Bicycling

For months, cyclist and writerRoger Rudick rides down the 1st Street Buffered Bike Lane. Often, Rudick stops near LAPD headquarters and snaps a picture of a police cruiser parked in the bicycle lane. Rudick would then send it to a sympathetic ear in the department, be it Sgt. David Krumer or Officer Jeff Kievit. After the complaints were too numerous to be written off as the work of a few rogue scofflaws, the LAPD revealed their internal strategy for informing officers that parking in a bicycle lane is not only unsafe, it's illegal.

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.

In the first post of this two part series, I laid out some of where we are in Santa Monica with regards to bicycling, and my belief that we are a regional leader even if Long Beach has silver and we remain ranked bronze. However a lot remains to be done if we are to make bicycling truly accessible in Santa Monica, and as promised, in this second part I'll outline some specific strategies and milestones that may be useful in guiding the next few years.

It is a pester in all business districts alike, from Retro Row to East Village Arts District: bicyclists on the sidewalk. The concern is not just annoyance; there are clearly safety issues at hand.

This weekend, Santa Monica Bike Center, the largest bike parking facility in the country, celebrated its one year birthday.

A recent report by Cullen McCormick uses a road diet in Northeast Los Angeles as a case study to examine the economic impacts of reducing mixed-use travel lanes and increasing bicycle lanes. Despite the traditional opposition of local businesses when diets are proposed in front of their stores, McCormick's case study finds there was little difference in the hyper local economies after a portion of York Boulevard underwent a road diet in 2006.

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.

Leah Missbach Day, co-founder of World Bicycle Relief and the keynote speaker to inaugurate the Women's Bicycling Summit, was very succinct with her main point about a bike:

Last year, Wolfpack Hustle stole the show, and many of the headlines, from the doomsayers that predicted Carmageddon when Caltrans had to temporarily close less than ten miles of freeway connecting the Westside of Los Angeles to the Valley. How did they do it? The bicycling team raced an airplane from Burbank to Long Beach and won.