day"

Nothing in there about how many fatalities and injuries their plans prevented, is there? No air quality reduction goals met or missed? These clowns aren't answerable to anyone, it seems.

Any savings realized from this exercise would not impact the City's General fund.

I spoke to Rita Robinson yesterday. I spoke to the Mayor's office yesterday.

These are crazy times at City Hall and for everybody in the City of LA.

At the same time, perhaps this is a good time to ask LADOT Bikeways "What have you done for me lately?"

Bikeways improvements, Bike Racks, Bike Plan, Bikeways Dept. Priorities.

I asked in January for a list of last years accomplishments, of LA's Bikeways assets and of the goals for this year. Crickets chirped.

If we're gonna partner with a department, surely we should know their goals and their accomplishments!

If anyone in City Hall would like to sit down with us (or even just me), I'd be glad to help them figure out what special funds to pull from to preserve a project budget for bicycles in LA.

What we need is the mayor to become a champion for our cause in city hall. In New York, they've got the mayor and their DOT head Jannette Sadik-Kahn. In Chicago, they've got Mayor Daly and his chief of staff.

If we do a ride, I would recommend that we find a way to make this a political priority for the mayor. That is my opinion (though I'm willing to change it).

Enough lip service from city bureaucrats! They have just been stringing everyone along. There have been no significant changes! Missing money and delayed plans with no results. We have played by their rules – with ZERO results.

WE ARE STRONG – They have not stopped the rides, organizing, and blogs.
Let’s show our strength in the streets. We have seen the Million Man March in 1995, we seen hands across America in 1986, we seen the massive May Day rally in 2006.

Now it’s our time to draw attention!
Lets ride, safely in numbers. Let’s take critical mass into a new level for the WORLD to witness!
Let’s plan and execute – who’s in! No contaban con mi astucia!

Else, let us make Transportation Demand Management (TDM) the center of DOT, a management of resources, and let them devise strategies how to get people out of cars. They run already a few big bus companies.
Let them put their parking spaces on the free market, but not without a commitment to TDM. The council would set goals of de-motorisation (x % of all trips under x miles not by car etc) and DOT would have a decent mission to accomplish. Put the green party out of work and get on with it. Of course Public Health would suddenly find entirely new ways to work with cycling folks of LADOT.
Then the bicycle work could really fly. DOT mission would include bike encouragement, it would include bike education, and it would commit the city to recognize and advertise the limits of car use. Metro would follow suite and their Call for Projects would no longer ban bike encouragement and education, excluded as "Marketing". And each mile cycled could suddenly count towards the carbon reductions required by SB 375.
Who cares for the bikeways section if we can go for the big prize! Can we?

"...has dedicated himself to developing viable and convenient alternatives to driving... " This is Mayor Villaraigosa in the 2009 DOT Transportation Profile, the very first sentence, no less. The words are on the page. Something to work with, at least.

As for LADOT, I really couldn't care less if the Bikeways department lives or dies, as long as it doesn't mean the end of bicycle projects and planning in Los Angeles. It's not like they were actually doing anything. If we can arrange an alternative, as Ubrayj suggests, let it die. If not, let's fight to turn it into something worthwhile, even if that means the existing staff has got to go — starting with the jackass who suggested cutting the damn thing to begin with.

And there are sharrows in L.A., on the UCLA campus. To the best of my knowledge, no cyclist has ever been injured and sued the university because they made the sharrows with the wrong kind of paint, despite Mowery's concerns to the contrary.

"Here in L.A. we need solutions that go beyond the zero-sum game of wider streets, synchronized lights, and left-turn signals. Let’s create projects that allow the city to be knitted together in a new and novel way."
by Aaron Paley, President » Community Arts Resources
http://www.lamag.com/article.aspx?id=15654

There's got to be a way to have our communities reflective and inclusive of us all and our happiness and safety - our old school leaders just aren't the ones to guide us there - we are.

The planning department should absorb the transportation planning functions of the City, and the LADOT's grant writers should work within the Planning Department - which is responsible for an over-arching vision of our city's future anyway. We have no long range transportation plans - what good is the LADOT when they've had decades to get it right, but have instead been fighting to remove crosswalks and kill more bikes and let drivers get away with it.

Seeing Michelle Mowery in City Council the other day next to the LAPD dude, and to have her stating that bike riders run stop signs when questioned about an H3 being used as a weapon in DTLA ... I mean, why do we need this person representing us to City Hall? She's more of an impediment to progress than anything else. We need a politically savvy, empowered (by the mayor's office) advocate for bikes in LA. LADOT's paper shuffler for bikes isn't what is going to get it done.

There are a bunch of options we, as cyclists, could offer up to a City Hall that will honestly try and find a way to soothe us in the face of Bikeways being eliminated. Give us a Bureau head who is a bike-planning nut, give us a mayoral deputy who puts the funding and people together to produce transportation reform to support bikes.

Saving the Bikeways Division is a phyrric victory - we get nuthin out of the fight.

I'm only sad that the other options I've listed above would need a broader consensus among cyclists and our own paid lobbyists to be faithfully considered in City Hall and the Mayor's office.

meh..... It just all seems like a lost cause. I was happy to see that people came out to talk against the cutting of funding but what's it really going to do when you have people in the LADOT and not even the bike person seems like she wants bicycle infrastucture... I think they see all the recent bike activity as a fad.. this city is just doomed.

I was actually reading the LACBC Action Alert when the earthquake struck last night, and I honestly don't know which experience was more stomach-churning.

Any department that can honestly claim that they can't start a sharrows project because they don't know what kind of paint to use has pretty well demonstrated their uselessness.

But Damien is right, getting rid of it would mean starting at less than zero. It would take years, if ever, before it was restarted or replaced. What we need is for someone on the council to step forward and kick some budgetary ass by threatening LADOT's entire budget unless they have a real, empowered bikeways department that can actually get things done.

Given the massive incompetence of LA city govt when it comes to transportation, I think benign neglect is the best outcome we can reasonably expect.

I would welcome the elimination of the bikeways dept, personally.

Don't worry, today is just round one of the budget battle for LADOT. We'll have plenty of chances to weigh in at committee hearings and such

@ Angle, Ubrayj

I know I'm going to take some flack for this, SoapBox I'm sure will have words for this, but unless there's a plan to replace Bikeways with something at Planning, I see this as a huge setback. Bikeways can be more than frustrating at times, but if they're gone completely all that will remain are the traffic engineers and bureaucrats. Not a recipe to get anything done.

I write Streetsblog and do my own advocacy because I believe people and circumstances can change. But without a Bikeways division at LADOT we're going to have a heavier lift, because if we manage to convince enough people to see things our way; we'll have to bring a division back before we can get some real planning.

Beat me to it!

There are other agencies that can fulfill the role that LADOT Bikeways is supposed to take, and if bike projects can be better integrated into general transportation projects, I think they might have a better chance of being realized. As of now, progressive bike projects are dumped into the LADOT Bikeways black hole, and the only thing that ever comes out is a litany of excuses why they can never be accomplished.

It's possible that the loss of the LADOT Bikeways department could ultimately be a positive thing.

(2) Who cares if the LADOT bikeways people get canned? Why does the LADOT even exist except to baffle local interests and build car-only facilities? This planning function belongs in the planning department. The engineering function belongs in the Public Works Department (which already has a bikeways design section). Cut the fat! Give us planners who will see that concerns other than high-speed auto travel are worth considering.

(3) What have we gotten out of the LADOT's bikeways division anyway? $450,000 vapor trail of a bike plan? More dead cyclists and no regime of safety measurement citywide? More dead pedestrians? Oh, and the City will stop pursuing Safe Routes to School money! Oh no! But wait, the LADOT misses tens of millions in Safe Routes to School funding opportunities every year! This department fought long and hard to prevent traffic calming around elementary schools in the Valley! Fire them all and let us all say "Good riddance!" Our elected officials will have one less pasty bureacrat to hide behind when we come a knocking.