BikinginLA

Evidently, life is cheap in Corona.

The parents of fallen bicyclist Benjamin Montalvo are justifiably angry that the hit-and-run driver who killed their youngest child in 2020 while driving high and distracted could get out of jail after just two and a half years of her nine-year sentence.

Noemi Velado was allegedly texting when she hit the 21-year old man and fled the scene, turning herself in to police days later.

According to KTLA-5,

The couple is now making an appeal to local and state lawmakers to officially designate Velado’s offense as a violent crime, which would require the perpetrator to serve 80% of their sentence.

“When you weaponize your vehicle and you’re texting endlessly and you’re high, that’s a violent crime and it should be treated as such,” Kellie said.

While the Montalvos say they keep their son’s memory alive by speaking out against impaired and distracted driving, they worry that Velado is not fully rehabilitated after such a short amount of time in prison.

Just one more example of how unserious California is about traffic crime.

And why people keep dying on our streets, and drivers keep fleeing afterwards. Because they know it’s not likely to result in more than a slap on the wrist.

And they’re usually right.

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Now you, too, can suffer from ‘bicycle eye’, ‘bicycle arm’, ‘bicycle elbow’ and/or ‘bicycle heart,’ and other made-up maladies of the Victorian bike boom.

Cycling Weekly looks back at the fads and fallacies of the day, as the Penny Farthings swept the world, allowing men and women to spread their DNA far and wide.

“One of my favourite facts is about what the bicycle did for genetics,” Will Manners, author of Revolution: How the Bicycle Reinvented Modern Britaintold Cycling Weekly. “For people living in rural areas, being able to get around on bicycles expanded the range of marriage partners available to them.”

According to geneticist, Steve Jones, this phenomenon makes the bicycle one of the most important inventions in recent human evolution.

But even more important, it could also clear up your zits in an ancient age before Clearasil.

The crowning glory in an era of ridiculous cycling ailments, ‘bicycle face’ was said to cause serious disfigurement. According to one account in Pearson’s Weekly, C.A. Pearson wrote that ‘bicycle face’ resulted from ‘the constant anxiety, the everlasting looking ahead, the strain on a nervous disposition which imparts a hard, set look to the face, and gives a haggard, anxious expression to the eyes which is quite painful to observe.’

Cycling, however, took a gentler view, writing: ‘we know riders of both sexes who have ridden for lengthy periods… and the only alteration we have ever noted in the countenances of any one of them is that the complexion has invariably been improved.’

It’s a good read, and more than worth a few minutes of your day.

Just be careful that smile doesn’t freeze on your face.

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Yet another clickbait piece promoting a liability law firm uses 2025 crash data to rank both the safest and most dangerous American cities for bicyclists and pedestrians.

None of which is Los Angeles.

Although it’s no surprise we’re not on the good list.

While the safest cities are spread out across the US, half of the most dangerous ones are clustered in California and Arizona. Add Florida, and it represents three-quarters of the list.

Which is kind of scary to think that just three states make up 75% of the most dangerous cities for bike riders and pedestrians.

And we live in one of them.

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Congratulations to Streets For All’s Michael Schneider, whose video illustrating the street paving differences between cash-strapped Los Angeles and gilded Beverly Hills was reposted by the New York Post, which never seems to tire of criticizing our (un)fair city.

Then again, we never seem to tire of giving them reasons to.

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

An Irish advocacy group complains that Dublin officials can’t seem to find any space for bike lanes while making plans for a street that’s a primary route for the city’s bicycle network.

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

A man in Salt Lake City, Utah, faces a murder charge and seven counts of discharging a firearm for shooting a man in the back, from a second-story window, who he thought was stealing his bicycle. To repeatedly repeat, no bicycle is worth a human life. Register it, put an AirTag in it, and just let the damn thing go and let the cops deal with it, because that’s what they’re paid to do.

A Spanish newspaper gets its knickers in a twist over video of a bicyclist drafting a minivan in the Canary Islands, whose driver seems to be working with him, calling it a very dangerous technique. Even though we’ve all done it. Or is it just me?

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Local 

Streets For All calls it a Monster Metro meeting tomorrow, as the Metro Board will consider approving a final design for the Sepulveda corridor, and extending the the C-Line to Torrance, while calling for opposition to Metro’s proposed exemption to SB-79 for Los Angeles County.

State

A year after the AIDS/LifeCycle bike ride ended after nearly three decades, two new fundraising rides are emerging to take their place, with Cycle to Zero supporting the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and Center Ride Out benefitting LGBTQ centers in Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Springs/Coachella; it remains to be seen if these rides will combine to raise as much to fight HIV/AIDS.

As if the financially troubled company wasn’t having enough problems already, Rad Power Bikes suffered another blown when a two-story fire destroyed their Huntington Beach store on Saturday.

Security cam video captured a man being chased down and attacked by a group of teens outside San Francisco’s Maritime Museum on Saturday, who beat and robbed him until bystanders stepped in to stop them – all because the man had asked them to slow down.

National

The Disco Biscuits announced a West Coast Tour to mark Bicycle Day 2026, the 83rd anniversary of chemist Albert Hofmann’s accidental discovery of the hallucinogenic effects of LSD as he rode his bicycle home. And yes, I’m just juvenile enough to find the whole thing pretty damn funny. 

An Oregon state appellate court says a cop needs more than a “hunch” that a bike was stolen to justify stopping the person riding it, reversing a gun possession charge resulting from the illegal stop.

Police in Austin, Texas can’t find the owner of an $8,000, customized Trek that they believe was stolen. Which is yet another reminder to register your bikes before anything like that happens to you.

Streetsblog calls on new New York Mayor Mamdani to rescind Central Park’s new 15 mph speed limit for bicycles imposed by former Mayor Eric Adams on his way out of office, arguing that it misapplies state law and sets a troubling precedent.

Meanwhile, new data shows that recent improvements for pedestrian crossings have resulted in better safety for people walking in Central Park.

A 17-year old boy surrendered to police, accompanied by his mother, for the December hit-and-run death of a popular Philadelphia, Pennsylvania DJ.

Something to watch for, as the University of Georgia’s College of Public Health has received a nearly quarter of a million dollar grant to study just how safe ebikes really are. Although as always, the question is whether they will differentiate between actual ped-assist bicycles, and electric motorbikes that unfortunately are also called ebikes.

International

Road.cc recommends the year’s best all-road bikes for whatever kind of paved or gravel roads you ride.

She gets it. An Irish columnist says bicyclists should be considered “brave”, “hardy”, “efficient” and “considerate” — rather than reckless or inconvenient — in a country that needs as many people as possible to ride to “alleviate traffic congestion, reduce air pollution, improve public health, make urban spaces more liveable, and cut carbon emissions.”

A new study conducted in Bangladesh, India and Ghana shows that increased bicycling could reduce pollution in the global south, home to 49 of the top 50 countries with the most polluted air, yet policies to improve safety and promote bicycling are far less common in low- and middle-income countries than in the wealthy north.

In a deeply disturbing story from India, a man was beaten to death, and several members of his family injured, when they objected when a woman in their family was struck by a member of another clan riding a bicycle; the other family attacked the victims with sticks and iron rods after the dispute escalated into an argument.

Bike Radar lists eleven Chinese bicycling brands you probably aren’t familiar with, but should be, as quality and innovation become more competitive with Western brands.

Japanese cops will stop giving warnings and start fining people for bicycling violations, with fines up to ¥12,000 — the equivalent of roughly $76 — for distracted bike riding.

Competitive Cycling

It could be a balmy 105° Fahrenheit for this week’s Tour Down Under, as Cycling Weekly asks how hot is too hot for bike racing?

Twenty-four-year old British cyclist Samuel Watson won the prologue of the Tour Down Under yesterday, through the INEOS Grenadiers rider opted for black shorts, instead of the team’s highly criticized beige/white kit.

Finally…

Your next cleats could save your floors and stop scaring the dog.

And that feeling when you can pedal guitar.

Or something.

Nice beat, easy to dance to. I give it a 95.

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

Oh, and fuck Putin.