Bike LA (formerly LACBC)

(Update: Tuesday, 2/23/10 at 8:02 A.M. - I had a chance to talk with Magos' lawyer over email last night and he confirmed that the LAPD sent the case to both the District Attorney and City Attorney; so in this case the LAPD isn't to blame.  I'm going to leave the text below unchanged so that the anyone reading through won't be confused by the comments section.)

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.

Too often, activists undertake a successful campaign of some sort and move on to the next campaign without taking the time to document what made their efforts such a success.  Not so with the recent Bike Parking Campaign in Pico-Union/Westlake undertaken by the City of Lighs/Ciudad de las Luces program of the Los Angeles County Bike Coalition.  While the campaign took the time to document their efforts in a blog post, the more accessible Bike Parking Resource Guide could be a guide book for any community that wants to take bike parking seriously.

Last week, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition announced the preliminary results for the three days of bicycle and pedestrian counts the group completed in the City of Los Angeles in late September this year.  Fed up with the "official" numbers used by the City of Los Angeles, who continues to rely on out-of-date and incomplete census data, the Bike Coalition did its own counts, by hand, to get a more acurate picture.

Via the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, next Wednesday at 2:00 P.M. will be another "bicycle heavy" Transportation Committee Hearing.  There's some new and interesting stuff on the agenda, such as a "bicycle anti-harassment ordinance," and some old friends such as an update on the Draft Bike Plan.  Below is the LACBC's email, and once the agenda items are posted tomorrow we'll have a full review.

There are two projects of the Los Angeles County Bike Coalition that haven't received as much attention on Streetsblog as they should, although CicLAvia did get a belated review last week after reviews in the Times and television.

The Los Angeles County Bike Coalition reports that funding is finally in place for the Sharrows pilot program for L.A.'s streets, half a decade after the LACBC began their Sharrows Campaign.  A group of funders have pooled their dollars to fund the Sharrows on a couple of Los Angeles' roads, but just because funding is in place doesn't mean the paint will start flowing; first the roads for the new paint need to be selected.

In yet another example of our bike culture's Do It Yourself ethic, the Los Angeles County Bike Coalition is planning to do its own bike counts to paint a clearer picture of how many people travel by bicycle in Los Angeles.  Bike counts are a necessary feature of any well thought Bike Plan so that the planners and engineers can place the right sorts of engineering designs at the right places.

Recently the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition launched a series of local campaigns designed to highlight some "best practices" in bicycle design and planning.  One of those campaigns focuses on re-engineering 4th Street as a Bike Boulevard in the Mid-Wilshire area, from where it begins on Hoover Street to where it ends on Alta Vista Blvd. at the Park LaBrea residential complex.