My apologies for the late post; blame a late night Internet outage that kept me offline until this morning.
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A couple of interesting tidbits from yesterday’s LAPD bike liaison meeting.
While traffic collisions are up overall in the San Fernando Valley compared to last year, there’s been a 23% decrease in bicycling collisions. And a 37% drop in collisions resulting in serious injuries to bike riders.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of bike lanes in Downtown LA has resulted in an overall slowing of traffic speeds, as well as improved compliance with traffic laws by bike riders. Demonstrating once again that if you want bicyclists to obey the law, just give them a safe place to ride.
Speaking of the department’s bike liaison program, you can find email addresses for each of the bike liaisons for the city’s four traffic divisions listed on the Resources page.
These officers are here to help if you have any problems resolving bicycling issues involving the police. So feel free to reach out to them when you need help, whether it’s dealing with harassment or dangerous traffic conditions on your ride, unfair treatment by police, or officers refusing to accept a report or complaint.
No, seriously. That’s what they’re here for.
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Disgraced ex-Tour de France champ Floyd Landis used to insist his Mennonite upbringing meant he wouldn’t have doped.
Now he’s in the dope business.
Landis, who won the 2006 Tour on an artificial hip, has teamed with former teammate Dave Zabriskie to create a new line of marijuana-laced lotions called Floyd’s of Leadville to treat pain and inflammation.
So far, it’s only available in Colorado, where virtually all things marijuana are legal.
But we may eventually see it here under California’s medical marijuana laws.
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An Italian judge concludes that cycling great Marco Pantani really did die of a cocaine overdose and wasn’t murdered by the mob.
An Aussie pro cyclist says living the lifestyle isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, explaining why she’s stepping away, if not retiring, at the ripe old age of 20.
All those crashes in the Amgen Tour of California are finally explained; the riders were running on Microsoft.
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Local
If you want your kid to perform well in school, buy ‘em a bicycle.
LADOT GM Seleta Reynolds testifies before the US Senate on the Internet of Things.
CiclaValley feels the sting of bicycling in bee season.
Monrovia is expected to adopt a new bike plan next month, including seven miles of protected bike lanes.
Just one day after a bike rider was shot and killed in Compton, another bike rider shot three men in a car, killing one.
Forty cyclists ride to protest a lack of infrastructure and police action to protect bike riders in Palos Verdes Estates by scrupulously obeying the letter of the law; one driver who clearly didn’t get it swore at riders because he had to go around them. Which is kind of the point.
State
Someone on a bicycle attacked two homeless people in San Diego using a rock and a golf club.
After partying all night, an Oceanside driver crashed into a pedestrian and kept going for nearly a mile — with his body still embedded in her windshield.
Solvang puts a planned bike and pedestrian bridge on hold after Caltrans finds deficiencies in a nearby vehicle bridge, which could require replacement while costing the city $600,000 in funds allocated for the bike/ped project.
A Visalia woman was critically injured when her bike was rear-ended by a car.
San Francisco cyclists pen a letter to the mayor asking for safer streets.
A Sacramento salmon cyclist is lucky to walk away from a crash with a light rail train.
National
The Atlantic says America’s automotive hegemony is insane.
An East Coast group is working on completing a continuous bikeway stretching from Florida to Maine. We can’t even get a continuous bikeway across Los Angeles.
An anonymous bicycling superhero rides to the rescue of a paint-covered kitten someone abandoned in an Albuquerque dumpster. Which is exactly what should happen to the person who put it there. Without the rescue part.
A Michigan paper asks if the Kalamazoo bike crash reflects a statewide trend, where bike-involved collisions were up 57% last year.
A Boston drunk driver gets eight to twelve years behind bars for the collateral damage death of a teenage bike rider, after he crashed into a car stopped at a red light and knocked it into the waiting cyclist. Although someone should tell Patch that when a person drives drunk, whatever happens as a result is not an accident.
No bias here. An upstate New York paper blames a cyclist for crashing into the side of a car, which apparently wasn’t moving and didn’t have a driver.
Famed bike-riding New York fashion photographer Bill Cunningham passed away at age 87 after suffering a stroke; a petition calls for naming a Gotham street corner after him, while the Financial Times says he should be admired for his principles.
A New York judge rules it violates a driver’s constitutional rights to require them not to crash into people.
A writer for the Washington Post offers tips on traveling in a car with a bike on the back.
Hammering out the Democratic Party platform be a messy process, but at least they reached unanimous agreement on the need for more bike paths.
Battling petitions circulate in Lafayette LA, calling for the removal, or not, of a bike lane that’s part of a citywide loop.
International
Who says Rapha doesn’t support women cyclists?
Cycling Magazine lists bicycling’s 14 most influential Canadians.
Police in Ottawa, Canada are using a sonar device to help catch drivers who pass too close to cyclists.
A crazed Brit cyclist who was deliberately holding up traffic reached in and stole the car keys from a BBC presenter who was acting in an entirely reasonable manner. Or at least, that’s his version of the story; something tells me the rider in question might see it a little differently.
Rome plans to create a 27-mile inner city bicycling route linking the city’s tourist attractions. Unlike LA, where there’s no viable way for most tourists to visit the city’s many attractions by bike.
Apparently, Pakistani bike riders need a helmet with front and rear cams, blind spot detection, brake lights, turns signals, Bluetooth and WiFi, and built-in GPS. But no word on whether it will actually protect your head if you fall off your bike.
An Aussie driver’s grandmother says he just made a mistake and he’s terribly sorry for fleeing the scene after killing a bike rider. Which makes it all okay, of course.
Finally…
It takes a real loser to slap a six-year old in the face in a dispute over a bicycle. Sometimes it’s nice just to ride your bike and fiddle around.
And congratulations, you are now superfluous.
