LADOT: Several Obstacles Lie in Way of Bike Sharing for L.A.

This Friday, as part of their Big Bikes Meeting Volume 2, the Council will consider whether or not to ask LADOT to begin soliciting proposals to bring bike sharing to Los Angeles.  However, based in part on testimony delivered when Chairwoman Greuel first brought up bike sharing, there’s a few obstacles mentioned in the LADOT report that the city would need to overcome before bike sharing could be succesful in LA.

The largest obstacle?  The city’s disjointed bicycle network.

While the City is in the process of updating its Bicycle plan and the development of a bikeway network, the City still lacks a continuous network to accommodate bicycle use for the bike sharing program.

This simple statement seems to be both a blunt assesment of the city’s failure to bring provide comprehensive infrastructure for cyclists, but also bit of bar raising for the Bike Master Plan currently being developed by the city and Alta Planning.

The incomplete bike network isn’t the only challenge facing bike sharing.  The report also details the difficulty in placing the new resources, the revenue stream needed to get the program off the ground and the discrepency between insurance requirements involving helmut usage and California State Law.

It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out this Friday.  Chairwoman Wendy Greuel has been a proponent of bike sharing since she saw the transformative effect a well-run system could have at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.  However, Transportation Committee Vice-Chair Tom LaBonge has stated in the past that Los Angeles should invest in other bike priorities before moving forward with bike sharing.

Photo: Los Angeles Streetsblog