Today’s Headlines

  • More Small Cuts To Metro Bus Service (The Source)
  • James Rojas Remembers DTLA’s Broadway Before Gentrification (LAT)
  • Federal FAST Transportation Bucks Go To L.A. Highways & Rail (Pasadena Star News)
  • Using Clever Comedy To Think Differently About Traffic Congestion (Medium)
  • Watch 1946 Video To See What L.A.’s Ped Traffic Looked Like (Curbed)
  • Los Angeles Is Really A Great Place To Walk (Daily Beast)
  • Artists Can Not Afford L.A.’s Arts District (LAT)
  • Bicycling Increases To Five Percent Of Transportation Trips In SM (Santa Monica Lookout)
  • WeHo Plans To Test Traffic Calming (WeHoVille)
  • City Of Indian Wells Loses Lawsuit Over Unsafe Road For Bicycling (SSTI)
  • Left And Right Both Oppose Restrictive Zoning, Planners Like It (Washington Post)
  • Study: U.S. Teens Exercise An Average Of 29 Minutes/Day (LAT)

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Get State Headlines At Streetsblog CA

  • Chewie

    Not all planners like zoning as it has been traditionally used to separate land uses and mandate low-density car-oriented development. However, there are a lot of planners who get paid very decent sums of money to carry out such zoning schemes. How to change that is a question I think about quite a bit.

  • There’s a lot of far-reaching underlying implications to the Indian Wells case. To start, the City used a horrible defense and really sets a bad precedent for bicyclist rights to use roads. They should’ve argued that the bicyclist was legally occupying the lane per CVC 21202 and that the driver violated multiple codes by hitting him, not that the bicyclist “shouldn’t be there”. With goals to increase bicycling well underway, the last thing we need is a large campaign to keep bicyclists off roads that are “unsafe”, especially since alternate infrastructure is not adequate in the majority of the state.

    Another huge issue is that a big part of the family’s lawyer’s argument rested on the lanes being less than 15 feet wide. Considering that livability, safety, active transportation, and others who advocate for traffic safety are trying to get cities to go down from 12 foot lanes to 10, a lawsuit stating that lanes narrower than 15 feet are too narrow is extremely problematic, especially considering how risk-averse CA engineers like to be.

    This judgement deserves to be watched very closely moving forward. It can blow up and backfire.

  • Regarding the 10 ft. lanes, isn’t it a “given” that the reduced lane widths refer to inner lanes, and that the real issue in Indian Wells was the lack of a wide outside lane?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_outside_lane

  • I didn’t read the actual decision, just the Desert Sun article, so maybe the argument was only about the outside lane. Still, a 15 foot outside lane does not interest me and I usually will control them anyway as they just aren’t wide enough to safely share. While a bike and motor vehicle can technically fit side-by-side in one, it requires the bicyclist to basically (or literally) be in the gutter. That is unacceptable.