BikinginLA

Day 245 of LA’s Vision Zero failure to end traffic deaths by 2025. 

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Sometimes it takes a miracle to survive a bike crash.

According to the Catholic Church, anyway.

A 15-year old Italian boy will be canonized by the pope — aka sainted — this coming Sunday, 19 years after Carlos Acutis died of leukemia.

Known as the God’s Influencer and the Millennial Saint, Acutis is credited with performing two miracles in response to prayers after his death — the healing of 4-year-old Brazilian boy with a serious pancreatic malformation, and the recovery of a 21-year-old Costa Rican woman who was nearly killed in a bicycle crash.

And he was one of us, riding his bicycle around the neighborhood he grew up in while befriending doormen and others who worked in the area.

But ain’t we all just two-wheeled saints, anyway?

Photo by Pixabay. 

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ICE officers “bull rushed” a man outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Downtown Los Angeles while deploying lethal weapons to keep the crowd back, apparently for the crime of just riding his bike past them on the opposite side of the street.

Thanks to Erik for the heads-up. 

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LADOT wants to know what you think about plans to create a nearly two-mile route along New Hampshire Avenue and Berendo Street between Koreatown and Pico-Union, providing bike riders and pedestrians a quieter, and presumably safer, alternative to busy Vermont Ave.

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Mark your calendar for the Corazón del Valle Active Streets event on November 2nd, closing five miles of streets in El Monte and South El Monte to cars, and opening them up to people.

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

A Calgary op-ed says no one is considering the needs of children and their parents, as three provinces move to rip out bike lanes against the wishes of local governments, leaving kids caught in an endless battle of bikes versus cars.

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

Police in Utah are looking for a hit-and-run ebike rider who knocked a woman walking on a Salt Lake City area trail into a ravine, leaving her with multiple leg fractures.

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Local 

A Monrovia police chase was caught on dashcam video, showing cops running after and catching a suspected bike thief.

LA County Sheriff’s deputies will conduct a 12-hour bicycle and pedestrian safety operation in West Hollywood Friday from 5 am to 5 pm, ticketing any violation that puts either group at risk regardless of who commits it. So ride to the letter of the law until you cross the city limits so you’re not the one who gets ticketed. 

Santa Monica’s E-Bike Voucher Program marked its first anniversary last month, providing 122 income-qualified residents with vouchers up to $2,000 to purchase bikes or ebikes.

 

State

The San Diego Union-Tribune seems to get it, with a news story that appears to make the distinction between e-bikes and electric dirt bikes, warning parents that the latter aren’t street legal. Although the story is hidden behind their paywall for subscribers only, so we’re kinda riding blind here.

A 29-year old man faces charges for allegedly riding his bike up to a Chula Vista police patrol car and throwing a hammer through the window, leaving one cop with minor injuries.

Sad news from Santa Cruz County, where a 78-year old Soquel man died when he veered off the road and crashed his ebike into an embankment.

More sad news, this time form from Woodside, where a someone riding a bicycle died in the hospital after being struck by a pickup driver on Saturday, although there’s no word on how the crash occurred or the identity of the victim.

Still more sad news comes from Vallejo, where someone riding a bicycle was killed by a driver early Sunday; again, there’s no details on who was killed or how it happened.

 

National

A new study says if you want to ride faster, pay attention to how you hold the handlebars.

Men’s Health explains how to balance running and bicycling the same day, without burning out.

Data from YouGov says young people have a huge appetite for ebikes, but feel priced out by the high cost. Trust me, it ain’t just young people. 

A Roswell, New Mexico man is facing charges for allegedly shooting and killing another man, after the victim kicked over his bicycle. Yet another reminder that no bicycle, or perceived slight, is worth a human life.

Kindhearted South Dakota cops bought a new bicycle for an eight-year old girl whose bicycle was destroyed in a collision; there’s also a crowdfunding campaign to help pay her medical expenses.

A 54-year old Oklahoma man recreated the 958-mile bike ride he took from Fruita, Colorado to Copan, Oklahoma as a 14-year old runaway escaping an abusive home.

I want to be like him when I grow up. A 75-year old Wisconsin man is still riding over seven decades after his training wheels came off, completing his 200,000th mile last week. I may or may not have passed that mark already, since I never bothered to count miles in the first decade or so of my riding career. 

Thousands of bike riders took over Chicago’s iconic DuSable Lakeshore Drive on Sunday, when the annual Bike the Drive shut down a 30-mile section of the roadway.

There’s a special place in hell for whoever assaulted a 44-year old autistic man as he rode his bicycle in an Indiana park, where a group of people set upon him for “following them too closely” when he stopped for a drink.

There are now over 50 candidates for the unofficial title of mayor of a Massachusetts bike path, ranging from cats to a cactus.

A writer for Slate says Alabama is becoming a destination for bicycling with more than 2,000 miles of dedicated biking and walking trails, and a new law that was set to commit the state to further connect the state’s 67 counties — except Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” rescinded an estimated $93 million in federal funding the state expected to receive to expand the trail system.

 

International

Momentum offers advice on how to find a bike for short people. Which my five-foot tall wife can attest is a lot harder than you might think.

The BBC might be starting to get it. The news agency corrected a recent story to say the victim of a Scottish crash was riding an electric motorcycle, rather than an electric bicycle, after a reader complained that they had misused the term “ebike.”

A 19-year old English man used his college gap year to raise the equivalent of nearly $60,000 for charity — including one benefitting jockeys — by riding 2,600 miles to visit 60 UK horse race tracks.

You’ve got to be kidding. A 13-year old boy in the UK has been arrested on a charge of suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving for causing the death of 12-year old boy, after using the wheels of an ebike to propel a park roundabout, or what we would call a merry-go-round.

That’s more like it. A British man has been jailed for 14 years for the drugged hit-and-run crash that killed a 47-year old man riding a bicycle, driving while high on coke and without a license, then burning his car in an alley to hide the evidence.

Dublin, Ireland is working to solve the bike parking problem by rolling out 300 secure bike lockers across the city.

Ireland’s Kildare County is getting a nearly $2 million, less than two-mile long bike lane “in the middle of nowhere” that no one, including bicyclists, seems to want — but they’re getting it anyway to improve safety on a dangerous stretch of roadway.

Around 7,000 bicyclists turned out in the snow for the annual Passo Stelvio Day, when the legendary Giro climb is closed to motor vehicles and open to bicycle traffic.

 

Competitive Cycling

Multiple Tour de France winners Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard will join Primož Roglič and Mexican star Isaac del Toro in a new four-person, two stage bike race in Andorra this October.

Evidently, losing a testicle to cancer really does make you faster. Norway’s Torstein Træen became at least the second cyclist to lead a Grand Tour after surviving the disease, after Lance set the standard for fellow mono-testicled cyclists in the Tour de France before being stripped of his seven wins.

Speaking of which, João Almeida told Tom Pidcock to grow a pair when Pidcock refused to take a pull as they struggled to catch Jonas Vingegaard on the final climb on Sunday’s ninth stage.

French cycling prodigy Paul Seixas threw down the gauntlet for the next generation by winning the Tour de l’Avenir, becoming the youngest ever winner — at 18 years and 339 days — of what Road.cc calls the de-facto U23 Tour de France, beating 19-year old Belgian Jarno Widar by 40 seconds.

British Cycling is breaking records with the help of bespoke, 3D-printed metal bikes.

Palestinian paracyclists competed in the Para Cycling Road World Championships over the weekend as members of the Gaza Sunbirds, made up of bicyclists who have lost limbs as a result of the Israeli war.

 

Finally…

Your next car could be a velomobile — and a real Motofocker. Now even the walls are out to get us.

And that feeling when you enter a car in a bike race, and lose by six days.

Although to be fair, it was over 130 years ago.

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

Oh, and fuck Putin.