BikinginLA

Just 162 days left until Los Angeles fails to meet its Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. 

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A 15-year old girl from Monterey Park is missing, nearly a week after she disappeared while riding her bike to visit family members.

Alison Chao left her father’s home a little after 5:30 pm this past Tuesday, but never made it to her an aunt’s home in San Gabriel.

She is described as Asian, 5 feet, two inches and weighs 96 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. Chao was last seen wearing a purple t-shirt, a pair of black shorts and a pair of dark shoes, while riding a blue mountain bike and carrying a black backpack.

Anyone with information on Chao is urged to call the Monterey Park Police Department at 626/573-1311.

Photo from Monterey Park Police Dept. 

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Apparently, riding a bicycle to a political rally and leaving it propped up under a tree, is just the kind of strange behavior that should alert the cops to a potential assassin.

At least the seems to be the take at Fox News, which breathlessly reports that would-be Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks was seen riding his bicycle through the recent Pennsylvania political rally where he later took a shot at the former president.

Someone spotted Crooks’ bike parked under a tree, propped up with his backpack, a full 42 minutes before the shooting — where it still stood hours later.

And that, as much as the range finder he carried, should have tipped off the police and/or Secret Service that something was amiss, according to Fox, and triggered an emergency response team.

But evidently, driving a car to the rally would have been perfectly normal.

Which is not to say that there weren’t other warning signs they should have picked up on. But simply riding a bicycle to the rally isn’t one of them.

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It’s now 214 days since the California ebike incentive program’s latest failure to launch, which was promised no later than fall 2023. And 37 full months since it was approved by the legislature and signed into law — and counting.

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

No bias here. An Ottawa, Canada letter writer somehow feels qualified to distinguish between good bicyclists and “Bozos,” as if bad drivers don’t exist, while another blames the people on bicycles for all their near misses while driving. Because it couldn’t possibly be their fault.

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

A 25-year old British man has been convicted of murder for fatally stabbing the 29-year old driver who crashed into his mountain bike and dragged it along the roadway; he claimed the driver and his passenger were both armed and he only killed the man in self defense, but the jury didn’t buy it.

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Local 

Federal officials approved a nearly $10 million grant to help build a pedestrian and bicycle crossing over the 710 Freeway, aka Long Beach Freeway.

 

State

Sad news from Maricopa, where a 53-year old man was killed by a driver while riding his bicycle — even if the story doesn’t mention that the car even had one. A driver, that is.

The rich get richer, as San Francisco gets another protected bike lane as part of the city’s Vision Zero program, this one a quick-build project on 17th Street. Which is what happens when a city actually give a damn about living up to its commitments to people on two wheels. Unlike a certain SoCal megalopolis we could name. 

The online San Francisco Standard says “disrespect” to drivers is fueling an angry political movement aimed at reclaiming space for motor vehicles, including reversing the potential permanent closure of the city’s Great Highway.

This is who we share the road with. A 23-year old Folsom driver has been charged with attempted murder for — allegedly — intentionally ramming his SUV into a motorcyclist and running over the victim, who was lucky to escape with a broken ankle and minor injuries.

 

National

Kawai, Hawaii became the latest jurisdiction to institute a Vision Zero program, promising to end traffic fatalities by 2040. Which is probably still years before Los Angeles will manage it, if it ever does. 

A new University of Washington study shows that Seattle’s Vision Zero projects have not had a negative impact on local businesses.

In a gut-wrenching story, three people have been arrested for the crash that killed a 67-year old Texas bike rider, including the driver — just 14 years old — as well as a 40-year old man charged with child endangerment and criminally negligent homicide, and a 22-year old woman charged with giving alcohol to a minor; a ten-year old child was also a passenger in the car.

A Tennessee man with a long record of DUI and driver’s license violations faces charges for the hit-and-run that killed a 41-year old man riding a bicycle, after a pair of women initially returned to the crash scene and falsely claimed one was the driver; no decision yet on whether they will be charged for the deception.

Skip the traffic and ride a bike to Rhode Island’s famed Newport Folk Festival.

Someone is putting up fake filming notices on New York lamp poles claiming that fictional Carrie Bradshaw of And Just Like That and Sex And The City fame gets hit with a Citi Bike bikeshare; then again, they also claim she accidentally sends the equally fictional Mr. Bean a nude selfie — and confesses to being Garfield the cat.

 

International

A writer for Forbes talks with ultra-distance “living legend” Lael Wilcox as she reaches the halfway point on her ride around the world, while explaining what goes into an attempt to set a new world record for circumnavigating the globe by bicycle.

A Glasgow, Scotland writer samples the city’s new $8.4 million segregated — aka protected — bike lane, and declares it better for both bicyclists and motorists.

An eight-year old boy from Cheshire, England has been named the UK’s Cyclist of the Year for his 80-mile bike ride to all four north west Premiere League stadiums, while raising the equivalent of nearly ten grand for a new bike shelter at his school.

An estimated 1,200 people took to their bicycles in the UK to call for a Gaza ceasefire and more humanitarian aid.

The Irish Senate takes up the the case of a family’s custom made bike shed, which they threatened to replace with a low-end trailer after the local government ordered them to remove it.

LeMonde examines the boom in French bike tourism, fueled by family-focused agencies, bike-specific accommodations and the explosion in ebike use.

Condé Nast Traveler says Paris is becoming a bicycling city, for better or worse — better being the willingness of the people to take to their bikes, and worse being the city’s still deficient infrastructure.

Even bicyclists in the Netherlands have to obey the law, but face fines if they don’t.

The number of people killed riding bicycles in Germany’s Thuringia state more than doubled last year, despite investments in bike infrastructure — although the victims were “not infrequently” blamed for their own crashes.

 

Competitive Cycling

Tadej Pogačar put an exclamation point behind his third yellow jersey with his third consecutive Tour de France stage win — and sixth overall in this year’s Tour — after previously winning the race in 2020 and 2021.

London’s Independent explains why Nice — the city, not the personality type — was the perfect stand-in for Paris for the finish of the Tour de France.

A Welsh website celebrates the Manx Missile being caught on camera speaking the local tongue, after Mark Cavendish set the record for Tour stage wins in what was likely his final grand tour.

CNN celebrates Eritrean Tour de France points champ Biniam Girmay, who became the first Black African to win a stage in the Tour de France, then added two more; Girmay says he wants to inspire others as the only Black rider in this year’s peloton.

Not surprisingly, cycling teams competing in the Tour consider broadcasting their team tactics on live TV a big non-non, with two — Visma-Lease a Bike and Ineos Grenadiers — pulling out of the broadcast agreement, and others threatening to.

 

Finally..

Your next ebike could come from the Mercedes F1 team. You know traffic sucks when even race car drivers would rather ride a bike.

And when you skate on biking under the influence because the cops can’t prove you were actually riding your bike, maybe don’t let them catch you riding a unicycle right afterwards.

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

Oh, and fuck Putin