Glen Primm, the author of Postcards from L.A. and a professional photographer in his own right, is the winner of the Spring Street Green Buffered Bike Lane photo contest. Grimm's piece is actually the masthead of said blog, and it earned $300 more than the next closest picture at Saturday night's fundraiser.
I asked Glen to send some thoughts, including how he took the picture. They are available after the jump, and his Streetsblog prize bag is in the mail.
I'm a native Los Angeleno and a car nut, but I like bikes and think cyclists deserve respect and room to ride, so I was actually pretty excited when they announced the lanes for downtown. For years commuters have been using Spring and Main streets as extensions of the freeways and blasting through downtown at crazy speeds. That might have been OK ten years ago when downtown was basically empty, but we have upwards of 40,000 residents downtown now, many with children, and a heck of a lot of them use bicycles. A perfect setup for bad news, any way you look at it. The bike lanes funnel the cars, which slows them down, and as time as gone by, it seems that car commuters have learned that our downtown streets are no longer a speedway, and the volume of traffic is much less.
The day after the fresh paint signs were removed, I was standing on the curb waiting for the first bicyclist I saw to come by. When he did, I took a series of images, then stitched them using Photoshop. I wanted to capture the effect of freedom and movement that comes when you have your own private right-of-way.
Personally, I really like the look of the shade of green paint the Bureau of Streets uses. Sadly, it's fading - who knows why - as the paint used for crosswalks and center stripes seems to stand up pretty well over the years. Perhaps they need to find a way to inject the paint into the asphalt for real permanency.
Cheers,
Glenn Primm
