Bicycling

Last month, when Clarence Eckerson was in town for the Street Summit, he asked me what Streetfilm he ought to shoot besides his coverage of Janette Sadik-Khan's speech and the Summit itself.  For me, the answer was simple.  Long Beach.

Over the weekend, the L.A. Eco-Village blog wrote about new bike lanes appearing over a 1.6 mile stretch of Hoover Street in South L.A. between 98th and 120th street.  A day later, the LADOT's Bike Blog picked up its own story about the lanes, noting that Hoover doesn't just have bike lanes, but underwent a road diet, narrowing the car travel lanes from four to two.

This week's Transportation Committee hearing doesn't have all of the agenda items that we hoped to see, but does have an interesting one concerning use of Measure R funds to widen a road in the San Fernando Valley.  Along with a report on the Wilshire Bus-Only program and one directing LADOT and City Planning to move on Bike Corrals, this item is a highlight on an unusually small committee agenda.

Since L.A. Streetsblog started publishing twenty-six months ago, we've seen a boom in bike advocacy.  Joining the LACBC; C.I.C.L.E. began doing more advocacy work, the Bike Writer's Collective began pushing the Cyclists Bill of Rights to Neighborhood Councils and the City Council, the Bike Working Group decided to write their own Bike Plan, and more recently two groups have formed to, amongst other things, endorse candidates and ballot measures that promote bicycle friendliness in a way that a 501(c)3 cannot.

Last month, when Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson was in town for the Street Summit, we were talking about the great work going on in Long Beach.  He commented that it would make a great Streetfilm showing that there can be great work going on in Southern California in the realm of Livable Streets and Bike-Friendliness.  I commented that there's a lot of great stuff going on in places such as Pasadena, Glendale, and Santa Monica.  Eckerson was nice enough not to argue with me on the spot, it's clear that Southern California is lagging behind the rest of the country when it comes to creating bicycling friendly cities.

A month ago, I had a few ideas about how Long Beach could go about improving its budding network of numbered bikeways. As it turned out, a few of the suggestions I made are slowly beginning to appear on the street lights and signposts of Long Beach. Is this a happy coincidence, or has the City of Long Beach drawn some inspiration from the pages of Streetsblog?

While we were down in Washington, DC for the National Bike Summit, Streetfilms got the chance to check out some of the innovative bike infrastructure.

I have to admit.  When I was told last week that LADOT had opened the "LADOT Bike Blog" I assumed it was a joke.  After the creation of the Michelle Meowery twitter feed at the end of last year, and knowing how easy it is to open a wordpress blog; I assumed this was going to be another chance for everyone to get a laugh at LADOT Bikeways.

Due to Los Angeles City Council leadership and community advocacy, bike corrals may soon be coming to Los Angeles. The April 14th meeting of the city's  Transportation Committee is scheduled to hear a council motion on implementation of a pilot corral in Northeast Los Angeles. Here's the backstory on how that came to pass.