Gary Kavanagh

Over the weekend the Santa Monica Bike Center was covered in the Los Angeles Times, which some of you may have read in the "Today's Headlines" roundup from yesterday. The article by Matt Stevens offers  a great snapshot of what the facility is and what it does. Importantly the Times covering Bike Center gets broadcasts what they're doing to a gigantic audience. Local advocacy group and LACBC chapter Santa Monica Spoke also got a big shout out for kicking off the momentum for bike policy in the city over the past couple of years.

With the local campaign heating up in Santa Monica, so too is the rhetoric of competing visions for the future of the city.

After a morning of chasing Endeavour through Inglewood on Saturday, I came back home to catch the TEDx Santa Monica talk on the subject of “City 2.0.” The event was hosted at the new Cross Campus collaborative working spaceon Broadway. It was a fitting site for talking about new urban ideas, as collaborative studio spaces for independent freelancers and small businesses, like Cross Campus, are an emerging urban trend that is becoming popular in Santa Monica.

New public parking rates went into effect this past week in Santa Monica, and despite hemming, hawing, and many letters to the editor leading up to this moment, the world did not end. Parking rates went up at most parking garages and street meters in the downtown core. However, some parking rates at frequently underutilized garages, like the underground lot at the Santa Monica main branch library downtown and the Civic Center Structure, were dropped. Of course the headlines leading up to parking-rate-mageddon trumpeted the rate increases and buried the decreases to brief glossed over mentions later in the articles.

There were some fears that the second coming of “Carmageddon”, a full closure of the 405 between the I-10 and the I-101, might really bring the disastrous traffic jams that were imagined but never materialized the last time around. By all accounts, traffic was no worse this weekend in Santa Monica and the Westside than any typical sunning idyllic weekend. Sam Morrissey, City Traffic Engineer for the city of Santa Monica reported “Santa Monica calmer than a usual sunny Saturday. No real traffic impacts.” If UCLA's research last time was any indication, the air was dramatically cleaner.

One of the things that always gives me some hope that our civilization hasn’t completely lost it’s way, is watching the "Bike It! Walk It!" Day event grow and develop in recent years. The next Bike It Walk It is next week, on either October 3rd or 5th (more details below). For those not familiar with the event, getting to school by foot, bike (or occasional skateboard or scooter) is promoted in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, with accompanying perks including snacks, drink and additional bike parking.

In order for our society to tackle the challenge of creating a more walkable and bikeable North America, with the appropriate devotion of money, resources and public space, we have to build a solid political consensus. Unfortunately, some of the compelling reasons to prioritize active transportation have been unnecessarily politicized into partisan issues. We can approach this dilemma by attempting to trek up the hill of overturning deeply imbedded political opinions, or we can find universal common ground and build up from there.

Preceding the start of the Pro-Walk/Pro-Bike/Pro-Place conference this week, the Congress for the New Urbanism met at the Renaissance Hotel across from the Long Beach Convention Center to convene their annual CNU Transportation Summit. At the summit, CNU develops its transportation agenda, including new and existing projects. Having caught the new urbanist bug in Florida at CNU 20, I was eager to have another opportunity to both learn and contribute to their dialogue.

Heading into the Pro Walk/Pro Bike Conference this week, I thought now would be a good time to address the tension and opportunities that exists between bicycling and walking in the city of Santa Monica. For locals, occasional but regular conflicts between walkers and bike riders is hard to miss. Rarely does a week goes by that there isn’t a letter to editor in one of the local papers from a pedestrian on foot irate about someone rushing past them on a bike, or a bike rider furious after falling or nearly doing so from avoiding someone walking into their path at the beach with little chance to respond.

This week Santa Monica planner Lucy Dyke, the city’s Deputy Director for Special Projects (a.k.a. the person in charge of making bike stuff happen) presented to the city planning commission an update on the status of implementation of the Bike Action Plan. Although most of the progress outlined was highlighting projects I’ve seen or experienced firsthand, such as the bike lane essentially to my front door on 14th Street, it was helpful to see all of the projects laid out in one place. Some new snap shots of ridership gains and other kinds of data were reported as well.