BikinginLA

I guess we’re going to ease back into this slowly. 

I’m apparently still affected by the adverse reaction to the Moderna covid and flu shots last week. I had hoped to play catch-up today, and cover most if not all of what we missed last week. 

But after falling asleep mid-sentence and running my laptop battery down to zero, it’s clear that I still don’t have my strength back — something I discovered after thinking I was okay on Saturday and nearly passing out at a WeHo dog event. 

But at least I got to see a nice bakfiets someone rode to the dog park. Even the corgi stopped to check it out. 

Due to the resulting time constraints, I’m going to be an asshole today and not take the time to look up who sent me what. So thank you for sending me stuff, even if I don’t credit you individually. 

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I promised someone last week, before everything went to hell, that I would look into the death of man killed by a driver while riding an ebike in Arleta early in the morning of Sunday, September 13th.

The victim was struck by the SUV driver before 2 am in the 13000 block of Osborne Street.

A crowdfunding campaign posted by his brother has raised over $17,000 of the $20,000 goal to help pay for funeral expenses, describing in heartbreaking detail how much he loved, and was loved.

However, as we have discussed before, it’s difficult to determine whether a fallen ebike rider was on an electric bicycle or an electric motorcycle, since the police and the media can’t seem to tell one from another. And while any death is tragic, only the former are the subject of this site.

So unless I know for certain that the victim of a crash was riding a ped-assist bicycle, and not some other form of two-wheeled electric conveyance, I’m not including them in the already too high count of SoCal bicycling deaths.

And yes, even one is one too many.

So while my heart goes out to the family and loved ones of Oscar Adrian Lazaro, I won’t be adding his name to a 51 others who have lost their lives riding a bicycle in our deadly corner of the country.

But if anyone can convince me he was on a legal Class 1, 2 or 3 ebike, I’m more than willing to reconsider.

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Gracias por nada, Los Angeles.

Or rather, thanks for a whole 2.2 miles of new bike lanes installed in the last fiscal year, from June 2025 to June 2026. Except that’s lane miles — i.e., counting each side of the roadway separately — so we’re really talking about a whole one and one-tenth mile of net new bike lanes.

Streetsblog’s Joe Linton wrote earlier this month that the City of Los Angeles, not to be confused with the other 87 cities and various unincorporated areas that make up LA County, built a whopping 7.5 miles of new bike lanes. But at the same time, the city removed 5.3 miles of already existing bike lanes, resulting in the wholly underwhelming 2.2-mile net total.

They also improved a whole 14.1 miles of existing bike lanes, which usually translates to adding a row white plastic bendie posts and calling it protected, as if those wands will somehow magically ward off a couple tons of ballistic steel and glass.

Which is like trading the family cow for a handful of magic beans. I mean, your family does have a cow, right?

And people wonder why I’m voting for Nithya Raman, if only because she’s not Karen Bass — the current mayor who not only supervised the non-building of bike lanes for the last three-and-a-half years, but also personally intervened to keep Forest Lawn Drive deadly.

Not to mention my current state Assemblymember, who voted to make it virtually illegal to fix the deadly street after a more than $300,000 lobbying campaign on behalf of Forest Lawn and Mt. Sinai cemeteries, in what can only be seen as a blatant attempt to drive more business.

Pun intended.

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Speaking of things that suck, as we seem to be this morning, yet another person traversing the county without benefit of a motor vehicle was killed by a driver before they could reach the other coast.

According to the New York Times, 24-year old Norwegian Joachim Lanham was killed by a driver in Kansas while attempting to rollerblade from Los Angeles to New York.

Lanham was 22 days into his journey when he was apparently run down by an 82-year old woman, once again raising the question of what the hell someone that old was doing behind the wheel. Except that in many, if not most cases, auto-centetric road designs and the lack of viable options doesn’t give them any other choice.

I’m just tired of people coming to this country on a tourist visa, and being sent home in a box.

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If you’ve been hanging around this site for awhile, you’ve probably seen my complaints that, despite common perceptions, bike helmets aren’t the life-saving equivalent of seat belts and air bags, and do little to protect again high-speed crashes or injuries to other parts of the body.

However, I may be forced to reconsider their utility, after a woman in Philadelphia used her bike helmet to stop a sexual assault.

No word on what the man actually did, or attempted to do. But the 63-year old woman responded by whacking the guy with her bike helmet — and continued to chase after him, yelling and smacking him with it, until a stranger intervened to protect her.

And him, apparently.

One more reason you should always have a helmet handy, evidently.

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Metro Bike says “Westward ho!” by expanding service between West Los Angeles and DTLA, as well as Downtown Los Angeles southward to the Rail-to-Rail Active Transportation Corridor.

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Kyle writes to say that Bike Streets is launching in Torrance.

They’re looking for 20 people willing to log every ride with Bike Streets and help build a Low-Stress Torrance Bike Map; you can sign up at bikestreets.com/join.

According to Kyle’s email,

Bike Streets takes a practical “Network First” approach to making biking safer and more accessible.

Instead of waiting years for individual bike lanes to be designed and funded, Bike Streets helps communities:

• Map the safest, lowest-stress streets and paths that already exist
• Connect those routes into a usable bike network
• Identify dangerous intersections and missing links that prevent the network from working
• Focus resources on fixing those critical gaps
• Start with practical, lower-cost improvements while working toward permanent infrastructure

The goal is to create a connected network that people can use now, and then continually improve it over time.

I think this is an approach worth learning about for anyone interested in making it easier and safer for kids and families to bike around their communities.

He says the project began with a podcast video from Avi Stopper of Strong Towns.

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A Bay Area TV station says a new bike trail offers a safer way to ride into Sausalito.

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A New England-based law firm forwarded their guide to safer electric transportation, covering everything from e-cars to ebikes, electric scooters and hoverboards, for whatever it’s worth.

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Sometimes, it’s the person on two wheels behaving badly. 

A 41-year old father of two died four days after he was struck by a speeding 32-year old bicyclist while walking in New York’s Central Park.

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Local 

Hoodline reports the LA Board of Public Works is set to approve an $84 million contract for a 2.9-mile segment of the Los Angeles River bike through Reseda, but will abandon planned under-crossings in order to finish in time for the 2028 Olympics, forcing riders to cross major streets.

Long Beach, like her larger neighbor to the north, met its target year for eliminating traffic deaths in abject failure, with 35 traffic deaths already this year, including six in just 18 days this month.

Speaking of Hoodline, nice to see their Jake Rodriguez reads this site, and thanks for citing me in his article about the fatal Paramount hit-and-run.

 

State

Construction has started on a bridge extending San Diego’s Fenton Parkway over the San Diego River in Mission Valley, providing bicyclists, pedestrians and yes, motor vehicle drivers with a safe crossing during high-water events.

Sad news from San Jose, where a 32-year old woman was killed by a driver while riding her bike.

 

National

You can all sleep better tonight, knowing the NTSB, aka National Transportation Safety Board, is on the case of the Milligan University massacre. On the other hand, it’s not comforting to know that Tennessee thinks a bicycling route with a 55 mph speed limit is somehow okay.

New protected bike lanes in Queens NY are the physical benefit of New York’s congestion pricing tolls.

A Baton Rouge, Louisiana group is still riding together, ten years after it was started by a 45-year old man to uplift the community.

 

International

Having obviously run out of things to talk about, Momentum continues recycling old articles, in this case linking to a 16-month old Japanese study showing that riding a bicycle can help people over 60 live independently. In other breaking news, researchers have confirmed that ursine creatures do, in fact, defecate in the woods. 

 

Competitive Cycling

In a win that shocked the world, the men’s elite cycling world title went to none other than Brandon McNulty, the 28-year old journeyman becoming the first American rider to take the title since Lance Armstrong in 1993, and Greg LeMond in 1983 and 1989; McNulty won by a 52-second margin in a two-lap solo breakaway.

Aussie Michael Matthews finished second in the race behind McNulty, with Mathieu van der Poel taking bronze.

The women’s world’s were marked by a massive 15-rider crash that changed the outcome of the race; fortunately, the two most seriously injured riders were showing marked improvement a day later.

Dutch cyclist Demi Vollering may have won may have won the rainbow jersey at the Road World Championships, but she was still sanctioned with a 1000 CHF fine — the equivalent of roughly $1,200 — a 25-point deduction in UCI rankings, and a yellow card for “using a non-compliant position or point of support on the bicycle.”

A 32-year old man documented his ride in the Race Across America, better known as RAAM, finishing the more than 3,000 race in 11 days, 23 hours and 3 minutes in a tribute to his father, who is suffering from prostate cancer; his film The Road to Why is now available on Apple TV and Amazon.

Twenty-three-year old Afghan cyclist Fariba Hashimi won silver in the Asian Games, after having to disguise herself as a man in order to train without abuse in the ultra-conservative country.

A 25-year-old Aussie cyclist and coach is back racing just two years after a life-saving heart transplant.

 

Finally…

Speaking of the worlds, the masseur for the Slovakian team had to shave his legs and compete in the race, after none of the country’s team members were physically able to race; he made it 100 km — 62 miles — before dropping out.

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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin.