BikinginLA

Just 287 days until Los Angeles fails to meet its Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025.

So stop what you’re doing and sign this petition to demand Mayor Bass hold a public meeting to listen to the dangers we face walking and biking on the mean streets of LA.

Then share it — and keep sharing it — with everyone you know, on every platform you can.

As of this writing, we’re up to 1,018 signatures, so let’s keep it going! Urge everyone you know to sign the petition, until the mayor agrees to meet with us! 

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Please forgive yesterday’s unexcused absence.

After a crowded weekend trying to wrangle a wild corgi with a torn rotator cuff — me, not the corgi —  and my lower back way out of whack, while my blood sugar inexplicably circled the drain all weekend, I just had nothing left to give, barely managing to write about Sunday’s fallen bicyclist in Encinitas. 

Then again, it’s not a lot of fun to try to type with a torn rotator cuff, either, as the damn thing keeps reminding me. 

Regardless, we have a lot to catch up on, so let’s get to it. And please forgive me if I don’t credit you for something you sent me, after losing track of things over the weekend. 

The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.

No bias here. A Cambridge, Massachusetts member of the deceptively named Cambridge Streets For All group — which is unaffiliated with the LA group by the same name — says no, the city’s bike lanes don’t work. Even though a recent study showed the bike lanes were very effective, and her pro-motorist group has lost a series of law suits attempting to prevent the bike lanes or have them removed.

No bias here, either. In a story locked away behind the paper’s paywall, a writer for London’s Telegraph somehow insists that bicyclists have turned Paris into hell on Earth, arguing that it is being ruined by bike lanes, ebikes and the nastiest cycling culture in the world. Because evidently, she liked it better when the streets were choked with cars and smog, and it wasn’t safe to cross the street with your baguettes. 

But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.

Cops in Boca Raton, Florida busted a pair of masked juvenile bicycle riders who were allegedly menacing motorists by weaving in and out of traffic, after one of the group crashed into a police car.

The singer Pink is one of us, as she rides through the streets of Sydney, Australia with husband Corey Hart. Although all anyone seems to care about was her lack of a helmet, in violation of Aussie laws.

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Local 

Streetsblog lists the LA-area projects funded by the federal Reconnecting Communities program, which will remove barriers and improve first mile/last mile bike and walk facilities to reconnect communities divided by highway projects, which usually went through low-income areas and communities of color.

Pasadena nonprofit Day One is distributing some of the 5,000 bicycles abandoned on Metro buses and trains every year to residents of Pasadena, Pomona, and El Monte through the free Metro Adopt a Bike Program. At least I remembered my friend Tim Rutt found this one. 

626 Golden Streets will return to the San Gabriel Valley at the end of next month, as Active Streets Mission-to-Mission connects the Mission Districts of Alhambra, San Gabriel and South Pasadena through five miles of carfree streets.

Spectrum News 1 looks at what’s new on PCH, where residents are finally demanding safety improvements after 59 people have been killed on the Malibu section of SoCal’s bloodiest highway since 2010, despite fighting them for years. Short answer, not enough. 

Santa Monica’s Complete Streets project on 17th Street and Michigan Ave was recognized by the League of California Cities as the winner of their 2024 Local Streets and Roads Project Award, Complete Streets award. Does that mean local residents will stop complaining about it now?

A greenbelt along the 91 Freeway in North Long Beach’s Hamilton neighborhood received a $1.2 million federal grant; the Hamilton Loop will include parks, and a walking path and bike lanes, along with other features.

 

State

Calbike celebrates the passage of HLA, while noting that five of the eight “bike champions” they endorsed will make the fall election.

Sad news from Auburn, where a 60-year old woman was killed when she was struck by a truck driver in Placer County just outside the city, while riding with another person. Or maybe she was 70.

 

National

Streetsblog explains how and why to start an ebike lending library. The why is easy — because people are growing old waiting for California’s ebike voucher program to finally launch so they can buy one. 

A travel website selects the country’s most bike-friendly towns for retirees; California’s Solano Beach, Arcata and Pismo Beach make the list that was topped by Walker, Minnesota, despite the high rents in the two California beach towns.

The Texas Department of Transportation launched a new traffic safety campaign urging bike riders and drivers to “Be Safe. Drive Smart.” Because we all know that all it really takes to end traffic violence is a not-so-catchy slogan.

Proving that Iowa is more than just corn, a new nine-mile bike trail will connect two existing trails to create a continuous, 120-mile loop through the state.

Heartbreaking story of a Chicago mother trying to get justice for her 16-year old son after he was killed by a suspected stoned driver while riding his bike; a Twitter/X thread from Bike Lane Uprising recounts efforts to help when the mom didn’t even have a lawyer.

Sad news from New York, where a 31-year old man riding an ebike was killed when he was run over by the driver of a postal truck after allegedly falling, although residents pointed to a human-shaped dent in a parked SUV as evidence the victim was actually pinned by the driver between the two vehicles.

New York-based urban tech accelerator URBAN-X apparently thinks the future rolls on two wheels, selecting seven companies focused on advancing electric mobility and two-wheeled transportation for their latest project, on the assumption that ebikes will take a more prominent role in transportation.

A New York council member says a planned bike lane is stuck in community engagement purgatory. Proving that Los Angeles isn’t the only major city with an interminable community engagement process, even if it seems like it.

 

International

Momentum celebrates the beauty of upright bikes, while GCN answers the burning question of whether you’re better off buying a new $600 bike or a $600 used bike.

They get it. Cycling Weekly says leave the bike computer at home, and just absorb the world and let your mind wander.

Worcester, England is revoking a ban on bikes in the city center, as council members call it unnecessary and ineffective, and more a reflection of political theater than traffic safety.

This is what it looks like when an ebike battery explodes into a fireball in a London apartment.

BBC host Mollie King, who doubles as lead singer of Brit girl group The Saturdays, raised the equivalent of $1.4 million for Comic Relief with her 310-mile bike ride across the UK in honor of her father, who died from a brain tumor.

A 49-year old British woman faces possible jail time after she was convicted of manslaughter for yelling at a 77-year old woman to stop riding her bike on the sidewalk; the victim then veered off the sidewalk into the street, where she was struck and killed by an oncoming driver.

Bollywood actor Kartik Aaryan is one of us, confusing fans by riding his bicycle just one day after buying a new Range Rover for the equivalent of over $700,000.

Forget carbon. Your next handcrafted Japanese bike could be made of wood.

Kiwi bicyclists went “starkers,” or close to it, to call attention to body positivity, bike safety and the environment in the New Zealand edition of the World Naked Bike Ride.

 

Competitive Cycling

UCI has officially blessed Giro’s weird-ass time trial helmets made for the Visma-Lease A Bike cycling team.

Belgian Jasper Philipsen won the Milan-San Remo in a photo-finish Saturday, throwing his bike ahead of Aussie Michael Matthews and Tadej Pogacar for a razor-thing victory.

Former Italian pro and 2021 Paris-Roubaix winner Sonny Colbrelli was credited with foiling bike thieves attempting to steal the bikes belonging to the Bahrain-Victorius cycling team as they slept in their hotel on the even of Milan-San Remo. The team, that is, not the bike thieves. Or the bikes.

America’s greatest ex-Tour de France winner relates how he suffered PTSD after having all seven Tour wins stripped away, losing his prize money and agreeing to pay the US government $5 million for cheating on their watch as leader of the US Postal cycling team; Lance says he had to check himself in for an intensive, five day treatment program that had him on the shrink’s couch for ten hours a day. If he felt that bad, just imagine how the people he bullied for all those years must have felt. And yet he still won’t just go away, already. 

Meanwhile, cycling fans ridicule Lance’s recent comments that bicyclists don’t compete like they used to back in the good ol’ days when he was still doping. Uh, racing.

Bicycling reports that Germany’s Canyon Bicycles has signed Dutch cross-discipline cyclist Mathieu van der Poel to a “staggering” ten-year deal. Although maybe they should ask Trek how that worked out with Lance. As usual, read it on Yahoo if the magazine blocks you. 

Sad news from Belgium, where 24-year old cyclist Jonas Bresseleers, a former teammate of Remco Evenepoel, was killed when he was struck by a truck driver while riding his bike; Bresseleers survived another disastrous collision five years earlier when a group of riders were sent the wrong way during a race, and he and two other cyclists were struck by a driver, resulting in the death of his teammate and friend Stef Loos.

 

Finally…

The pope wants to sell you his Pinarello. Why worry about bike parking at the end of your ride, when you can just take your own bike rack with you?

And that feeling when you have to crowdfund your own bike lane sweeper because the city won’t clean them — and the local paper makes it seem like a good thing.

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

Oh, and fuck Putin