Long Beach

It is the wrong way to be advertising the use of public transportation--and to experience this egregious advert, one simply has to take the Blue Line through Long Beach. And if you're lucky, you'll only hit one or two lights as you watch individual commuters putt-putt past you while the entire Metro trains halts.

2011 marked an extraordinarily hard year for Long Beacher Danny Gamboa: cyclists seemed to be getting killed far too often. In that year alone, Southern California saw a staggering 70% increase in deaths from 2010, with 70 cyclists losing their lives in the seven-county region of SoCal alone in 2011.

According to Cox and Phil, this homogenizes porn into "lame porn" because a stigma about something we are continually bombarded with--sexual images--prevents us from actually discussing sex or creating erotic images that supersede stereotypes.

The racial and economic disparities amongst the bicycling communities in Long Beach is not one to be understated. In fact, a friend of mine pointed this out while we were doing the cover photoshoot for the Long Beach Post's Person of the Year, the Bicyclist: "Wow, this crowd is overwhelmingly... white."

We keep getting safer here in Long Beach—and as a rather stereotypical boy whose palate leans towards danger and risk (or what my fair counterparts rightfully call stupidity), this makes me happy. And it was of no shock to me that the first ever all-female class of League Cycling Instructors (LCI) accredited by the League of American Bicyclist graduated nine women this past month from Long Beach: Jessica Alexander, Krista Leaders, Bernadette McKeever, Elizabeth Williams, Maria Sipin, Henriette Alamillo, Renee Jones, Machiko Yasuda and Nayely Limon

(Editor's Note: The Simple Art of Beautification Part I can be found here.)

Glance to the right of this article and you'll see ads geared towards bike safety. Sift through the work of this site and you'll find endless accounts of dooring, commuter frustration, measures to keep one safe, how to "properly" ride a bicycle, riding on sidewalks... The list is as exhaustive as it is important despite its seeming redundancy.

Oftentimes, we feel far too overwhelmed with the act of bettering our neighborhoods. There's a sense of futility, particularly paired with the economic crisis, that overshadows creative and innovative ways to handle even the most simplest of beautification tasks.

Marking the fifth year of bike counts at fourteen locations throughout Long Beach, data shows that ridership has increased by an astounding 70% on city streets and 45% overall.