Bicycling

Los Angeles' bicycling community has lost one its hardest-working and longest-serving advocates, Alex Baum. Alex Baum (1922-2015) was a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, a successful businessman, and a persistent champion for bicycling in Los Angeles. For decades, Baum chaired the city's Bicycle Advisory Committee, and was a tireless presence in corridors of Los Angeles City Hall, urging lawmakers to make Los Angeles a great place for bicycling.

This morning, I listened to SBLA editor Damien Newton interviewed yesterday on KFI radio's John and Ken show . Frankly it made me tense to hear the level of antipathy that John and Ken express toward people who bike. Toward me. Toward my family and our safety.

The preliminary striping is down on the resurfaced mid-city stretch of Venice Boulevard that SBLA highlighted last week. The site is east of the existing Venice Blvd bike lanes, in the Los Angeles City neighborhoods of Harvard Heights, Arlington Heights, and Mid-City. 

Editor's note: The Department of Do-It-Yourself works in strange and mysterious ways. Today we run a guest post by cyclist Eric Weinstein who may or may not have been part of Dept. of DIY's westside cycling division's Lincoln Boulevard sand removal effort last week.

Last night, the Board of Directors for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition met to approve the appointment of their new executive director. This morning, via email, they introduced the bicycling community to their new leader, Tamika Butler.

The 5-city San Gabriel Valley regional bike plan is currently making its way through a complicated series of city approvals. Two important bike plan hearings are taking place tonight in the cities of El Monte and Monterey Park. Specific details on those hearings after the jump. Folks who live, work, bike, or breathe in the San Gabriel Valley are encouraged to attend in support of plan passage.

After a woman was hit by a bicyclist riding on a Sacramento sidewalk, she threatened the city with a lawsuit, and her attorney is pushing the city to pass one of the most restrictive bicycle licensing laws in the country.

In a motion before the Metro Executive Management Committee last Thursday morning, County Supervisor and Metro Board Member Mark Ridley-Thomas cited the successful "transformation of unused or abandoned rail right-of-ways into pedestrian access and bicycle routes" around the country and here in L.A. as support for his call that the Board direct Chief Executive Officer Art Leahy to move forward on the recommendations found in the 212-page feasibility study on the proposed Rail-to-River Bikeway.

Livability proponents celebrate that car-centric Level of Service (LOS) is finally on its way out, at least in California.Wouldn't it be great if there was a similar bike- or walk-centric metric that could be used instead? UCLA Lewis Center and Institute for Transportation Studies researchers have studied some of the published metrics for evaluating how well streets serve pedestrians and cyclists. The researchers' conclusion: in all of the bike and ped metrics they reviewed, there is no silver bullet. Moreover, adapting LOS doesn't look like a fruitful approach.