Come join me on my morning bike commute. Ride three miles in my shoes. Maybe you’ll be outraged enough by what you see to write your city councilperson, demanding safer streets. Maybe you’ll decide cycling in L.A. isn’t so bad after all and go for a ride. Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll decide not to froth at the mouth in protest when road safety improvements to keep cyclists safe add a couple of minutes to your morning commute.
If nothing else, you’ll get to see what it looks like from the other side when you honk your horn as you blow past a cyclist who momentarily inconveniences you — and, I hope, decide never to do that again.
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One of LA’s most questionable urban planning writers is at it again.
In his latest post for City Watch, Richard Lee Abrams a) confuses light rail with trolleys, b) blames bike lanes, not all those people in single occupancy vehicles, for all that traffic congestion, and c) says the quote below proves the city has an anti-car policy, when it does nothing of the sort.
Bicycles are such a slow means of locomotion that they impede faster vehicles. As a result, bicycles cause increased traffic congestion. The City admits that its policy of adding Bike Lanes to city streets is a part of an anti-car policy. Director of Planning, Vince Bertoni stated in a July 13, 2017 LA Magazine interview:
“…[We want streets that don’t] just revolve around the automobile. We’re looking at what it’s like to walk, bicycle, even skateboard down these streets and all the other ways we’ll get around. We’re going to be putting in wider sidewalks, trees, bicycle lanes that people feel protected in.”
That’s before blaming corruption for LA’s Transit Oriented Development policies, and prescribing solutions to LA traffic that would only make the problem worse and degrade the quality of life he claims to be trying to save.
An Irish writer says cycling has been vilified for doping, but other sports haven’t faced the same scrutiny — especially since the doctor in Spain’s Operation Puerto doping scandal also had clients in soccer, athletics, tennis and boxing, none of whom have been named.
It’s not often that bike advocates find themselves on the same side as the anti-tax wing of the GOP, but that’s the case in Oregon where the governor is expected to sign a $5.3 billion budget that incudes a $15 excise tax on new bicycles over $200. Thanks to Ed Ryder for the heads-up.
Boise police are looking for a bike rider who ripped off the side mirror of a car, causing $1,000 damage to the vehicle. Needless to say, the driver disavows any knowledge of what he could have possibly done to make the rider so angry. We’ve said it before — no matter what a driver might do, violence is never the answer. It only makes things worse in the long run.
An English town councilor wants to separate bike lanes with pink armadillos he designed himself. Which should be enough to convince any number of drivers it’s time to quit drinking.
After too many late nights this week trying to keep up with the news in Beverly Hills and Playa del Rey, my diabetic body chose last night to remind me who’s really in charge.
I’ll try to make up for it with a new post tomorrow to catch up on all the news we’ve missed.
June 19, 2017 /
Mark Elliot / Comments Off on Back at Beverly Hills City Council Tomorrow: Bicycle Lanes for Santa Monica Boulevard!
Please join residents, riders, regional bicycle commuters and multimodal mobility advocates tomorrow for a return engagement of ‘Bicycle Lanes Comes to Beverly Hills’! The curtain rises at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Council chambers. There is a new cast but a familiar storyline: Will city officials agree to include bicycle lanes on our reconstructed Santa Monica Boulevard? Will we finally plug the gaping hole in the backbone bicycle network to connect West Hollywood and Century City?
When the curtain closed on this show back in July of 2015, councilmembers Nancy Krasne, Willie Brien, and (then-Mayor) Julian Gold would not agree to striping bicycle lanes. Even though the boulevard would be wide enough to accommodate lanes. Even though riders would have shared a 15’ wide curb lane with buses and many, many motorists.
(For more about the twisted road to Santa Monica Boulevard bicycle lanes in Beverly Hills, check out my recent recap. Want a news update by email right after the decision? Sign up for the Better Bike blast!)
Of course US DOT advises against letting bicyclists share such a wide lane with motor traffic. And for good reason: on a corridor that sees 50,000 motor trips on average every day, for example, why would any city official choose to put bicycle riders into a scrum with buses and SUVs? Yet our two councilmember-doctors, Gold and Brien, along with councilmember Krasne (“I love the bikers”), simply could not be persuaded by a safety argument. No matter how many riders offered it.
Now, two years later the curtain rises again… but with a new cast!
Returning for an encore performance is Mayor Lili Bosse. She has made multimodal mobility a priority for the city and we are looking forward to our first complete streets plan early next year. (The RFPs are back at the end of June – stay tuned!) Councilmember John Mirisch also supports bicycle lanes. He’s actually a resident of Sweden so he knows what Euro-style multimodal mobility looks like. First-time councilmember Robert Wunderlich could add a third vote for bicycle lanes on the corridor. Not only has he said he supports lanes; he’s even asked why they can’t be protected lanes!
Supporting players in the City Council drama include Vice-Mayor Julian Gold. He couldn’t support bicycle lanes in 2015 (but said he was open to them). And first-time councilmember Les Friedman, a longtime member of our Traffic and Parking Commission, has never been a pro-multimodal or pro-bike voice. (When pressed on infrastructure, he simply asked, “Why do all the cyclists run stop signs?”) We need to give these two officials in particular a reason to make safety job #1. We want five pro-safety votes.
The curtain rises again tomorrow, Tuesday June 20th at 7 p.m. The storyline is familiar: Will city officials agree to include bicycle lanes on the new Santa Monica Boulevard? Tomorrow’s City Council meeting (455 N. Rexford Dr. Beverly Hills at 7 p.m.) is your opportunity to write a different ending to this saga.
Here are our top-three arguments for bicycle lanes: safety, safety, and safety.
Bicycle lanes are recommended because a wide curbside lane encourages higher speeds. Buses and bicyclists are generally “not compatible” when sharing the curb lane, according to design guidance, so why have a too-wide curb lane when we can stripe a bicycle lane within it?
Moreover, Santa Monica Boulevard is appropriate for bicycle lanes because there is no curbside parking on the corridor in Beverly Hills. That’s often an impediment to riders because the ‘door zone’ is a known hazard. But here it is not a problem. This boulevard is a perfect case where bicycle lanes will improve flow for all road users.
Santa Monica Boulevard is regional connector and bicycle commuters already use it. We go to UCLA, the beach, and to businesses and homes right here in Beverly Hills. Let’s give us a safe way to reach them!
The second issue concerns rider experience. Aside from the question of whether we have the votes to stripe bicycle lanes is the question of what kind of lanes we will get.
We are looking for standard 5-foot wide lanes at least. The staff report proposes bicycle lanes as narrow as 4’ 6”. Ostensibly that’s because the city proposes to stripe the inside lanes at 11-feet wide. It could also be because city transportation officials never supported bicycle lanes and a 4’6” lane is designed to fail to gain support. Regardless, it comes back to safety: according to current design guidance that 11’ #1 traffic lane needs to be reduced to 10 feet. That would reduce vehicular speed on the corridor and make available a greater margin of safety for riders.
Tomorrow we will ask that City Council direct staff to distribute the available curb-to-curb space in a way that maximizes safety for all road users. Here’s a preview of what that could look like.
Santa Monica boulevard lane width adjustments could get us the room we need!
Moreover, we urge City Council to support high-visibility green bicycle lanes. Making lanes more conspicuous offers several advantages over conventional (Class II) lanes. Reduced road conflict is a feature of high-viz lanes and should lead to fewer crash injuries (which have increased dramatically in Beverly Hills). When color delineates the space available to riders, motorists are discouraged from encroaching into the lane and are encouraged to yield to riders when appropriate. Not only that: colored lanes highlight the multimodal function of the boulevard. Our plans say we want travelers to travel by bicycle so let’s make it obvious!
An added benefit is that green lanes add to the apparent greenspace while reducing the visual impact of the blacktop. Win-win!
Help us support bicycle lanes for Santa Monica Boulevard!
Please contact City Councilby email with your support for high-visibility bicycle lanes. Reach Council at mayorandcitycouncil@beverlyhills.org. Your short statement should indicate whether you are a resident and/or if you work here. Those are important considerations for any councilmember.
Plan to attend the meting on Tuesday, June 20th in Council Chambers, City Hall, 455 N. Rexford Drive. The curtain will rise at 7 p.m. and the main act should hit the stage at 7:45 or so (please refer to the agenda).
I want to thank Ted Rogers for this essential blog, as well as thank all of the tireless supporters who have come to my City Council hat-in-hand, year-after-year, asking for this most basic of safety measures. You have come from Westchester, the Valley, and the far Eastside on two wheels and I salute you!
Special thanks goes to Kory Klem, Rich Hirschinger, Eric Bruins, and the many other folks who helped to craft our Greenway proposal in 2014. That was the leverage we needed to get an additional 2.5 feet of width to make lanes even possible. We also couldn’t have done it without LACBC which lent staff support for our proposals and outreach over the years. Let’s see what tomorrow brings!
I was hoping to knock out today’s Morning Links, despite meeting with the LAPD in the afternoon and enduring the world’s most unproductive Neighborhood Council committee meeting last night, eventually having to walk out before the topic of bike lanes ever came up.
Unfortunately, I came home to the tragic news from Murrieta, which took up what little time and energy I had left.
So I’m forced to throw in the towel for tonight. And leave you with a promise to catch up on everything we missed bright and early tomorrow.
Through the end of this month, BikinginLA is supporting local bike shops and other small businesses in the bike industry by offering deep discounts on our usual advertising rates. For more information, or to find out if your business qualifies, email the address on the Support and Advertising page.
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It was a surprise announcement.
And both heartening, and a little disappointing.
Word broke Thursday morning that LA’s Vision Zero Alliance had finally released its long-awaited Action Plan, explaining how the plan to reduce traffic fatalities by 20% by the end of this year, and eliminate them entirely by 2025.
While the report hits all the appropriate notes, it’s a little short on specifics.
For instance, it talks about the need to reduce speeds to drive down LA’s worst in the nation traffic death rate, but doesn’t actually commit to reducing speed limits to 20 or 25 mph, as other major cities have done. And it discusses working to change laws at the state level, without stating whether they will fight to remove the deadly 85th percentile law that drives up speeds and destroys livability — not to mention survivability — on city streets.
However, there are a few specific actions we can follow to verify that the plan is on track:
Vision Zero means designing a street network that is safe for all modes. The City will:
Install live-saving improvements on the priority corridors and intersections along the High-Injury Network, such as optimizing four-hundred traffic signals and redesigning at least twelve miles of City streets every year to accommodate safe transportation for all.
Update 100 percent of the expired speed surveys on the priority corridors by the end of 2017.
Update all City street-design standards used by the Bureau of Public Works, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of City Planning to be consistent with the National Association of City
Unanswered is whether the city will address the chronic understaffing problems at LADOT so they actually have the capability to work on Vision Zero, without throwing the hard-fought Mobility Plan out the window.
Some of those bicycling deaths could be prevented simply by building out the low-stress network of Bicycle Friendly Streets called for in the plan, giving riders a safer and more comfortable alternative to riding busier streets.
Also unanswered is how they will solve the problem of recalcitrant councilmembers who attempt to block desperately needed safety improvements in their districts, as Gil Cedillo and Paul Koretz have already done.
Not to mention LA’s rampant NIMBYism, which rises up to oppose virtually any changes on our streets, especially if there’s the slightest suspicion it might slow traffic down.
The Austrian man who was busted for trying to ride naked into a hotel in eight degree weather says he was trying to impress a girl. Although getting fired from his job as a pastry chef at the hotel probably isn’t the way to do it. And someone should explain to him about shrinkage.
A Pennsylvania bike rider was apparently under the influence when he was killed by a 17-year old driver; the victim had a water bottle filled with booze, and a dope pipe in his pocket.
University of Florida students are unnerved by a man riding his bike around campus wearing a swastika. Sometimes bike riders are the bad guys. And sometimes they’re just assholes. But even assholes have a constitutional right to be one.
But not as cheap as Illinois, where a drunk driver cops a plea for killing a man who was riding his bike home from work, in exchange for a whopping ten days behind bars. Ten effing days. Thanks to J. Patrick Lynch for the heads-up.
And a three-time Brit traffic serial killer gets his suspended license back three years early because it’s an inconvenience to his family. It was probably pretty inconvenient for the families of his victims, too.
And then we wonder why nothing ever seems to stop the carnage on our streets.
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Nice to hear from Michael Wagner of CLR Effect, who offers news from LA County’s too often neglected Eastside.
Even if the news isn’t exactly what we want to hear.
Santa Monica Planning is hosting a ride with SaMo’s mayor this Sunday. LA mayor Eric Garcetti agreed to ride with bicyclists when he was running for office four years ago, but to the best of my knowledge, no one has bothered to ask him to do it. Which should be a big hint to the LACBC, the BAC, LADOT…
US Cycling membership now includes legal benefits, including a free consultation, reduced legal fees, and priority consideration for pro bono legal representation. Although virtually any bike lawyer will offer a free consultation.
An editorial in USC’s Daily Trojan calls California’s ban on headphones for bike riders a new, overbearing law. Except the law only prohibits wearing headphones in or on both ears, rather than one. And it’s not new. Wearing headphones in both ears has been illegal for years, just as it is for drivers; all that changed with the new law was to eliminate loopholes to include any form of headphones or earpieces.
Seventy-one percent of people responding to an online poll in one Canadian town think winter bicycling should be banned; one bighearted driver thinks running over a cyclist could provide extra traction on icy streets.
In a truly bizarre case, Dutch police have filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice against a UN lawyer from Jamaica who claimed she had been brutalized by cops who arrested her when she got off her bike and walked it across a busy street.
Who needs a mountain when you’ve got a parking garage? Adelaide, Australia cyclists compete in their own indoor hill climb. Thanks to Adam Ginsberg for the news.
Thanks to Todd Rowell for his generous donation to support this site. Donations are always welcome to help us bring you the best, freshest and most accurate bike news in this post-truth era of alternate facts and fake news.