BikinginLA

Day 41 of LA’s Vision Zero failure to end traffic deaths by 2025. 

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Let’s get the worst news out of the way first.

Beloved UCLA Distinguished Urban Planning Research Professor Donald Shoup has passed away.

Known to friends and fans as Shoup Dogg, Donald Should gained fame among urbanists, traffic planners and advocates with his 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking, which established him as one of the world’s leading experts on parking, and the hidden costs it imposes on builders and cities.

I'm deeply saddened to share that Donald Shoup passed away last night. He was the ideal academic—curious, methodical, and concerned with turning ideas into real-world change. TAing his parking course these past few years has one of the greatest honors of my life. Rest in peace, Shoup Dogg.

— M. Nolan Gray 🥑 (@mnolangray.bsky.social) 2025-02-08T04:34:00.707Z

Here’s how Shoup was described in his bio by the university.

Donald Shoup is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. His research has focused on transportation, public finance, and land economics.

In his 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup recommended that cities should (1) charge fair market prices for on-street parking, (2) spend the revenue to benefit the metered areas, and (3) remove off-street parking requirements. In his 2018 edited book, Parking and the City, Shoup and 45 other academic and practicing planners examined the results in cities that have adopted these three reforms. The successful outcomes show that parking reforms can improve cities, the economy, and the environment.

Shoup is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners and an Honorary Professor at the Beijing Transportation Research Center. He has received the American Planning Association’s National Excellence Award for a Planning Pioneer and the American Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Distinguished Educator Award.

But that doesn’t begin to do him justice, starting with the love his former students and associates held for him, along with virtually anyone else he came in contact with.

Myself included.

I always found Shoup engaging and helpful, whether in person or on social media. Whenever I reached out to him, he responded immediately, offering me a Cliff Notes education in urban planning, while challenging me to do my own research.

Much of what I know today today about parking and urban planning I learned from him.

But more than that, Shoup has done more than anyone else to get cities to reform their parking policies, including eliminating parking minimums, here in the US and around the world.

The world will be poorer place without Shoup, but far better off because of him.

He was 86.

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No surprise here.

Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto has come back with a proposed ordinance setting minimum standards for Measure HLA.

And advocates have found it, well, lacking.

The city has been slow walking the legally required implementation of HLA — which requires the city to build out the ten-year old mobility plan whenever a street gets resurfaced — since its passage by an overwhelming margin nearly a year ago.

Streetsblog reports the ordinance will come up before a joint session of the Transportation and Public Works Committees at City Hall, starting at 8:30 this Wednesday morning.

According to Streetsblog’s Joe Linton,

Item 4 (council file 24-0173) includes the City Attorney’s draft implementation ordinance, a new law essentially designed to specify how the city will comply with Measure HLA. Some advocates anticipate that the ordinance will be helpful to remove some city department excuses currently blocking HLA upgrades. But the ordinance also attempts to water down some parts of HLA, including introducing a few loopholes where the city could opt out of some improvements required under Measure HLA. It also sets up a cumbersome extra appeal process that would likely mean serious delays before the city improves streets. The item also looks to codify current relatively driver-centric outreach standards for HLA upgrades that “may result in closures or disruption of access to the public right-of-way.” That “access” is not the everyday dangers/barriers faced by people walking, in wheelchairs, or bicycling – it’s a euphemism meaning repurposing space currently for driving or parking cars. Safe streets advocates face Hobson’s choice on this one: push for modifications hoping for a somewhat stronger ordinance (changes could mean sending it back to the City Attorney for months further delaying delayed safety upgrades) or get a weak city processes approved that could facilitate some improvements.

Meanwhile, Streets For All called out specific problems with another separate, but related, proposed HLA implementation document that specifies facility minimums.

While most of the minimums make sense, there are some that either violate HLA or have the potential to violate it. Specifically, the city should:

1. Not include shared bike/bus lanes as acceptable for the Bicycle Lane Network. Bus lanes are bus infrastructure that brave cyclists can also use; they are not a substitute for actual bike lanes.

2. State how they will accomplish speed, volume, and crossing control on the Bicycle Enhanced Network (neighborhood streets); right now, the draft just says they will implement it, but not it should specific treatments such as speed humps, traffic circles, chicanes, etc.

3. Include basic improvements for the “moderate” tier on the Transit Enhanced Network; currently, they have state “none” are required. Improved bus stops, better signage, and transit signal priority are basic things that should be included.

4. Bus lanes should be implemented as envisioned in the Mobility Plan 2035. Currently, City Planning suggests the City can forgo the implementation of a bus lane on a TEN street if the bus lane “would not support a transit operator’s planned or existing service pattern.”

Streets For All asks you to attend City Planning’s virtual meeting at 6 pm this Thursday, basing your comments on the points above, as well as emailing your comments to City Planning.

If any of that seems confusing, it was for me, too. Thanks to Joe Linton for helping me clarify what I had originally written. 

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Life is cheap in Napa County, where the driver who killed an Oregon couple as they rode their bikes on vacation got less than one lousy year behind bars.

Nike executive Christian Deaton, 52, and 48-year old Nike designer Michelle Deaton were riding on Silverado Trail in October of 2023 when they were struck by unsecured lumber in the back of a truck driven by 57-year old Porfirio Sanchez.

Sanchez had faced up to four years behind bars, but was sentenced to just 364 days in jail after pleading to two counts of vehicular manslaughter; prosecutors dismissed charges of felony hit-and-run, providing police with false information and altering evidence as part of a plea deal.

He will have to serve just over half of his overly lenient sentence before being released.

Proving once again that killing two innocent people is just no big deal, as long as they’re riding bicycles.

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No surprise here, either.

Singletracks reports a number of Los Angeles-area mountain bike and gravel trails were destroyed in the recent Palisades, Eaton and Hughes fires.

According to the magazine, the Mount Wilson, Mount Lowe, Middle Sam Merrill and Sunset Ridge trails above Altadena were burned, along with the Backbone, Rogers Road and Sullivan Canyon trails near the Palisades.

Others, such as the famed El Prieto trail, were also damaged.

While some may re-open as early as May, it will take years to fully recover from the damage.

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Traffic violence hits a little too close to home for the folks at Bike Talk this week, and Walk ‘n Rollers steps up to help kids affected by last month’s LA Fires.

biketalk.org/2025/02/bike…@bikinginla.bsky.social @pedalingpast60.bsky.social @nyc.streetsblog.org

— Bike Talk (@biketalk.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T00:33:19.454Z

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

Miami Beach becomes the latest city to rip out bike lanes, removing the bike lanes from one-way, pedestrian-friendly Ocean Drive, and returning it to a pedestrian unfriendly two-way street. Because cars.

Nice guy. The UK’s Health Minister was fired after it was revealed that he had sent racist, sexist and otherwise offensive messages on WhatsApp — including his sincere wish that a constituent named Nick would get run over by a garbage truck while riding on a local bikeway.

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

Nice guy, part two. A 31-year old British man will spend a lousy four months behind bars for ramming his bicycle into the legs of his former girlfriend, knocking her to the ground and calling her obscene names while standing over her.

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Local  

Seriously? Confused Claremont drivers can’t figure out how green bike lanes and bike boxes work.

 

State

SlashGear follows up on what happened after the noseless, gel-padded VSEAT bike seat lured two of the Sharks on Shark Tank to invest two hundred grand for a 25% equity, saying the company founded by a California woman and her trainer is still around, selling the unique seats online while promising to alleviate crotch pain for $119.

A San Diego letter writer says if you really want to keep bike riders safe, enforce the damn traffic laws, already.

An 18-year old Fresno man was hospitalized in critical condition with a head injury after he was struck by a driver when he allegedly rode his bike through a red light.

Once again, a police chase has led to another mass casualty crash, after six people were hospitalized, two critically, when a driver fleeing from the cops crashed into a San Francisco restaurant’s outdoor seating area while people were watching the Super Bowl.

 

National

The US Bicycle Route System has added another 3,568 miles to its cross-country network, bringing the total to over 23,000 miles, nearly halfway to its goal of 50,000 miles.

Seattle Bike Blog writer Tom Fucoloro, author of Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars, says if the city wants to challenge the dominance of motor vehicles, it “needs support from the people pulling every lever of power.”

A writer for Streets Minnesota says ebikes can mean greater freedom for people with limited vision, for whom driving can be a challenge, if they can do it at all. Thanks to BikeLA Executive Director Eli Akira Kaufman for the heads-up.

America’s leading anti-urbanist has come down strongly against congestion pricing, as President Trump announced plans to kill the program in New York City, even though it has already proven successful in reducing congestion and improving safety. Which doesn’t bode well for implementing it in Los Angeles for the next four years.

A Maryland tourist has filed a $1.6 million lawsuit after she suffered “significant” injuries when a Virginia Beach, Virginia cop doored her without looking as she rode her bike in a bike lane.

 

International

The Velo podcast talks with a British Columbia bike shop owner about the trials and travails of just trying to earn a profit and stay in business these days.

That’s more like it. A 31-year old British woman will spend the next six years and eight months behind bars for killing a 71-year old man riding a bicycle while she was driving distracted and “persistently” surfing Instagram, Facebook and SnapChat behind the wheel, as well as texting.

A writer in the UK thought a ride with a 66-year old grandmother would be relaxing, until the world class masters cyclist dropped him like a sack of spuds.

More proof that bicycling is good for you, as a new Finnish study shows people who bike to work tend to take fewer sick days off from work, along with a reduced risk of long-term absences due to illness.

Bicyclists in Budapest, Hungary will now enjoy a connected, protected bicycle highway on the city’s Grand Blvd.

A Nigerian evangelical minister braved nine days of bad roads, crashes and bigass snakes to ride his bike nearly 400 miles across the country to wish the General Overseer of the Church a happy 83rd birthday.

A new Chinese study shows a one-size-fits-all approach to bicycle and motorcycle thefts won’t work, because bicycle and motorcycle thefts are clustered in different areas, under different circumstances; surprisingly, it also showed that the proportion of low-income residents in a given area led to more motorcycle thefts, but fewer bicycle thefts. Although it would be interesting to see if those results would hold over here. 

 

Competitive Cycling

The peloton put on the brakes and called a halt to the third stage of France’s Étoile de Bessèges in protest after several cars and trucks made their way onto the course, compressing riders into a single lane on the roadway.

Belgium’s Soudal-Quick Step development team has pulled out of the upcoming Tour of Rwanda over fears the armed conflict in neighboring Congo will spread.

Sixty-one-year old Vietnamese cyclist Hoang Hai Nam won that country’s first gold medal at the 2025 Asian Road Cycling Championships in the over-60 men’s individual time trial while riding a borrowed bike, after the Vietnamese team’s bicycles and gear were burned in a truck fire.

Bystanders came to the rescue of a New Zealander competing in the country’s annual coast-to-coast run, kayak and bike race after he crashed his bike just three miles into the 34-mile bicycle stage, loaning him a foldie from their camper when his derailleur snapped completely several miles later.

 

Finally…

Probably not the best idea to crash your speeding ebike into a cop. Your new smart handlebars could have been funded through OnlyFans photos — yes, that OnlyFans.

And who needs spandex when you’ve got chain mail?

Seems a bit overkill… pic.twitter.com/RkL4Q8jJhE

— Rory McCarron (@CyclingLawLDN) February 2, 2025

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

Oh, and fuck Putin.