Anger and Optimism Expressed Over BMP Maps

BMP Map for the Westside and Downtown

Last Friday, the city released the first piece of its Bike Master Plan when it posted the draft area maps that will make up the framework of the engineering portion of the Plan.  "Word on the street" is that the City's Planning Department , the body that is in charge of the BMP despite the widely held belief that it's the LADOT Bikeways Division, didn't want to release the plan piecemeal.

If the reaction from advocates and bloggers is any indication of the general feelings towards the plan, then the instinct to withhold wasn't a bad one.

Complaints over the maps released last week range from the content of the plan to the outreach efforts by Planning to even that the Maps were released as low resolution pdf.'s and not a more user friendly technology.  Los Angeles Bike Coalition founder Joe Linton in the comments section from Friday's story provided what was the most positive comment on the maps and it wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

That being said, most of the rest of the comments I received said that the draft plan sucks.  Eric Knutzen, of the Bike Writers Collective and Homegrown Evolution sums up a lot of the complaints:

First off I feel left out of the process, not having been allowed to see the
plan while it was in progress and before it went to LADOT (presumably to be
gutted of anything that would impede motor vehicles). 

As for what has been delivered, it all hinges on if anything substantive is
done with the streets categorized as "bicycle friendly streets". Curious that
"sharrow" is not mentioned in the description of this category and neither is
"traffic calming", two critical components of a bicycle boulevard which, I'm
guessing, is the phrase that was used in earlier drafts of this plan (at least
that's the terminology from the outreach meetings). Perhaps this will be cleared
up when we see the whole thing.

Knutzen is referring to one of the five street categories that are used in the maps.  Three of the designations, "bicycle path," "bicycle lane" and "bicycle route" are ones that are pretty common, both in L.A. and around the country.  The other two, "bicycle friendly streets" and "proposed but currently unfeasible" are unique to Los Angeles.  Knutzen is wondering whether the treatments for the "bicycle friendly streets" are going to be anything worth celebrating or a pat on the back.

Ron Milam, another founding member of the Los Angeles County Bike Coalition, looks at the network of "bicycle friendly streets" as a step in the right direction, with a caveat.

Alex Thompson, of the Bike Writer's Collective and Westside BikeSIDE wrote comments that were more critical.

Also in the Streetsblog comment section was a comment from the Bike Writer's Collective's and Bike Oven's Josef Bray-Ali who found the lack of a plan for East L.A. distressing.

Lastly, Roadblock, who's name has been in the news a lot recently found the plan hopeful although was annoyed at the presentation's poor usability:

Itried to pull it into adobe illustrator to seperate out the wishful thinking parts but its lo res flattened artwork... no dice.  Thus wishing for them to put this into google maps and allow for turning off and on proposed routes versus infeas-able routes etc... perhaps someone at the LACBC could translate this to google?

Thus far there is no formal comment from the Los Angeles County Bike Coalition, CICLE, or the Bike Advisory Committee, although I expect we'll here from some of these groups at tomorrow's meeting of the full LABAC.  In the meantime, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section or email the city at jordann.turner@lacity.org.  We'll have more on the maps and the bike plan in the coming days and weeks.