Maybe Los Angeles is finally getting fed up with traffic deaths.
Steve S reports at least 100 people turned out last night for the ghost bike installation honoring 15-year old Sebastian Montero, who was killed by an alleged speeding driver in Woodland Hills yesterday.
Montero’s bike was installed on De Soto Ave and Burbank Blvd, across from the entrance to the Kaiser medical center.
Let’s hope the turnout leads to demands for safer streets, so some good can come from this heartbreaking tragedy.
The San Diego Union-Tribuneprofiles a former software engineer who quit his job, gave up his car and now works part-time for the San Diego County Bike Coalition.
Life is cheap in Kansas, where a drunk driver gets just three and a half years for falling asleep behind the wheel and running down a bike rider before fleeing the scene, leaving the victim on the brink of death for weeks.
No bias here. If a Boston truck driver couldn’t even see a bike rider due to the truck’s massive blindspot, why the hell does it matter if the victim didn’t signal? And why the hell are trucks that blind their drivers to human beings in the roadway even allowed on city streets?
The New York Times says city planners are getting distracted by the bright, shiny objects that are self-driving cars, rather than focusing on proven safety measures.
The driver stopped after the crash, and was cooperating with investigators. Police do not think drugs or alcohol played a role in the crash.
The Desert Sun reports the crash occurred on a relatively desolate stretch of northbound Bob Hope Drive. The victim was found several feet from his bike, with a heavily damaged utility truck stopped nearby.
A street view shows two wide, straight traffic lanes in each direction on Bob Hope, with a 50 mph speed limit, and an unprotected gutter bike lane on each side.
No time of the crash, or any other information is available at this time.
There are two intersections for De Soto and Burbank, as the street jumps a block north before continuing; no word yet on exactly which one the crash occurred on. However, there appears to be bike lanes on either side of De Soto.
Hopefully we’ll have more information soon.
This is the 13th bicycling fatality I’m aware of in Southern California, and the sixth in Los Angeles County. It’s also the fifth in the City of Los Angeles.
A ghost bike will be installed at 9 pm tonight.
Update: According to a source with the LAPD, the crash took place at the south intersection, directly in front of Kaiser Medical Center, as Montero was crossing De Soto headed east, where the crosswalk would be if one was painted.
The driver reportedly shifted to the right lane, and accelerated through the intersection as soon as the light changed, catching Montero before he could get across the street.
No information yet on who may be at fault or any possible charges.
Update 2: The Los Angeles Daily News says the crash occurred around 11:40 am Sunday. He died about an hour later after being taken to a local hospital.
Police are investigating the timing of the traffic light, as well as the speed of the driver.
Montero was riding with a friend, who was unharmed.
Photos from GoFundMe page
Photo by Steve
My deepest sympathy and prayers for Sebastian Montero and all his family and friends.
Thanks to Steve and Zachary Rynew for the heads-up.
April 2, 2018 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Morning Links: LADOT’s new focus on “transportation happiness,” and LA BAC meets tomorrow in Hollywood
LADOT chief and NACTO president Seleta Reynolds explains how Los Angeles is adapting urban mobility for the digital age — including an emphasis on transportation happiness.
To achieve that, she says,
We are currently drafting a Mobility Bill of Rights to identify core principles like reliability, safety, comfort, equity, transparency, and community that should be the foundation of services we provide or allow to serve Los Angeles. Each of these principles has a set of key performance indicators that we will baseline with Angelenos in order to guide improvements to existing service, like taxis and transit, and help us to regulate new services as they come into the city.
Of course, if the city really wants to increase transportation happiness, they’d place a greater emphasis on bike riding and safer streets, since bike riders are the happiest commuters.
Today’s photo show a new bike box next to Hollywood High School.
………
The Los Angeles Bicycle Advisory Committee will meet this Tuesday at the Hollywood City Hall.
Bike riders offered warning about the dangers of self-driving cars before Uber decamped for Arizona to avoid regulation restrictions in California — and before Elaine Herzberg was killed as she walked her bike across a Tempe street.
Bike rentals have begun for the year in Yosemite. Although someone should tell NBC Bay Area to hire a decent proof reader; pretty sure they meant rentable, not rentalable.
March 30, 2018 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Morning Links: Upcoming bike events, bike stolen from Fontana victim, and violently anti-bike cops in San Leandro
Let’s start with some upcoming events we haven’t mentioned yet.
A number of Los Angeles-area legislative districts are holding special elections on Tuesday; Bike the Vote LA has rated the candidates in each district.
And then some lowlife scum stole her bicycle before police could collect it as evidence.
Let’s hope it was just a mistake, and someone took the bike to hold it until it could be picked up.
………
This one really pisses me off.
Police in bike-unfriendly San Leandro are allegedly confiscating kids’ bicycles for traffic infractions, under the pretext that they might be stolen. And reportedly dooring teenage bike riders on purpose, and holding unarmed children at gunpoint.
To the best of my knowledge, there is nothing in the law that allows police to confiscate bicycles based on nothing more than a supposition. Which is no different than impounding a driver’s car simply because he looks suspicious, with nothing to back it up.
Meanwhile, intentionally dooring a bike rider not only violates the vehicle code, it’s assault with a deadly weapon and an illegal use of force.
And don’t even get me started on pulling a weapon on nonviolent children for the crime of simply riding a bicycle.
Let’s hope this story results in a fleet of lawyers descending on the town.
And whoever is responsible for these outrageous policies finding new work as an unarmed security guard at the local mall.
Thanks to Frank Lehnerz for the heads-up.
………
Long Beach Bike Ambassador Tony Cruz offers basic advice on how to ride a bike safely. Although there could have been a mention of road position beside merely riding outside the door zone.
Ebikes really are pulling people out of their cars; 28% of people surveyed purchased their ebikes to reduce their reliance on cars, while 76% of ebike trips would have otherwise been made by car.
Canadian musician Rich Aucion is on a 15-city tour of the US, riding from gig to gig by bike in what will eventually be a coast-to-coast ride to raise funds for a mental health organization.
Philadelphia’s bike-hating columnist inexplicably says flipping bike lanes from the right to the left side on two one way streets is equivalent to flipping the bird to local residents. And compares the city’s bike advocacy group to the NRA.
A disabled polio survivor from Nepal visits Brunei, the 68th country he’s visited on his round-the-world bike tour. Yet another reminder that bikes offer increased mobility for people with disabilities.
And if you’re caught on video trying to steal a bike, come up with a better excuse than alleging that the owner asked you to bust the lock and bring it to him.
Even though that means ignoring the concerns of everyone who wants to live on a quieter, calmer street. Or doesn’t want to get run down by those same drivers.
Which marks yet another victory, albeit hopefully a temporary one, for the people behind the driver activist group Keep LA Moving, which organized the resistance to the bike lane.
As well as opposition to the recently shelved Temple Street road diet, and the failed road diets in Playa del Rey.
So far, only the Mar Vista Great Streets Project on Venice Blvd has survived their traffic safety denier onslaught.
Let’s hope Pasadena can do a better job of communicating the benefits of such projects than LADOT has up to this point. And that the Orange Grove project will come back more successfully at a later date.
Because right now, the people in the black hats and two-ton vehicles are winning.
As Matthew T. Hall, San Diego Union-Tribune editorial director, lamented on Twitter about the kits, “What kind of world are we leaving our children?”
Well, for one, apparently one where folks Spin’s age, edging toward 60 and above, think the appearance of bicycles in certain communities amounts to some apocalyptic hellscape of two-wheeling insurgents intent on demolishing mankind as we know it…
Never mind that not everyone can afford to buy a bike, nor the notion that perhaps a significant portion of the bikes that appear in Little Italy—or Mission Hills or Point Loma for that matter—might have actually brought someone to your popular neighborhood. Seems like short-sighted economics to drive that kind of business away…
Is it a perfect system? Hell no, but what is? But for this curmudgeon who this week turned 59, the bikes have offered—at a reasonable price—an opportunity to regain some semblance of a connection with my city and, by some miracle, my youth.
………
Horrifying video of a head-on collision as a driver turned directly into a bike rider waiting at a red light.
Needless to say, the driver claims she never saw him. Which should be seen as a confession rather than an excuse.
Note: This video shows exactly what it looks like to get hit head-on from the rider’s perspective. So consider that before deciding if you really want to hit play.
………
Bloomberg reports that Uber disconnected the collision avoidance system that comes standard in the Volvo SUV that stuck and killed Elaine Herzberg while she was crossing the street in Tempe Arizona, relying on their own failed self-driving technology instead.
An American Idol contestant is teaming with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and a Nashville bike/walk advocacy group to discourage texting while driving, two years after he was run down by a distracted driver while riding his bike.
A Canadian mountie won’t face charges after investigators conclude there isn’t enough evidence to prove he ran over a fleeing bike theft suspect, even though he probably did.
A new study shows one in four drivers in Australia’s Queensland state pass bicyclists too closely. Which should sound familiar to most bike riders just about anywhere else.
Now he reports the city has begun pouring new concrete to patch the crumbling stretch of concrete that took him down.
As usual, despite years of complaints, they only got around to it after it was too late. And after being embarrassed with a front page story.
But at least it should help prevent the next one.
Photos by Patrick Pascal.
……..
More fallout from the crash of a self-driving Uber car that killed an Arizona woman as she walked her bike across an overly wide street.
Arizona’s governor has suspended testing of self-driving cars in the state, after previously welcoming them with open arms when California installed safety restrictions on them.
Speaking of the LA River bike path, it’s about to be shut down once again, this time for construction of a long-planned bike and pedestrian bridge connecting Atwater Village and Griffith Park.
San Diego’s Little Italy Association is scooping up dockless bikeshare bikes, and depositing them outside the business district. Which is strange, because these are the same people who fought planned bike lanes, insisting that all their customers come by cars. Thanks to Frank Lehnerz for the heads-up.
The mayor of Hamilton, Quebec learned about the need for safer streets the hard way, nearly getting hit by a car just seconds into a ride to promote the city’s bike infrastructure.
A Kiwi sociologist says the bikelash over the new bikeways stems from “a sort of initial adjustment stress” from people who are unable to handle the change to the street.
March 27, 2018 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Morning Links: Save money by biking in the nation’s second most expensive city, and bikelash in the Rose City
Although I’m told that the opposition is being guided by the people behind anti-traffic safety group Keep LA Moving, which has apparently set its sights on halting any lane reduction plan in the greater LA area.
The Pew Charitable Trust looks at the possible spread of the Idaho Stop Law, which was considered in a number of states this year — including California, where it failed in part thanks to opposition from AAA, which seems to have confused the solution with the problem.
Canada’s Cycling Magazine offers advice on what to do, and not to do, when taking your bike to a mechanic this spring. I’ve said it before; treat a good wrench like your best friend, because for your bike, he — or she — is.
The Guardian offers advice on what to do if your bike hits a pothole. Which is good advice here, too. Especially the part about hiring a lawyer if you’re going to take on city hall.
Life is cheap in the UK, where a driver gets off with just eight months for plowing through traffic lights and into a bike rider while driving with five times the legal level of a cocaine derivative in his system. Seriously, who knew there was a legal level of coke for getting behind the wheel?
Clearly, hit-and-run isn’t just an American problem. Although apparently in the UK, it’s considered hit-and-run if you leave the scene after hitting an animal, unless it’s a cat.
A long-planned Wisconsin bikeway connecting Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River is at risk after estimates for a bridge over a highway come in higher than expected.
Singapore went carfree on Sunday, as part of a monthly program to close the streets of the Civic District to motor vehicles on the last Sunday of each month.
A special thanks to Pedego 101 and J Fylling for their generous donations to help replace my late, lamented laptop, which, after two full months in the repair shop, appears destined for that great recycling facility in the sky.
Despite the city’s lip service to Vision Zero, it’s clear, to paraphrase Casablanca, that the deaths of a few innocent people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy town.
Now neighboring Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell has joined him, citing a lack of significant, widespread support for the vital safety project.
If that’s going to be the standard, we might as well toss Vision Zero in the scrapheap of Los Angeles history right now. Because we may never get a majority of Angelenos to believe that saving lives trumps saving a few minutes on their commute.
City officials are elected to do the right thing, not the popular thing. And make the difficult choices that they know will prove correct down the road, even if they initially lack “significant, widespread support.”
Like saving lives, for instance.
Instead, O’Farrell became just the latest LA councilmember to back down in the face of organized opposition from angry motoring activists, settling for a number of incremental improvements to the street that may make it a little safer and slightly more pleasant, but likely do nothing to stop speeding drivers from running down more innocent people.
In part, because of attitudes like this from Rachael Luckey, a member of the Rampart Village Neighborhood Council.
A road diet on Temple, Luckey says, would have been too extreme.
“I hate to use the words ‘acceptable loss,’ but we do live in a metropolitan city, and it’s a dangerous world we live in,” she says. “As far as Temple Street is concerned, I don’t know that it is a crisis per-se. If we were seeing 20, 30, 50 people run over, I would be a lot more alarmed.”
A California Highway Patrol collisions database shows that from 2009 to 2017 on the stretch of Temple Street between Beverly and Beaudry, 34 people have been severely injured and five people have died in traffic crashes.
I wonder if she’d still consider it an acceptable loss if one of those victims was a member of her own family.
And once again, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti was too busy running for president to weigh in on one of his own signature programs, exchanging pledged commitment to Vision Zero for zero involvement.
When Vision Zero was first announced in Los Angeles, I questioned whether the city’s leaders had the courage to made the tough choices necessary to save lives, and help make this a healthier, more vibrant and livable city.
The answer, sadly, is no.
………
On a related subject, a new journal article from Chapman University assistant law professor Ernesto Hernandez Lopez examines the legal aspects of the LA Mobility Plan.
And the auto-centric bikelash that threatens to derail it.
Here’s how he summarizes the paper, titled Bike Lanes, Not Cars: Mobility and the Legal Fight for Future Los Angeles:
Examines LA’s Mobility Plan 2035
Summarizes lessons from biking scholarship
Uses these lessons to make sense of the litigation on the Mobility Plan 2035
Suggests how law and politics can help city bike lane policies and advocacy and policy making for these
Relates bike lanes to Vision Zero (safety), “first and last mile” (intermodal), and mobility (de-car)
Correlates the litigation and LA experiences with Vehicular Cycling and Automobility theories
The San Gabriel River trail will be closed at Carson Street in Long Beach today for an emergency repair due to water damage. Riders will be detoured to Town Center Drive.
The path should be reopened on Saturday, unless they run into unexpected problems.
If not, take a few minutes to see if you can reconcile what you see with the local police chief’s insistence that the victim, a homeless woman walking her bicycle across the street, darted out of nowhere into the car’s path.
Right.
Then look closely at the interior view, which shows the clearly distracted emergency human driver looking down the whole time, until just before the moment of impact.
The car should have been able to detect the victim; the fact that it didn’t indicates a major flaw in the system. And the woman behind the wheel definitely should have, if she’d been paying the slighted bit of attention.
Correction: The initial stories identified the driver as a man, Raphael Vasquez. However, it appears that Vasquez has been living as woman, Raphaela Vasquez, since being released from prison in 2005. Thanks to Andy Stow for the correction.
The head of a European bike industry trade group responds that bike riders will have to wear beacons to identify themselves to autonomous vehicles. Why stop there? Why not implant all newborns with transponders so self-driving cars can see them regardless of how they travel, and choose to kill the one person crossing the street rather than the three people in a car.
A former Los Angeles Times staff writer calls LA streets a contested space where no improvement — such as the Venice Blvd Great Streets project — goes unpunished.
You’ve got to be kidding. Life is cheap in Yolo County, where a garbage truck driver walked in a plea deal in the death of a bike-riding college professor after pleading no contest to vehicular manslaughter. And was rewarded with a deferred judgement and a lousy 80 hours of community service.
Eugene, OR decides to make a six-block test road diet permanent, concluding it was worth the effort despite initial concerns. Sort of what might happen here if more city officials had the guts to actually try it.
Traffic delays caused by highway construction enticed an El Paso, Texas man to sell his truck and buy a motorized bicycle, improving his health and saving at least $800 a month.
Cycling Weekly considers the symptoms, tests and recovery for concussions. Sooner or later, everyone comes off their bike, and chances are, you can’t count on your helmet to protect you from TBIs, because that’s not what most helmets are designed to do.
A new reports says 43% of the Ontario, Canada bike riders killed between 2010 and 2015 were struck from behind. And 25% were under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
