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Quick confession...I'm not in L.A. this week. If I were, I would be awfully tempted to go to the Safe Routes to Schools/LADOT Pedestrian Advisory meeting on Thursday and the "How Bicycle Friendly Placer Are Made" later that evening.

I cannot pretend to be an expert on fracking. Not even close. Yet, I can't help the feeling that drilling thousands of feet into the earth, pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laden water -- with many of the chemicals being known carcinogens -- multiple times over several days into the ground in earthquake fault zones can't be great for the environment. Even if that makes me a silly person.

Two new ghost bikes went up in South L.A. and Compton yesterday. One was to commemorate the death last month of Sylvester Henderson, 26, who was hit by the train while crossing the Blue Line tracks at the intersection of Grandee and Century Blvd.

"This chart sums up why South LA consistently gets left behind when funds are divided," reads the post on the Empowerment Congress West Area Neighborhood Development Council's facebook page (referring to the image above).

On Thursday March 7th, the Expo Construction Authority Board of Directors approved $89,000 for the first step in what would be the "Expo Greenway" (Greenway) project near the Westwood Station of the Expo Line. The Expo Greenway project would transform the area between Westwood Boulevard and Overland Avenue adjacent to the future bikeway and rail project into a sustainable urban greenway that would provide a corridor of native species, a stretch of open space, and a place where rainwater is sustainably moved back to the ground.

TONIGHT Sitting in a room full of California journalists and their editors last week as part of my training for a journalism fellowship, I was incredibly surprised to learn that few of them knew that fracking was going on in L.A.'s back yard. The lack of awareness has been of great concern to many of the local environmental organizations because it makes it harder for them to gather support to counter powerful lobbies in favor of the practice. It is one of the reasons representatives from a number of the organizations have gathered this weekend for a California Fracking Summit; they hope to cobble out a common position against regulations proposed by the Department of Oil And Gas (DOGGR) and decide upon strategies that will facilitate their fight. While the summit itself is closed to the public, the festivities of the evening are not.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

"They've been receiving it pretty decently, I must say," Karen Whitman, the "Mama" of Mama's Chicken, told the riders with the Healthy Food tour regarding her customers' response to the fresh produce she recently began offering at her shop. "The more people that know about it, the more that's coming in."

As a cyclist, I do my best to avoid Vermont Ave. like the plague.