BikinginLA

Yesterday, I mentioned that my California Assembly Member, Rick Chavez Zbur, had signed a letter calling for a halt to the shovel-ready safety improvements planned for Forest Lawn Drive this past June.

He also supported, and voted for, SB 194, a last-minute bill introduced in the state legislature that will make it virtually impossible to remove a traffic lane on Forest Lawn for the foreseeable future, assuming Governor Newsom signs it.

So I reached out to Zbur’s opponent in the November election, fellow Democrat Colin Hernandez, for his comments. Surprisingly, he responded right away, sending me the following statement.

Forest Lawn Drive has a documented and deadly safety problem, and we have a responsibility to act before another person loses their life. After years of public input and technical review, LADOT developed a fully funded project designed to slow traffic and improve safety for everyone who uses the road, including drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.

SB 194 would block a safety project that has already gone through years of public review and is ready to move forward. Assemblymember Zbur’s support for the bill puts a narrow carveout ahead of urgent safety improvements on one of Los Angeles’s most dangerous streets. I urge Governor Newsom to veto SB 194 and Mayor Bass to allow the Forest Lawn Drive Safety and Mobility Project to proceed. Public safety decisions should be based on evidence and the needs of the community—not special interests.”

So, we have an incumbent who bends to the will of an intense lobbying campaign — to the tune of $360,000 — to halt a much needed safety project, and a challenger who supports it.

I know which way my vote will be going.

I should also mention that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass personally intervened to halt the project, which her challenger, Nithya Raman, had shepherded through years of public meetings and revisions.

So I know how that vote will go, too.

A ghost tire like those pictured above was installed on Forest Lawn Drive on Saturday to honor the four people killed there in the last 13 years, including a man killed in a single car crash last month. 

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Nope, no bias here.

The Santa Monica city council voted to approve a nearly $2 million contract to move forward with a Complete Streets redesign of 14th Street Tuesday night.

But someone in Santa Monica threw together a hastily designed website that does everything but call Vision Zero a commie plot to drain America of its vital bodily fluids.

The site calls out the made-up dangers protected bike lanes, and their supposed risks to the elderly and first responders.

It places blame for the project squarely on Streets For All, which disavows any involvement with it. And basically calls the LA group a wholly-owned subsidiary of California YIMBYs, bought and paid for by those nefarious Silicon Valley tech bros.

This didn’t start with a traffic study. It started with a movement, and the movement is billionaire-funded.

“Vision Zero” and “protected bikeway” sound like neutral engineering terms. The advocacy infrastructure behind them is not neutral, and it’s not local.

Streets for All, the region’s leading “safe streets” advocacy group, is a fiscally-sponsored project of the California YIMBY Education Fund. California YIMBY and its affiliated funds have taken roughly $15 million from Open Philanthropy — the fund run by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna — plus six-figure checks from Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. This is who is underwriting the advocacy machine pushing this design template statewide…

The bikeway funding is bundled into a state housing grant, not a resident-driven transportation request — and the political infrastructure that put this council in place traces back through Streets for All to the same tech fortunes that fund the YIMBY movement statewide. None of that makes the underlying safety goal illegitimate. It does mean residents are entitled to ask whose priorities are actually being served before a $2 million contract gets signed on a street most of them drive, not bike.

It gets worse.

This isn’t a debate about bike safety. It’s a debate about who gets to move through this city.

“Vision Zero” is marketed as a road-safety program. In practice, on corridor after corridor, it’s a template for taking travel lanes and parking away from drivers and handing that space to a small, specific mode of transportation — engineered by an advocacy and funding network built by tech investors, not by the seniors, tradespeople, and parents who actually drive these streets every day.

The whole thing sounds like it was written by someone who spent five minutes looking up words on the internet, without understanding any of them.

Or maybe just some of the safe pro-car propagandists we’ve encountered before, under different names.

And as loathe as I am to disagree with the site’s bogeymen and women, I think Claude would have done a much better job putting the whole damn thing together.

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Speaking of traffic safety, Caltrans will take part in a rare webinar scheduled for when most people can actually participate, at 7 pm on Wednesday, September 23rd, hosted by Streets Are For Everyone.

As for asking the hard questions, I’d suggest asking why they’ve spent the past few decades trying to kill us.

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Once again, multiple bike riders have been killed by a dangerous, allegedly stoned, hit-and-run driver.

This time it happened in Kent, England, on Sunday, when a 22-year old man allegedly slammed into a group of three people riding bicycles. A man in his 60s and a woman in her 50s both died at the scene.

Another woman was hospitalized with minor injuries.

The driver was charged with two counts of causing death by dangerous driving, failing to stop at the scene of a road traffic collision and possession of a class C drug.

In the UK, class C drugs include anything from anabolic steroids and nitrous oxide to prescription tranquilizers like Valium.

A 21-year old man was also arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving, while 19-year-old woman was held on suspicion of assisting an offender.

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

A 20-year old Florida man faces charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and hit-and-run involving property damage after allegedly using his car to intentionally run down bike rider in a Taco Bell parking lot, resulting in minor injuries and a fucked-up bike; the men reportedly knew each other.

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Local 

A section of the popular Ballona Creek bike path is closed due to storm damage just north of Duquesne Ave in Culver City; no word yet on when it will reopen.

Streets For All is hosting a virtual mobility debate for Santa Monica city council candidates tomorrow evening. Providing yet another opportunity to foist their YIMBY-fueled and tech bro-funded agenda on the unsuspecting citizenry of the fair city. 

Also tomorrow, Glendora will host an open house to discuss the $21.4 million People Movement Project, with eight miles of offroad greenways, and two miles of on-street multimodal improvements.

Monrovia will host a community bike ride and audit supporting the city’s Bicycle Master Plan update on Saturday, and Carson will host an interactive open house for the city’s Bicycle Action Plan.

 

State

Escondido becomes the latest California city to ban ebikes for kids under 12.

A group with the friendly name Friends of Hopkins Street sues Berkeley over plans for protected bike lanes on the eponymous street, preferring their precious parking over human lives. Which seems not-so-friendly to me, but what do I know?

They get it. The Sacramento Bee reports that California has the third most congested traffic in the US, with Los Angeles drivers losing 83 hours a year due to traffic congestion, but adding more lanes will just make things worse.

 

National

There’s not a pit deep enough for the two men charged with stealing an adaptive bicycle from a 10-year old Santa Fe, New Mexico kid with cerebral palsy.

The victim gets the blame in a Colorado crash, when a 32-year old ebike rider was killed in a right hook, and accused of speeding up to pass a semi driver on the right side. Yes, that’s possible, but it’s more likely that the driver didn’t notice the victim on his right until it was too late.

A 31-year old El Paso, Texas man learns the hard way that it’s probably not the best idea to try to run over a bike cop during a traffic stop.

A Michigan TV station says bicycling deaths are rising in the state, and asks if anything will change after a 12-year old boy was killed by a driver while riding his bike. Nothing changed after dozens of little kids were shot to death at Sandy Hook and Robb Elementary, so what makes them think anyone will actually care about a single kid on a bicycle?

A 77-year old New York man was killed in a head-on collision with an ebike rider, who lost control of his ebike in a bi-directional protected bike lane, and crashed into the man’s bicycle. As usual, though, the story doesn’t say whether it was a legal ped-assist bike, or an illegal e-moto.

Heartbreaking story, as Florida man says he watched surveillance video of his bike-riding brother run down and killed by a hit-and-run driver in New York State from 1,200 miles away in Florida, saying the driver didn’t even try to stop.

 

International

Montreal becomes the latest Canadian city to consider going backwards on bike lanes, after building a bike network that has made it North America’s most bike-friendly big city.

A look at London’s leading bicycle cafés.

A London bike rider says he’s embarrassed to be a bicyclist after watching one bike rider after another ride through a busy crosswalk. Seriously, pedestrians are the only road users more vulnerable than we are, so just stop for them, already. 

Leading Euro bikemaker Orbea announced a recall of their 2019 and 2020 Optima urban ebikes due to a possible weak joint that could cause the frame to break while being ridden.

Sad news from Ukraine, where a Ukrainian soldier who had been photographed early in the war riding a bicycle while carrying three RPGs was killed in a Russian airstrike. War sucks. 

 

Competitive Cycling

When we last left our heroes, the Vuelta peloton was taking a well-earned rest day, as Enric Mas held tightly to his red leader’s jersey; Tuesday’s stage 16 saw 21-year old Brit rookie Matthew Brennan take his fourth stage win, with Mas 2 minutes, 6 seconds ahead of Felix Gall, as Primož Roglič stands another 4 second back in third.

Dutch sprinter Dylan Groenewegen suffered a torn rib muscle and a shattered bicycle when he was hit by a motorcyclist while on a training ride, saying “it could have been much worse.”

Tadej Pogačar may be done for the season, but he’ll be back next year, and every year through 2032.

Is anyone really surprised to learn that bra doping is a myth, and maximizing cleavage doesn’t actually do anything to make women faster? Although it would do more to draw more male fans to women’s cycling. 

Velo says pro cyclists are surprisingly bullish on the prospect of wearing airbags to prevent injuries.

 

Finally…

Honestly, who among us hasn’t ridden over 400 miles dressed as an orangutan? Ditching the subway for a $1,300 ebike.

And who needs a motorcycle when you could have a Ducati?

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

Oh, and fuck Putin.