Sharrows

The 3rd District of Long Beach is home to the first Sharrow lanes in the city  on 2nd Street in Belmont Shore. Today, the 3rd is expanding its number of Sharrows as it prepares to repave Livingston Drive between 2nd Street and Termino Avenue.

The good news: the city of Los Angeles is implementing more bike lanes than ever before. From July 2011 through December 2011, the city of Los Angeles has implemented 12.5 miles of new bike lanes. This is by far the highest total for any six-month period since at least 1996, and probably the most ever. For the past decade or so, the city has averaged roughly two-to-three miles of new bike lanes every six months.

Last weekend, in an impressive display of what LADOT can do on city streets when it puts its mind to it, 4 teams of LADOT employees spread out throughout the city and placed 803 Sharrows over 20.61 miles of city streets.

When Jonathan Weiss emailed me two weeks ago announcing that Sharrows placeholders appeared on Motor Avenue, I didn't think too much of it. After all, stencils marking a place for bike racks have been on the ground next to my Big Blue Bus stop for almost five months.

Earlier this week, Joe Linton noticed that marking were appearing on mid-town streets to mark the spot where Sharrows would be placed.  Linton is one of the harshest critics of the city's attempts to jump off the Bike Plan to add Sharrows to city streets to reach the Mayor's stated promise of 40 miles of bike projects every year for the next five.

There's always a risk when an advocate is hired by a government agency.  Will the advocate "go native" and be an ineffective agent of change?  Will the advocate ever be able to shake his reputation of being "just" an advocate?

Yesterday, we featured a headline by our Joe Linton that pretty harshly criticized an LADOT Bike Blog posting from Monday about the LADOT's committment to increasing the number of Sharrows on L.A.'s streets.  We summarized Linton's post into a couple of questions and sent them on to the LADOT to get some clarification.  After all, the city is promising 20 miles of Sharrowed streets to be completed in the next year...what could be wrong with that?

Yesterday, Carter Rubin and I were in Northeast L.A. on our way to a meeting at Occidental College and we had a chance to stop in and visit with Josef Bray-Ali st the Flying Pigeon Bike Shop (see ad on the right).  I commented that the "D.I.Y. Sharrows" that appeared along some local streets connecting the Gold Line Station with Figueroa street were finally taken up.  LADOT had promised to remove the road markings when they were put up, one year and a couple of days ago, but Bray-Ali pointed out I was wrong.  "They're still there, they're just faded."

Through the LADOT Bike Blog, we've gotten some answers as to what the heck happened on Westholme Boulevard, where a large portion of Sharrows were covered up last week.  Basically, there was a communication breakdown between the Bureau of Street Services, the same government body that physically installed the Sharrows in the first place, and the LADOT.  Further compounding the confusion, the Sharrows don't yet appear on the Street Plan for Westholme because the Sharrows are part of a study.  The Bike Blog explains the significance: