Bicycling

Despite the Monday 9am hour and the picture perfect weather, a standing-room only crowd assembled in the Metro Board Room for city of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's first Bike Summit.  Alongside Mayor Villaraigosa were Department of Transportation (LADOT) General Manager Rita Robinson, Metro CEO Art Leahy, Department of City Planning (DCP) General Manager Michael LoGrande, and  Police Department Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese sitting in for Chief Charlie Beck.

This past weekend, city of Los Angeles work crews were out scraping and putting down preliminary bike lane striping on Reseda Boulevard. The final thermoplastic striping isn't there yet, but the preliminary lines are down. The lanes extend from Devonshire Street to Parthenia Street - a total of 2 miles. Streetsblog readers will recall that these lanes were approved in 1996, but remained unimplemented until bicyclists caught city staff lying about planned peak-hour parking lanes, which would have precluded the approved bike lanes.

Showing a little bit of tech-saavy, to help reach out to the notoriously technorati sprinkled throughout L.A.'s bike scene, Mayor Villaraigosa is using Google Moderator to rank questions for the Mayor in advance of Monday's Bike Summit.  You can go directly to the web-page set up for the Summit by clicking here.

(Note: You can read full copies of the statements of everyone quoted below here.)

I just sat down to lay out Carter's piece on the RailLA exhibit Downtown and wanted to pass this on to any cyclists checking out the site this afternoon.

While the 2010 draft is, in some ways, an improvement over the disappointing 2009 draft, it's still incomplete and problematic. This article reviews the bike plan process, then begins to analyze what's in and what's missing from the 2010 draft, as released so far.

Bicycle advocate and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa took to the Internet to talk bike policy in the aftermath of this weekend's crash.  While there's nothing groundbreaking in his essay; it's nice to see our city's political leader take a stand for bicyclists. 

Well, that didn't take long.

It's a story we've heard too often.  A cyclist is riding legally down the street, when out of nowhere, blam!  For some reason, a car slams into the bicycle for reasons unknown.  The car speeds off (or the driver waits, it doesn't matter), and the bloody cyclist rises to his feet, calls 911, and for whatever reason, the police won't take a report.  The driver who caused the accident gets off free as a bird.  The cyclist is left to his own devices to take care of his own problems.