Just 84 days left until Los Angeles fails to meet its Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025.
Conceptual rendering of bike lane-free Vermont courtesy of Streetsblog LA.
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Sadly, no surprise here.
A large collection of Los Angeles advocacy groups, led by Streets For All and ACT-LA, are complaining that Metro’s plan for bus lanes on Vermont Ave don’t comply with the requirements of Measure HLA.
The ballot measure, initially sponsored by Streets For All, passed with overwhelming support in the March primary election, winning two-thirds of the vote in the City of Los Angeles.
It ordered the city to comply with a very simple requirement to build out the already approved Mobility Plan 2035 whenever streets in the plan get resurfaced.
Or maybe not so simple, since LA officials have apparently been busy dragging their feet and looking for loopholes ever since.
According to Streetsblog LA, Metro has been working on plans to add bus lanes to Vermont for over a decade, scaling back what had been 12 miles to just six.
And just bus lines.
Advocates see Vermont as a key opportunity. If you can’t go big, be thorough, and make transit and transit riders a top priority on one of Metro’s and the nation’s highest ridership corridors, where can you?
The Alliance for Community Transit (ACT-LA) is currently circulating a letter (sign on as an individual or organization) in support of improving Vermont for people on bus, bike, and on foot – from Sunset Boulevard to the Metro C (Green) Line Athens Station. ACT-LA and two dozen organizations are calling for following features all along the nearly 12-mile-long project:
- uninterrupted bus lanes
- protected bike lanes
- pedestrian scrambles at high injury and bus transfer intersections
- tree planting, non-hostile shelters, signage, wayfinding, trash bins, and a bus rider bill of rights at every stop
- wait time displays and public water at all major intersections
- electrification of buses along the corridor
- preserving all street vending and expanding the sidewalk in areas with high vending concentrations
But Metro’s current scaled-back, penny-pinching plan includes “little for pedestrians, and nothing for cyclists.”
Metro somehow claims that’s consistent with the mobility plan, and “helps support” Measure HLA.
Streets For All disagrees. And they should know, since they wrote the damn thing.
This week, the advocacy group Streets for All, the main proponent of Measure HLA and one of the signatories of the ACT-LA letter, wrote to Mayor Karen Bass and Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins in support of Metro’s Vermont project proceeding in full compliance with Measure HLA. The letter states:
“As designed, the BRT project brings (welcome) improvements to Vermont Avenue… Those trigger the City’s obligation to install Mobility Plan enhancements. Therefore, were the City to issue permits for the project without assuring implementation of its Mobility Plan enhancements at the same time, the City would violate its ordinance, waste public funds, and allow Vermont’s dangerous conditions to remain despite the voters’ mandate.”
Streets for All notes that the project complies with the city’s plan for transit and pedestrian facilities, but not for bikeways.
It would be bad enough if this were a one-off. But Streetsblog includes a long list of current projects that don’t appear to comply with the mobility plan or HLA.
HLA gives Angelenos the right to sue to force implementation of the measure, and that could be where we’re heading.
Los Angeles seems to be daring these organizations to take them to court, either thinking they won’t do it, or in hopes of somehow getting the measure overturned.
Which seems unlikely, since it’s now part of the city charter.
We thought we had won when HLA passed. But clearly, this battle is just getting started.
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Streets Are For Everyone, aka SAFE, notes that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a wide range of traffic safety measures passed in the last legislative session.
These range from mandating that Caltrans follow its own Complete Streets policies, to bills extending the statute of limitations for hit-and-run if the driver flees the state.
But Newsom dropped the ball when it came to speeding drivers, vetoing a bill to increase the penalty for speeding more than 26 mph over a 55 mph limit, as well as a bill to mandate an audible warning when drivers exceed the posted speed limit by more than 10 mph.
You can read SAFE’s full article explaining both Newsom’s reasons for the vetoes, and why they think he was wrong.
But for now, let’s just say they raise serious questions over whether the governor truly grasps the dangers posed by speeding drivers to everyone around them, both on and off the roadway.
If he did, he would work with the legislature to fix the bills or to craft alternatives that he would favor, rather than just killing them with a stroke of the pen.
People both in and out of motor vehicles are injured and dying at ever increasing rates, many through no fault of their own.
And speeding is one of the leading causes of that.
If the governor doesn’t understand that, nothing will improve until he leaves office.
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A bike ride on Saturday, October 19th will explore the new bike lanes on Hollywood Blvd, which many people noted weren’t ready for prime time during the recent Hollywoods CicLAvia.
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It’s now 292 days since the California ebike incentive program’s latest failure to launch, which was promised no later than fall 2023. And an even 40 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.
Call if a false alarm this time. It turns out the dangling wire a Milwaukee bike rider was nearly decapitated by when it wrapped around his neck as he rode past a light pole was part of an Eruv that had fallen, used by a Jewish community to allow them to move about celebrate the Sabbath more freely.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
Seriously, if videos show bike riders avoiding a newly constructed Melbourne, Australia protected bike lane, there’s probably a reason for it.
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Local
A travel writer visits Los Angeles, and finds it surprisingly bikeable — as long as you’re on a guided bike tour, and do much of your riding on bike paths.
State
About damn time. Caltrans is finally getting around to adding bike lanes on San Diego’s busy Friars Road. I wasn’t comfortable riding on Friars when I live down there, and that was nearly four decades ago.
National
A British travel writer rode his bike 4,000 miles through the heart of conservative small town America, relating what he learned about “guns, politics and Trump.”
Your next road bike could be 3D printed — and the most aero bike ever built — while your next racing tires could inflate themselves, automatically adjusting for differences in terrain.
An Idaho reporter talks about the interesting and crazy people he bumped into riding his bike down the left coast.
He gets it. A Boston writer says bike lanes don’t just benefit people on bicycles, they help everyone — yes, even businesses — improving safety and accessibility, traffic flow, and environmental sustainability.
Cambridge, Massachusetts is making $1.5 million in safety improvements to a local street, weeks after a father was killed when a driver lost control and drove up onto the sidewalk he was riding his bike on. As usual, only making the improvements they knew they needed after it’s too late.
A New York woman is being called a hero after she stopped her car to save the life of a man who suffered a heart attack while he was riding, giving the experienced triathlete CPR on the side of the road until paramedics arrived.
New York City is encouraging safe and fun bicycling through their Biketober initiative, with events scheduled throughout the month in all five boroughs. Just let me know when to show up for Biketoberfest.
He gets it, too. An op-ed from a South Carolina writer says the problem isn’t dangerous bicyclists, but speeding drivers — and it’s time to slow them down.
International
Road.cc explains everything you need to know about bike cams but were afraid to ask.
A newspaper in Edinburgh, Scotland talks with local bike riders about what makes them feel unsafe on the road, including potholes, narrow roads and dangerous drivers.
A London man got his stolen ebike back by posing as a locksmith, knowing the thief — or the schmuck he sold it to — would need a new one to make it work.
A British bicycling instructor is using his bike cam to bring bad drivers to justice. Too bad that’s illegal here.
Cycling Weekly explores why twice as many bicyclists are killed riding on rural roads in the UK compared to busy city streets, and what can be done to bike riders safe on country roads.
A government minister in the Netherlands wants to see a quarter of all bike riders wearing helmets within the next decade, in a country where only four percent currently do.
Hong Kong’s police chief calls for mandatory bike helmets, as bicycling deaths rise in the city; six of the eight bicyclist killed this year weren’t wearing one. Yet somehow, no one seems to be calling for banning large trucks and SUVS, or any of the other multitude of factors that could be causing the jump, besides what the victims did or didn’t have on their head.
An Aussie man decided to move to China permanently after touring the country by bicycle, personally witnessing the changes in the countryside in the two decades when he lived and worked in Guangdong.
Competitive Cycling
Mathieu van der Poel won this year’s Men’s Gravel World Championships riding an actual gravel bike this time, instead of riding his roadie.
Pro cyclist Lachlan Morton shattered the record for riding around Australia, completing the 8,800 mile journey in just 30 days, nine hours and 59 minutes, and beating the old record by nearly seven days — despite a close call with a kangaroo.
Good news, as Belgian cycling star Wout van Aert is back on his bike for the first time since a devastating crash in the Vuelta last month.
Finally…
Forget a tent on your next bike tour, and tow a trailer — unless your trailer is a bike, of course. Sometimes it takes a village to get your stolen ebike back.
And we may have to deal with predatory LA drivers, but at least we don’t usually have to worry about migrating great white sharks.
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin
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