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(Editor's note: Dan Koeppel is the writer of the now famous "The Illegal But Highly Effective D.I.Y. Bike Lane" article that appears in the July issue of Bicycling Magazine.  You can continue to read his writing at his blog at www.bananabook.org.  The following was written as an update to his editor's at Bicycling Magazine.)

In what could seem a companion piece to either this morning's Streetsblog.net post or last week's interview with Michael Woo, the California Planning & Development Report outlines some of the excuses local planners are using to attack S.B. 375, the legislation that requires land-use patterns be used to fight sprawl. 

Streetsbloggers,

For anyone planning to pedal to City Hall for tomorrow's "All-Bike" city council meeting, I just received email notice that it has been canceled.  I'll have more on this later, but wanted to make sure nobody made plans this evening on old news.

What's a sharrow ? Well, a sharrow is a lane marking that looks like a bicycle with a chevron on top of it.  Sharrows are used to mark streets as places where bicyclists and cars share the road.  The sharrow is painted where that it's most safe for cyclists to ride in the middle of the point of the chevron, though, from this photo taken at UCLA, you can see that bicyclists don't necessarily know this.  Sharrows are one useful tool in the planning toolkit to help bicyclists ride safely and to let drivers know that bikes belong on the street.  The upside of sharrows is that they are cheap and easy. 

Unified by our shared experiences on the street, angered by the now infamous "Hummer Incident" and emboldened by their experiences with the LAPD Police Commission and Inspector General, roughly fifty cyclists pedaled to the monthly Los Angeles City Council meeting in Van Nuys to tell their stories, our stories, about life on the streets of Los Angeles.

This Saturday, the Southern California Transit Adovates will host Fabio Ficano of Ansaldo Breda, the rail car company in the middle of the controversy about who will supply rail cars for future the expansion of the Gold Line.

Next Friday, CalPIRG is hosting a major conference about what the upcoming reauthorization of the federal Transportation Trust Fund could mean for Los Angeles, if we want it enough.  New federal language in transportation funding legislation could bring major changes to Los Angeles and the rest of the country.  However, CalPIRG is perfectly able to promote their own event: