The one time of year I come right out and ask for your money.
Okay, beg.
Because operating this site is a more than full-time job, for far less than minimum wage. And while I truly appreciate each of the sponsors over there on the right, their support, as valuable as it is, doesn’t cover what I need to keep this site going.
Especially after a year like this, when the money that came in went out just as fast. Or faster, even.
But that’s where you come in.
Your support helps fill in that gaping gap, and allows me to devote all my working hours to bringing you the latest bike news on a daily basis, from around the corner or around the world.
And devote whatever time I have left in this life to helping make this a safer place for people on bicycles, and a more livable world for all of us.
Or call it the 1st Corgi Memorial Fund Drive in memory of our late, great spokesdog
It’s not an easy job. Especially when I have to bring you news that none of us want.
But it matters. Because we can’t fix problems if we don’t know they exist. And our leaders can’t hide the truths we shine a light on.
So give what you can, or give what you want.
But please, give something.
You can contribute with just a few clicks by using PayPal. Or by using the using the Zelle feature that came with the banking app that’s probably already on your smartphone; just send your contribution to ted @ bikinginla.com.
Any donation, in any amount, is truly and deeply appreciated. And will help keep all the best bike news coming your way every day.
If you can’t afford to give anything, or just prefer not to, that’s cool too. You’re more than welcome to keep coming back, and contributing to our online community.
But please give if you can, and what you can. Because we can really use the help.
This year especially.
Thank you to Felicia G and theMuirs for their generous contributions to this fund drive even before it officially began.
And as always, a special thanks to Todd Rowell, who came up with the idea for this fund drive in the first place.
But I have a lot to be grateful for, starting with a self-made job I truly love. And the readers who make it possible.
Because without you, all this would just be empty words in cyberspace.
So thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
Have a warm and loving Thanksgiving, whether you spend it with family, friends or on your own this year. And ride safely, because I want to see you back here when we return next week.
Although whether it will become another parking magnet for movie production trucks and delivery vans, like the lanes on Spring Street, remains to be determined.
KNX radio reporter Margaret Carrero offered a brief look at the new lane.
Twitter post
Although not everyone was pleased, as our anonymous correspondent makes clear.
A couple thoughts on the bike lane.
On Saturday, before the Art Crash ride, I gave the new lanes a spin, heading north.
First. The signals. The #¢&ing signals. The bike signals are short, and you will sit there, staring agog at a green pedestrian signal, while the red bike signal mocks you. The fury will be interrupted only by the terror of close left turns by motorists.
Just north of 6th Street, I paused to reflect upon my unplanned nap (and accompanying skull fracture) at the exact location that is now the buffered zone of the new bike lane.
In the northbound Main Street lane at 5th Street, as I sat at an unnecessarily long red, thinking unkind thoughts about our traffic engineers, a left-turning motorist rolled by within inches of my front wheel. Had there been a bollard there, I imagine she would’ve scraped it, and then blamed me.
Halfway to 4th Street, I parked at the curb to drag a scooter away from its repose in the northbound bike lane. The heavy, ungrateful thing beeped angrily for having its slumber disturbed.
Upon reaching 3rd Street, I whipped left, and hit the brakes, because there’s only one bike lane, and it’s contraflow! There’s no warning about this. No “NO LEFT TURN” or bike-lane specific “ONE WAY ONLY” signage. How does design this dangerous pass review?
So, once you reach 3rd, and you wish to continue westbound, you have to either share the westbound #1 lane with cars, or cross over to the #3 lane, which has a sharrow.
AAAAUUUUGHHHH. It’s like LADOT gave their interns a couple gallons of paint, a couple gallons of whiskey, and free rein.
The Zero Emissions 2028 Roadmap 2.0 aims to drastically cut emissions and traffic in time for the 2028 LA Olympics, through a shift to electric cars and buses, micromobility, and yes, bicycles.
L.A. has a reputation as a car-dependent city. But the city also now has the country’s most ambitious plan for cutting emissions from transportation. In less than a decade, it wants the majority of new cars to be electric and all city buses to be electric—and it wants 20% of trips that currently happen in single-occupancy cars to shift to public transportation or active transportation like biking.
Good luck with that.
According to the plan, in just nine years, Los Angeles will have a complete fleet of electric buses, and 30% of the cars on the street will be electric.
Then there’s this.
Expanding micromobility can also help; a recent report in Santa Monica found that 49% of the trips that people were taking on electric scooters and shared bikes were replacing short trips that otherwise would have happened in cars. Some projects now are working to expand access to micromobility in neighborhoods that don’t have many options. Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, for example, is running a pilot with a nonprofit building a solar-powered e-bike share project in the community of Huntington Park. (Other pilot projects are expanding access to electric car sharing in low-income neighborhoods; if residents use that option instead of owning cars themselves, they also may be likely to drive less.) Designing streets to make it safer to ride a bike—such as a two-way protected bike lane that was installed in downtown L.A. earlier this year—is also a key part of helping people shift away from cars.
As usual, the question is whether there will be any follow through this time.
Unlike, say, the city’s stagnant Vision Zero plan. Or the dust-ridden 2010 bike plan, or the equally ignored Mobility Plan 2035 it was subsumed into.
Or any number of other plans that were announced with great fanfare, and quickly forgotten because our elected leaders lacked the political will to actually implement them.
So we’ll see.
But considering they only have nine years to accomplish this massive transformation of the city’s streets, they’d damn well better get started.
We desperately need these in California, where the view from a bike seat makes it seem like every other driver is holding their phones.
I was briefly in touch with the company behind these cameras, before losing their emails during my drug-addled post-surgical state earlier this year, who said they’re working to bring them to the state.
And even though drivers or their passengers are usually at fault for dooring anyone, because they’re required to only open a car door when it’s safe to do so and doesn’t interfere anyone, and only leave it open as long as necessary to exit the vehicle.
Which this driver clearly failed to do.
………
Yes, handicapped people can ride bikes. Despite what angry NIMBYs insist at bike lane public meetings.
Business owners on a Montreal street complain about a bike lane pilot project that replaced 275 parking spaces over the summer, saying their business was down $5,000 a month, although they don’t say if that was an average of all the businesses or collectively. Instead of complaining, maybe they should do something to entice the 800 riders who pass by on the bike lanes each day to stop and come in.
No trademark issues here. An Aussie startup wants to get delivery workers out of their cars and onto the company’s Bolt Bikes rental ebikes. Not to be confused with Usain Bolt’s bright yellow Bolt scooters, which got here first.
November 26, 2019 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Morning Links: Missing bollards in DTLA, LA Walks celebrates, and new LA River bridge unofficially opens
It’s a light news day as we lead into the actual holiday season. As opposed to the one that started shortly before Halloween.
So let’s all remember to ride safely and defensively the next few days.
And try to keep it that way.
………
Eric Solomon sends word that Los Angeles officials appear to be doing their best to make the protected bike lanes on Spring Street in DTLA a little less safe.
I noticed that some of the bollards on the Spring Street Bike lane have been removed from the edge of intersections, allowing cars turning left to cut through the bike lane rather than make their turn from the middle of the intersection.
After all, you wouldn’t want to inconvenience motorists a little just to improve safety for people who aren’t encased in a few tons of glass and steel.
Right?
Update: Solomon reports today that the bollards have been replaced.
………
Los Angeles Walks will honor leading walking advocates at their annual soirée next month, with tickets starting at $150.
Still more sad news from Northern California, where a homeless man was killed when he was struck by several drivers while riding on a freeway in Richmond; at least one of the drivers fled the scene. As with other similar cases recently, there’s no explanation for why he was riding there.
A Sonoma columnist says the $20 million it took to build a new protected pedestrian and bicycle lane on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge was money well spent to fight climate change.
A Buddhist “Monk on a Bike” is riding westward across the US after riding across the country in the opposite direction last year, in an effort to connect with the spirit of America and call attention to Alzheimer’s disease, which recently took his father’s life.
The ebike revolution is passing by Northern Ireland because the country has failed to reclassify them like the rest of the UK did; current law classifies them as mo-peds instead of bikes, requiring additional tax, insurance and a license.
Outsidetakes a deep dive into the story of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, the American bike tourists on an around the world journey who were murdered by terrorists in Tajikistan two years ago, after 369 days on the road. The pair have been posthumously, and unfairly, ridiculed in some quarters for their positive outlook and faith in humanity.
After an Australian drunk driver ran down a bike rider, instead of checking on the victim or calling the Down Under equivalent of 911, he stood next to his car and texted his sister to call a good lawyer; he apparently found one, since the judge sentenced him to just three years behind bars.
I doubt I have to tell you Thanksgiving is coming.
Which means the unofficial holiday dedicated to worshiping unbridled consumerism and spending will inevitably follow, as day follows night, and doping allegations follow cyclists.
Get out and ride your bike instead, to burn off that Thanksgiving dinner and restore some semblance of post-holiday sanity, then go spend some money at your local bike shop the next day for Small Business Saturday.
Speaking of which, a few years back, David Kool, owner of Santa Monica Mountains Cyclery, wrote what remains the best explanation I’ve seen for why supporting your local bike shop matters.
Once again forgetting the lessons of induced demand, a Sacramento-area highway project would remove bike lanes from a causeway to widen I-80, replacing them with a separate bike/ped crossing. Thanks to Megan Lynch for the tip.
National
Somehow we missed this one, as The Verge ranks the transportation modes in the Wizard of Oz; surprisingly, the bicycle came in second behind the ruby slippers. Personally, I would have gone with the witch’s flying broom. And maybe toss in a few of those flying monkeys, too.
Palm Beach FL authorities make an extremely belated arrest in a six-year old case where a driver killed a homeless vet riding a bicycle, while traveling at twice the speed limit. And tried to let the woman he was with take the blame. Be forewarned, this was a horrifying crash, and the story gives a graphic description of it.
Reports indicated he was headed south on the narrow street with a group of other riders when he was hit head-on by the driver of a dark colored Toyota sedan, who continued without stopping.
The victim, identified only as a 36-year old Vista resident, died at the scene before rescuers could arrive.
After hitting him, the 20-something driver continued on to smash into a parked car.
The victim, described only as a 60-year old man, died at the scene. Police note that he was not homeless, despite the early morning hour.
They also say the area is well-lighted and not considered dangerous for people on bicycles, and that the victim had lights on his bike; video from the scene clearly shows front and rear blinking lights.
Which means there was no excuse for taking the life of an innocent human being.
As if there ever is.
This is at least the 67th bicycling fatality in Southern California this year, and the 30th that I’m aware of in Los Angeles County; half of those deaths have occurred in the City of Los Angeles.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for the victim and his loved ones.
