Once again, I’m unable to post a new Morning Links today.
But this time, it’s not my fault.
Honest.
My internet service went down a couple hours ago, as I was working on today’s post. And took my unsaved changes with it.
After waiting patiently and rebooting both my laptop and modem more than once, I have no choice but to throw in the towel and try again tomorrow — assuming Spectrum cable can get its shit together by then.
So keep your fingers crossed, and hopefully we’ll be back on Thursday.
And yes, in case you’re wondering, I pecked this out on my phone, which doesn’t have access to all the links I’ve saved for the last two days.
But at least my mobile phone company still loves me.
Cypress Park residents are tired of the sound of speeding cars, screeching brakes and crunching metal, saying it’s just a matter of time before someone gets killed. Unfortunately, it’s not an accident that their city council representative is commonly known as Road Kill Gil for his willful inaction on traffic safety issues.
Hermosa Beach has renamed the sharrows on Hermosa Ave for Julian Katz, the former public works commissioner and longtime advocate for bikeways who passed away last year. Out of respect to Katz, I’ll keep any wisecracks about the non-benefits of sharrows to myself, for once.
And on a personal note, I hope you’ll join me in wishing the Corgi a happy birthday today, as she turns 13; we’ve now had her for almost nine of those years.
Ramirez was riding south on Lynwood, splitting lanes between a car and the semi, when he either lost control of his bike or was hit by one of the drivers as he neared 8th, and somehow fell under the rear wheels of the truck.
The driver kept going without stopping, failing to notice — or ignoring — a witness chasing behind in his car, honking and flashing his lights.
Despite frantic efforts to save his life, Ramirez died at the scene.
So now all the driver has to do to get away with it is claim just that, regardless of whether it has any basis in fact.
The truck was described as an all-white semi with sleeper cab and a box trailer, and no visible logos or other markings, California license 4MY4587. Police believe the driver may be on the way to Fresno.
As always, there is a standing $50,000 reward from the City of Los Angeles for any fatal hit-and-run.
This is at least the 32nd bicycling fatality in Southern California this year, and the 13th that I’m aware of in Los Angeles County; it’s also the seventh in the City of Los Angeles.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for Jaime Ramirez and all his family and loved ones.
Thanks to Megan Lynch and John Dammon for the heads-up.
Then ended up demanding that the city council remove all bike lanes in his district from the mobility plan.
An attempt that failed miserably.
Now he’s suddenly called a public meeting to discuss plans to improve safety on Eagle Rock Blvd on exceptionally short notice.
Neale Stokes reports that hand-scrawled posters have just gone up around Cedillo’s Verdugo field office, announcing a last minute public meeting to be held on Saturday to discuss crosswalks, bike lanes and traffic safety on the busy boulevard.
Never mind that no other notice mentioning a meeting regarding Eagle Rock Blvd has appeared online or in local publications to give more than a handful of people a chance to offer their input.
It’s almost like he wants to hold a public meeting without the public actually showing up.
Except for the ones who’ll support his predetermined position, of course.
Except for the director of USC’s Transportation Engineering Program, who argues that moving cars by maintaining the outdated Level of Service standard is more important than saving human lives.
No, really.
To the editor: Road diets are a travesty regardless of how we pay for them.
Proponents of reducing road capacity invariably claim that lane reductions can be executed with little impact on traffic volumes. They can, but traffic volumes do not describe level of service. A given traffic volume can be achieved with denser, lower speed flow; or with sparser, higher speed flow.
Initiatives like Vision Zero focus worthy attention on pedestrian safety but deliver far too few safety improvements in exchange for potentially crushing increases in network travel delays. Lives have value. Time has value. Mobility has value. Vision Zero mismanages the trade-offs.
Put fuel tax revenues into capacity, maintenance, repair and congestion pricing tools.
James E. Moore II, Los Angeles
The writer is a professor in USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering and Price School of Public Policy and director of USC’s Transportation Engineering Program.
Yet another reminder that the old, entrenched attitudes are hard to defeat.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes is all too real.
A Bay Area bike rider lists all the specialized — or Specialized — gear you’ll need for your first bikepacking ride. Or you could just a sleeping bag and a tent, strap ’em onto the bike you already own, and just go.
Then there’s the 350-mile, unsupported, ultra endurance Dirty Kanza XL, featuring the 28-year old woman who won last year’s 2,745-mile Tour Divide — even she didn’t even learn how to ride a bike until she was 20.
The traffic light is the first step in a planned neighborhood greenway — a reduced calorie version of bicycle boulevard — on Rosewood stretching from La Cienega to La Brea.
The street will also feature a traffic diverter to force drivers to turn right onto La Brea, to keep Rosewood from becoming yet another cut-through street swamped with motor vehicles.
This is what we could have had on 4th Street if former councilmember Tom La Bonge hadn’t riled up Larchmont area residents by failing to explain how a bike boulevard would benefit them, while promising not to install a red light that was never planned for the street to begin with.
So thanks off to Koretz, who hasn’t exactly been a friend to bike riders in Westwood and West LA, for doing the right thing here.
Originally, researchers believed that more bike lanes and the increase in cyclists would lead to a “safety-in-numbers” effect: the more cyclists on the road, the more likely drivers would slow down and be aware of their surroundings. Instead, they found that safer cities aren’t due to the increase in cyclists, but the infrastructure built for them – specifically, separated and protected bike lanes. They found that bicycling infrastructure is significantly associated with fewer fatalities and better road-safety outcomes.
And like previous studies have demonstrated, it shows that protected bike lanes don’t just improve safety for people on bikes, but for everyone on the roadway.
Researchers found that like the grid blocks found in cities with higher intersection density, bike facilities act as “calming” mechanisms on traffic, slowing cars and reducing fatalities.
“The U.S. is killing 40,000 people a year on roads, and we treat it as the cost of doing business,” Marshall said. “A lot of the existing research focuses on bicycle safety; with this study, we’re interested in everyone’s safety.”
The study also concludes that slowing traffic through bike lanes and other improvements can result in more minor crashes, but fewer deaths — which is the exact purpose of Vision Zero.
And refutes the arguments used by groups like Keep LA Moving, who have used a slight increase in car crashes to argue against the road diet on Venice Blvd.
Colorado now has a vulnerable users law, which increases penalties for drivers that seriously injure or kill bike riders and pedestrians.
Missoula, Montana rolls out new rules for ebikes and e-scooters, saying they’re not just for Lycra-clad racers. Because so many racers ride scooters in their skin-tight Lycra kits, evidently.
A Chicago bike rider says banning bikes from the city’s new Riverwalk after promoting it as a bike & pedestrian pathway in order to get a $99 million loan to build it is bait-and-switch, even as an alderman promises to pass the ban.
An Ottawa letter writer says banning right turns on red lights next to bike lanes is a bad idea, because drivers are more likely to right hook a rider when the light is green. Which would make sense if most drivers bothered to look right before they turn right on a red. But they don’t.
Beijing will open the city’s first bike-only roadway tomorrow; the 4-mile bikeway promises to cut 14 minutes from commute times to a nearby job center, even with a 9 mph speed limit — and no ebikes.
It’s no surprise that rideouts rankle the tight-of-sphincter; Homo sapiens probably started feeling contempt for anybody younger than them as soon as our life expectancy hit 30. And yes, being teenagers, rideout participants also do things a mature adult might consider “stupid.” In fact, I’m willing to bet some of them are even listening to that rap music and smoking the pot.
Even so, there’s not a shred of evidence that what has become an international phenomenon has resulted in an alarming rate of injury to either the public or to the riders themselves, and the likelihood that one of them might knock you down unintentionally—let alone target you for an attack—is so tiny as to be laughable.
Although he might want to decide whether to call them bike-outs, ride-outs or rideouts.
I stumbled on the first of what I assume will be many LA ride-outs on Memorial Day, as well walked past a group of young bike riders gathered in a park near The Grove.
Around 45 minutes later, they came rolling through the upscale mall, whooping and popping wheelies, 30 or so teenage boys, mostly on fixies, as shoppers jumped out of their way.
As much as I admired their spirit, and the sheer rebellion in their affront to an icon of LA commercialism, putting that many pedestrians at risk was questionable, at the very least.
Although in my imagination, I like to assume it was done out of righteous indignation after one of the riders was kicked out of the Grove with his bike.
But next time, maybe keep the ride-outs to the street outside, where the only people they’ll annoy are safely wrapped in a few tons of steel and glass.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps going on.
An Australian grandfather describes how he survived by playing dead after a man standing behind a car shot him twice in the head while he was riding his bike on a dirt trail two years ago, for no apparent reason; his would-be killer still hasn’t been found.
Pasadena police celebrated Bike Month with a bicycle and pedestrian enforcement detail last Fridays, ticketing 85 drivers for violations that endanger people on foot or two wheels; just five people on bikes were busted, along with 17 pedestrians. Which refutes all those people who insist that people on bikes always break the law.
Bicyclingoffers up an entirely subjective list of the greatest bikes ever made — if you can get past the nausea-inducing rapid fire photo montage at the top of the page. And if you can get past the fact that it doesn’t include a single bike from the last century, which I can’t.
Talk about getting it wrong. A deputy director with Utah’s Department of Transportation, who has apparently never heard of induced demand, says they need wider roads to avoid gridlock like California — which enjoys wide roads along with hellish traffic congestion.
And even a tornado knows better than to mess with the Wright Brothers bike shop.
My daughter happens to be driving through Dayton, OH after last night’s tornados and just sent this picture gratefully reporting that the historic Wright Brothers bicycle shop was untouched. Wright Patterson AFB and the USAF Museum are also safe. (Yes, she’s an airplane geek) pic.twitter.com/BRAVNpUNOC
May 28, 2019 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Morning Links: Taking traffic safety deniers seriously, walking bikes on the Troutdale bridge, and Bruce Lee was one of us
Good to see you back after the long holiday weekend.
Now grab your coffee and buckle in. We’ve got a lot of territory to cover, and a lot to catch up on.
Today’s photo captures an e-bakfiets used as an expensive marketing gimmick for a perfume pop-up at the Grove, photobombed by a hot and tired corgi.
Two years after state lawmakers boosted the gas tax with a promise to improve California streets, some cities have raised the ire of drivers by spending millions of the new dollars on “road diet” projects that reduce the number and size of lanes for motor vehicles.
Projects have touched off a debate as taxpayer advocates and motorists complain that the higher gas taxes they are paying for smoother trips will actually fund projects that increase traffic congestion.
Especially if those funds go towards reducing excess road capacity for motor vehicles, which increasing overall capacity by installing bike lanes.
Also known as the dreaded — to them — road diet.
Not to mention knee-jerk opposition from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn, which never met a tax they liked.
Gas tax money can legally go to such projects, but that does not mean it should, said David Wolfe, legislative director for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., which opposed the original gas tax increase and supported an unsuccessful statewide ballot measure last year to repeal it.It has since continued to watch and criticize how state and local governments are spending the money.
“When Proposition 6 was on the ballot, all voters heard was money would go to road repair and maintenance,” Wolfe said. “They want roads to be repaired. They don’t want roads to be taken away with their taxpayer dollars.”
Never mind that road diets have been shown to reduce overall crashes by 19% in the Golden State, and as much as 47% elsewhere.
So they’re complaining about using gas tax funds to save their own lives and repair bills.
Smart. Real smart.
Never mind also that $2.27 billion of the gas tax increase went to repair and maintain roads, while $750 million a year was set aside for transit projects.
And a paltry $100 million went to bike and pedestrian projects. Most of which benefit drivers, as well.
But try telling that to angry motorists and traffic safety deniers while they light their torches and sharpen their pitchforks.
“It’s creating gridlock on Venice Boulevard, which is then causing cut-through traffic into our neighborhoods,” said Selena Inouye, board president of the Westside Los Angeles Neighbors Network, a group formed in response to the project…
Inouye, a retired social worker, said having motorists pay higher gas taxes so the money can be used to reduce the capacity of roads is contradictory.
She and her husband are paying more than $4 a gallon for gas at her local service station, she said, a price that has been increased by the state gas tax.
“The money should be used to help with congestion overall, and I don’t think that road diets help congestion. I think they cause congestion,” Inouye said.
Even though no one else seems to be able to find that gridlock they keep complaining about. Or that only 12 cents of that $4-plus for a gallon of gas is due to the gas tax increase.
But those are just facts.
And facts just get in the way when you’re insisting on having yours.
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Malibu Hills resident Chris Willig forwards his observations on the absurd, and possibly illegal, attempts by LA County to force bike riders to walk over the newly reopened Troutdale bridge.
Mulholland Highway had been closed in Cornell for about 6-months since the Woolsey Fire which caused the Troutdale Bridge to melt. The catastrophe has vexed cyclists. They’ve been forced to use a detour of about 6 miles on Kanan Road to go around the closure. And that route is plagued by increased traffic particularly 1,000’s of heavy debris laden trucks hauling the remains of burned out houses.
A temporary one-lane bridge opened Wednesday afternoon, but the celebration from the cycling community has been short lived. Cyclists have been banned from the main road bed with LA County officials trying to force people to walk their bikes on a pedestrian sidepath. This strange traffic configuration can been seen in the photo (viewing north from the south bank of Triunfo Creek) with all of the signage required to direct traffic. It seems ridiculous since the crossing is now controlled by a traffic light system to allow only oneway passage at a posted 10 MPH. As cyclists using this route are normally in road shoes, walking the 230 feet required seems dangerous. More importantly, if many cyclists take the detour trudging across the bridge as instructed, it is clear traffic will be interrupted by all the dismounting and remounting in the street, especially at the south terminus (pictured).
The safest and most convenient routing for road cyclists would be using exactly the same rules for auto traffic. Ironically, the only change from pre-fire norm would be we’d have to cut our speed in half to accommodate the cars slowed by the new speed limit.
After a Glasgow woman is killed riding her bike, a man does some soul searching, wondering whether bicycling is worth the risk. And concluding he may keep riding, but can’t recommend it to a friend.
I sort of want to be like him when I grow up. A Michigan man gave up his comfy retirement to ride his bike across the US, and in countries around the world. And spent New Years Day riding a fat tire bike on the ice and snow of Antarctica. No offense to our southernmost continent, but I’d prefer a more temperate climate. Which Antartica will probably be in a few years, if we all keep burning fossil fuels.
Evidently, I decided to cap off a difficult week with a bout of low blood sugar that knocked me out for a few hours as I was trying to work. And left me too out of it to get anything done once I woke up.
Just one more reminder that diabetes sucks, even when you have it mostly under control.
So I’m giving up and throwing in the towel tonight.
Get out on your bike and enjoy the holiday weekend. Ride safely and defensively.
And I’ll see you back here bright and early Tuesday morning.
Altadena Councilwoman Dorothy Wong expressed concern for vulnerable road users being sandwiched between 50-foot long trucks, cones and cars as work begins on removing sediment from the Devil’s Gate Dam, putting 400 dump trucks on the streets of the San Gabriel Valley every day.
A Kansas man rode his bike a thousand miles to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in just ten days, only to have it stolen off the back of his truck. But raised over $33,000 to fight eating disorders along the way.
