Streetsblog Los Angeles

Ruthie and Christopher man CSU's Bike Week pit stop at Menlo and MLK Blvd.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I had a hard time figuring out what time the South L.A. Bike Week Pit Stops would be up and running today. I took a gander at the pit stop map and promptly devised a route in my head so I could hit all of the South L.A. stops.

I had missed what turned out to be an epic exploration ride led by CICLE’s Dan Dabek along the Expo Line bike lane on Wednesday because I woke up feeling very sick. So, I was determined to get out and support the South L.A. organizations offering pit stops for riders on Bike-to-Work Day.

So determined was I, in fact, that I did not pay attention to the times listed that the stops would be offered. I’m sure I saw the times listed on the map (of those that were there — some were not). But I must have ignored them, assuming that bike-to-work hours would coincide most closely with the morning rush hour, i.e. the hours that people go to work.

I rode down to Community Services Unlimited’s (CSU) Expo Garden stop to find no one there. A little sleep-deprived, I came to the conclusion that perhaps I had missed it because it was now 8:30 a.m. and headed for the City Lites‘ site at 84th and Vermont.

Nothing.

The security guard looked at me like I was insane.

“Pit stop? Bicycles?” he repeated slowly, shaking his head. “I don’t think so…?”

Great, I thought. I’m 0 – 2. Either I AM actually insane or I am dumb and I got this all wrong. Read more…

Last week, I published a list of seven questions I had as the Transportation Conference Committee started meeting. I was examining the politics, not the policy. Turns out some readers wanted to hear more about the policy.

I asked the Cap’n what his questions would be. The reply:

Meanwhile, reader Ryan Richter sent in his revised list of questions too. They’re a little more specific, so I’ll start with Ryan’s. With any luck, the answers to Cap’n Transit’s questions will be woven into the answers below.

Thanks to both of you for keeping me focused on what really matters in this whole political hullabaloo.

Ryan’s first question:

1. How will public transportation fare after being practically decapitated in the last round?

Public transit came out a winner when members of the House GOP mounted their full-frontal assault against it. “The uprising was so immediate and so bipartisan [the Republicans] backed off,” said Deron Lovaas of NRDC. Democrats and some urban and suburban Republicans blew up at the idea that transit would no longer be eligible for its 20 percent of Highway Trust Fund dollars, which it’s gotten since the Fund’s Mass Transit Account was created under Ronald Reagan in 1983. Surviving an attempt against it makes transit that much stronger now – its opponents know that defunding transit is a losing issue for them.

Read more…

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blogging for a quick pep talk. Thanks to our generous and supportive readers, Streetsblog and Streetfilms are almost halfway to our goal of raising $30,000 by June 1. We’ve got two weeks left to raise $17,000 — help us reach that target so we can keep making the case for designing cities and towns around people, not cars.

Your donations directly fund the original reporting, commentary, and videos we produce – powerful content that influences the decision makers who shape our streets and the places we inhabit.

For a bit of added incentive this week, we’re giving away a new handmade messenger bag from Vaya, makers of bags and other bike accessories using recycled materials, to one lucky reader who donates by May 24 at midnight. Here’s a look:

If you value the work we do at Streetsblog and Streetfilms to advance livable streets and green transportation, please give. Thanks as always for reading.

Photo: Jim Shanman/Culver City Bike Coalition

Talk about mixed messages.

In preparation for this morning’s meeting of the Expo Bicycle Advisory Committee for Phase II, Culver City’s representative, Jim Shanman, visited the bike path for Phase I that starts at the La Cienega Station going west.  At least he thought it was for the bike path, since apparently the path is closed to bicyclists and pedestrians and e-bikes.  The bollards also close it to cars, so I guess it’s just for rollerbladers, pogo stick riders and skateboarders.

Oddly, even though Metro’s bike tour of Expo Phase I showed up just as Shanman was leaving, this picture didn’t make their write up at The Source.

We’re kidding of course.  Expo Construction Authority staff confirmed the sign is an error, most likely it got switched with a freeway entrance sign.  The sign will be replaced soon.

Major media outlets can be harsh to bicyclists — often inexplicably or irrationally harsh. Even progressive sites like Salon are not immune, as we’ve written about before.

Photo: Salon

Today Adonia Lugo at Urban Adonia points to another unexpected source of venom: the feminist blogosphere, a.k.a. ladyblogs. These bastions of tolerance and acceptance have a strange blind spot for cyclists, Lugo writes:

When the topic of bikes comes up, there’s always a mini-war in the comments between people who despise “bike hipsters” (read: entitled, privileged jerks who think they own the road) and people who actually ride bikes. Commenters trot out their most extreme stories of negative interactions they’ve had with people on bikes, sometimes concluding with things like “F#%* BIKING HIPSTERS I HOPE A BUS HITS YOU.”

These are the same websites that promote things like fat acceptance and anti-bullying campaigns. Why are bicyclists portrayed as inhuman creatures unworthy of sympathy, dismissing an incredibly diverse world of practice (bicycling) because of the stupid behavior of a few jerks? And, this is the thing that really confuses me, why do people find jerk bicyclists so harmful to society when they constantly interact with motorists who run red lights and stop signs, use infrastructure like traffic circles in dangerous ways, talk and text in the car, drive without looking from side to side when entering intersections, and engage in other dangerous behaviors that kill people every day?

I asked a few of my friends, one a bicyclist and one less inclined to the bicycling arts, what they thought about this phenomenon. Both responded that it’s because you can see a bicyclist’s face, whereas it’s easier to think of a motorist as a car. The interactions with bicyclists stick out in people’s minds, and maybe they feel more personally insulted by the face-to-face flouting of laws. I think it’s also because we’ve trained ourselves to think of driving as passing through an obstacle course rather than moving through a social space. Cars that do dumb stuff are a nuisance, but they do not interrupt the illusion until there’s an actual crash. Bodies that do dumb stuff are a threat to the idea that driving is a no harm, no foul activity. You might actually hurt someone!

Elsewhere on the Network today: Mobilizing the Region shares a story about New Jersey high school students who are fighting for 0.2 miles of sidewalk at a dangerous turn by their school. Greater Greater Washington sees parallels between the misperceptions of New York City’s bike-share plans and the days preceding the launch of Capital Bikeshare. And the Transport Politic says Dallas’s Trinity highway plan, which will parallel a new light-rail line, represents “transportation planning at its worst.”

Tomorrow morning we’ll use Storify to capture the best public media from today’s Bike to Work Day festivities.  If you have videos or pictures you want us to include, or any comments on the best and worst pit stops, please leave them in the comments section and we’ll be sure to include them.  You can find a map with all the pit stops, right here.

This evening, we’re planning  a trip to Joxer’s in Culver City for a Bike from Work Party.  The LACBC has updated the list of bars and restaurants throughout the county.  The full list can be found after the jump. Read more…

• Will E-Highway Help Solve Pollution Problems Along 710? (LAT)
• Dear Courier, Now This Is an Official Response from Metro (The Source)
• High Speed Rail the Latest to Expect Legal Fast Track (LAT)
• Times’ Boulevard Series Causing a Stir (KPCC)
• Candidate Kevin James Calls for Longer Review of Farmers Field EIR (City Watch)
• L.A. E-Car Drivers Drive Longer, Charge at Off-Peak Hours (LAT)
• Caught Texting While Driving?  Fine Could Go All the Way Up to $30 (ABC7)
• Bike Week Continues with Mid-City/Expo Ride (The Source)
• Drunks!  Use This Guide to Avoid Traffic Stops and Get Where You Need to Go While Wasted (Daily News)

Cyclist turns on to new Main Street Bike Lane and Road Diet. Photo:LADOT Bike Blog

South Los Angeles has three new bike lanes. Maybe it’s the celebrations of bike week. Maybe it’s the push to meet the mayoral directive for 40 new miles of bikeway by June 30th 2012. Maybe Mayor Villaraigosa, City Councilmembers Bernard Parks and Joe Buscaino pushed hard enough. Maybe it’s just good livable streets attitudes taking hold.

Whatever the reason, The city’s Department of Transportation (LADOT) crews have been working weekends to stripe new bike lanes.

As reported by the LADOT Bike Blog and Bikas, there are three new bike lane projects implemented on South L.A. streets since mid-April.

The new Vermont Avenue northbound bike lane goes 2.1 miles from the Metro Green Line to 88th Street. According to the LADOT Bike Blog, an additional 2.2 miles of northbound Vermont Avenue bike lane are “in the works.” That near-future mileage will extend from Redondo Beach Boulevard to 120th Street. This project is only on the east side of Vermont Avenue because that side of the street is in L.A. City; the other side is in unicorporated L.A. County. Bikas explains, Read more…

Last week Salon ran a pretty horrendous piece on the future of transportation called “Oops — Wrong Future.”

Members of the Google robocar team. Photo: Inhabitat

Writer Michael Lind argued that the “case for infrastructure investment has suffered from the lack of a plausible vision of the next American infrastructure.” Things that are not “plausible,” according to Lind, include “renewable energy and mass transit.” He wrote:

The idea that the U.S. could transition quickly from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind power and solar power inspired many liberals to support artificially rigging markets in favor of renewable energy by methods like cap-and-trade and renewable energy standards that force working-class consumers, via utility, to buy expensive power from uneconomical wind, solar or biofuel sources. And for a brief moment in time, the center-left in the United States was entranced by the mirage of a continental high-speed rail system.

Okay, we’ll give you a second to consider that this was printed in one of the country’s leading, left-leaning online magazines.

“Rigging markets” is some pretty debatable rhetoric to describe renewable energy standards and cap-and-trade — a policy that is supported by the overwhelming majority of economists. (Billions of dollars in tax breaks for gas companies and subsidies for road building – some people might describe that as “rigging markets” in the opposite direction, but we digress.)

Unlike “uncritical,” “unrealistic” and “entranced” proponents of rail, Lind has a vision for the future that is very much like the present, or even the past. Brace yourself, readers: In the future, the U.S. will have an endless supply of fossil fuel thanks to “environmentally responsible” shale gas exploration. Plus, in the future, rail and bus transit of all kinds will never be able to complete with Google’s self-driving cars.

Lind is a big fan of Google robocars. He goes on about their many benefits:

Robocars may be fatal for fixed-rail transportation, at least for passengers rather than freight. Google has been test driving self-driving cars in California and Nevada has become the first state to legalize driverless vehicles. No doubt it will take several decades for safety issues and legal arrangements to be worked out. But high-speed trains might find competition in high-speed convoys of robot cars on smart highways, allowed higher speeds once human error has been eliminated. And the price advantage of subway tickets over taxi fares in cities may vanish, when the taxis drive themselves. Point-to-point travel, within cities or between them, is inherently more convenient than train or subway journeys which require changing modes of transit in the course of a journey. Thanks to robocars, much cheaper point-to-point travel everywhere may eventually be cheap enough to relegate light rail and inter-city rail to the museum, along with the horse-drawn omnibus and the trans-atlantic blimp.

What Lind — and Salon — fail to mention is that his professional interests are very much entangled with the producer of those cars.

Read more…

In advance of tomorrow’s hearing at Metro headquarters over the Westside Subway, a group called L.A. on the Move released the above video on YouTube. The video graphically illustrates their concerns. Sometimes a video is so clear that commentary from Streetsblog writers is not necessary.