BikinginLA

Just a quick note this afternoon.

My focus this past week has been on updating my blog and preparing for a relaunch later this month, as I work on transitioning it from a personal bike blog to an advertising supported LA and SoCal oriented bicycling website.

Exactly what that means, I have no idea. My intention is to keep doing what I’ve been doing, but better and more of it.

More or less.

As part of that, I’ve been revising some of my pages and working adding more; you can see the changes I’ve made to the  Change the Law and Survival Tactics pages above.

Among the pages being added are a Resources page, which will include many of the links currently over there on the right, such as a listing of bike lawyers, organizations and some of the city’s better bike shops, as well as links for the LA bike anti-harassment ordinance, LAPD bike liaisons, among others.

I’m also adding a page of bicycling facts and links to studies that will provide useful information for advocates. So if you have any favorite facts or studies you think I should include, feel free to suggest them in the comments below, along with a link back to the source.

And the same goes for anything you think should be included on the Resources page.

………

Just a couple other quick notes.

Mayor Garcetti has announced a new Great Streets Initiative to get city agencies to work together for a change in improving our streets. They can start by sending the deadly-by-design Hyperion/Glendale bridge makeover back to the drawing board. But don’t take my word for it; state Assemblymember Mike Gatto says so, too.

The experimental resurfacing of Highway 1 north of Cambria to repair damage from Caltrans’ ill-advised chip sealing of the roadway has been deemed a success, allowing bike riders to resume using one of the state’s most popular riding routes. Hopefully our own Caltrans branch is paying attention and will fix the damage they’ve done to the road surfaces on Angeles Crest and Mt. Baldy.

The LAPD is stepping up efforts to save the lives of pedestrians and bike riders in the Valley. Although as Rick Risemberg noted in forwarding the story, they can’t resist blaming the victims instead of the people in the big, dangerous machines.

A writer for the Times’ Opinion page discovers road diets aren’t so bad, after all. Meanwhile, another suggests the way to be a better driver is to try riding a bike; actually, there have been studies showing that bike riders really do make safer drivers.

And then there’s this from the Times, in which they question whether freeing bike plans from CEQA review is a good thing, saying it’s hard to imagine anyone suing to halt a bike lane. Even though that’s exactly what happened in San Francisco, needlessly delaying that city’s bike improvements for several years.

The formerly bike-friendly London Daily Telegraph allows a writer to attack Lycra-clad riders in silly hats in what we can only hope is a failed attempt at bike humor.

A story in story in the Toronto Star cites a reader accusing cyclists of supreme arrogance when they pass on the bike path for the crime of — wait for it — using a bike bell. And threatening retaliation by honking like a maniac at every cyclist he sees on the streets.

Finally, in perhaps the most absurdly over the top anti-bike diatribe I’ve had the misfortune of reading, a Toronto writer says cyclists are sanctimonious jerks who should be shot — yes, shot — despite admitting to chasing and physically assaulting a rider who objected, if inappropriately, to the risk of being doored. We can only hope the rider in question reads the story and presses charges, published confession in hand, and the courts force his attacker into much needed psychotherapy.