Bicycling

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.

(Following this weekend' high profile crash and fatality at Critical Mass, there's bound to be some discussion of fixed gears, "brakeless bikes" and helmet usage. Here at Streetsblog, we don't want to run away from the controversy or try and tell you how to think so we decided to run a series on the issue(s) raised by the events of the last 96 hours. If you would like to chime in, feel free to do so in the comments section, or if you are interested in publishing your own op/ed, drop me an email at damien@streetsblog.org - DN) 

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.

In 2011, the City of Los Angeles passed a new Bike Plan which included a  “5 year bike network implementation plan.” The implementation plan focued on a handful of “core” areas to focus the bulk of the new bike facilities. One of those areas is Downtown Los Angeles. A year and a half later, checks in on how Downtown Los Angeles has changed in the past year and a half and what is in store in the coming years.

More good bike news from the California legislature this week: The extensive and costly environmental reviews required for on-street bike lanes would be streamlined under a bill approved unanimously by the State Assembly on Monday. The bill, AB 2245, would relieve planners of needing to conduct environmental impact reports (EIRs) for bike lane projects, which are required under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The bill is expected to be signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown next month.