Bicycling

The Alliance for Bicycling recently set  the dates and locations for six "Winning Campaigns" trainings it plans on hosting in 2010, which include the following:

First Lady Michelle Obama took to the mikes this afternoon to kick off a national campaign to combat childhood obesity, emphasizing new initiatives to promote biking and walking alongside a strong focus on healthier food options in schools.

Last week, the LA Bike Working Group began to release parts of "L.A.'s Best Bike Plan" in the form of the Backbone Bikeway Network maps and started a new conversation about the state of bike planning in Los Angeles.  The maps, first published on three members of the steering committee's blogs, moved to LAist and then on to the mainstream media.

I was waiting to write about "L.A.'s Best Bike Plan's" Bike Backbone Network that's was slowly rolled out over the last week until all three maps were public.  In the meantime, the Los Angeles Times and KPCC have picked up on part of the story, getting some of the major details wrong.  The Bike Backbone Network was never about building a lot of new bike infrastructure, it was about declaring the streets that make up the Backbone as the main thorofares for cyclists to commute and move around town.  But much more on that tomorrow...

A new presentation on the causes and severity of bicycle crashes, available here after being hand-scanned by Enci Box, has been made available and analyzed at Westside Bikeside by Dr Alex Thompson. Amongst the results is the above chart showing that nearly one quarter of the reported bicycle crashes in the City of Los Angeles in 2008 were also "hit and runs." While this number is high, the news gets worse; these are just the ones that are reported and recorded. We've already seen that sometimes hit and run crashes involving cyclists aren't taken seriously, and other times the police report is just poorly done. However, as Thomspon notes, just getting our hands on these statistics is a step forward in the relationship between cyclists and the LAPD.

Here at LA Streetsblog, we spend a lot of time looking at some of the bicycle and pedestrian designs from around the world and going "why not us?"  Budapest.  Copehnagen.  Beijing.  Heck, even Tempe and Baltimore are doing better when it comes to supporting cyclists.

For the second time in three months, a national coalition of bicycling and pedestrian advocates took a look at how federal funds are being spent on projects designed to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe as they move themselves from one place to another.  For the second time in three months, Los Angeles was shown to be well behind the curve when it comes to spending money on "non-motorized transportation" as the state likes to call it, or "people powered movement" as those that transport themselves do.

Maybe the Whittier Daily News and other newspapers that syndicate Officer Al Perez's column, "Ask a Cop," ought to consider changing the name to something else.  Maybe "Ask a Cop, but not about bicycle laws."  Or, "Ask a cop, but be prepared to do your own fact checking."

(editor's note - Local coverage tomorrow. - DN)