July 2, 2016 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Weekend Links: Traffic and bicycling fatalities jump, help fix Forest Lawn Drive, and ride-off with Metro Bike
Just a few quick notes before we break for the holiday weekend.
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So much for peak driving, as driving hit record levels, with Americans putting in more miles on the road 2015 than ever before.
Along with it comes a 7.7% jump in traffic fatalities, with bicycling fatalities up 13%, and pedestrian deaths climbing 10%.
But the increase wasn’t just because of the record driving levels. The rate of traffic fatalities also increased to 1.12 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, up from 1.08 the year before.
A genuine nationwide commitment to Vision Zero can’t come soon enough.
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If you’ve ever ridden LA’s Forest Lawn Drive, you know what a challenge it can be to navigate the crumbling road surface.
Cyclist Craig White has started a petition calling on Councilmember David Ryu to fix the roadway to make it safe for people on bicycles.
It’s well worth taking a few moments to sign.
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Metro is looking for people to ride in Thursday’s kickoff event for the Grand Opening of the Metro Bike Share at Grand Park in DTLA on Thursday.
Metro Bike Share is launching with up to 65 stations and 1000 bicycles in Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) on July 7, 2016!
Join Metro, the City of Los Angeles and the Downtown community in a celebration at Grand Park with music, snacks, and a chance to be the first to test ride the new bikes for free!
To sign up for the ride-off, select your preferred station destination from the ticket options provided. You’ll be assigned a bike and asked to sign a waiver as a part of the registration process. Please note: Sign ups are first come first served, so don’t miss out. Don’t forget to bring your helmet!
If you are interested in leading a ride group, please email us at marketing@bikeshare.metro.net. Ride leaders get a special Metro Bike Share gift for helping out!
Remember this is a ride-off, so make sure to pick a station close to where you want to end up! We recommend arriving to the event by Metro Rail, bus, or by walking. Plan your trip at Metro.net or use the transit setting on your preferred map application.
Fortunately, though, he was, as he tells her about the metal rod in his back after recovering from being hit by a car six months earlier.
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Sad news from Chicago, as a woman was killed riding one of the city’s Divvy bikeshare bikes, in what is believed to be the first bikeshare fatality in the US.
A suspected bike thief was caught on video in Long Beach’s Belmont Shore.
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My formerly sled dog-racing brother, now living in Colorado, forwards news of an Aspen area bike trail being closed due to too much adorableness.
A rider took a photo of three mountain lion kittens on the side of the trail. Which means that mama was undoubtedly nearby somewhere. And not likely to look kindly on anyone getting too close to her brood.
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Have a great 4th of July weekend.
But don’t forget that holiday weekends mean more drunk and stoned drivers on the road. And more people more focused on finding a parking space than looking for bicycles in front of them.
So ride safely and defensively this weekend. I want to see you all back here on Tuesday.
A helicopter was called to rush him to emergency treatment, but he succumbed to his injuries before it arrived, and was pronounced dead at the scene.
The 19-year old driver remained at the scene and cooperated with police.
The paper describes the intersection as having stop signs on La Rica, but uncontrolled on Baldwin Park. There’s no word on which direction the victim was riding or if he stopped before entering the intersection, or how fast the driver was traveling.
A street view shows a four lane divided roadway that would encourage high speed travel at that hour.
Anyone with information is urged to call the Baldwin Park Police at 626/960-1955.
This is the 46th bicycling fatality in Southern California this year, and the 18th in Los Angeles County. That compares with 34 in SoCal Last year, and 14 in the county.
Update: The victim has been identified as 30-year old James Hernandez, who lived just around the corner from where he was killed.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for James Hernandez and his loved ones.
Just in time for today’s start of Italy’s Giro Rosa and tomorrow’s Tour de France kickoff, a Brit company wants to paper your walls with Tour de France-inspired images.
All that’s missing is Le Doping. Motor and otherwise.
Seriously, if I still had an office, one or more of these would go up as soon as I could have them shipped overseas.
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Now that Caltrans has finally embraced bicycling and walking, the inevitable bikelash has begun.
A writer for the Spectator calls the agency’s 2040 transportation plan more of a social-engineering than transportation-engineering document, complaining that we need to fix the “roads, freeways, and bridges that most of us actually rely on to get places” instead of building bike lanes.
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The Santa Monica Spoke says your voice is needed to get the Feds to count bikes when determining performance measures for our national transportation system.
Seriously, the Corgi would flip my bike the first time she saw a squirrel or motorcycle. Let alone a sandwich lying in the street.
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On the eve of the Tour de France, the Wall Street Journal calls Peter Sagan the rock star of cycling.
French rider Nacer Bouhanni will miss the tour after injuring his hand punching out some loud drunks in the next hotel room.
Nineteen-year old Roseville CA cyclist Neilson Powless is being compared favorably to Lance and LeMond as the future of American cycling. Hopefully more like the drug-free latter than the former.
Los Angeles offers a $50,000 reward for the person who mistakenly shot a ten-year old girl in the head while aiming for a man on a bicycle in Boyle Heights last month.
KPBS asks how blocking bike lanes is good for the environment, as plans for San Diego’s North Park neighborhood call for widening roads to alleviate congestion.
San Francisco cyclists call for safer streets at a meeting of the city’s Vision Zero committee, after two bike riders were killed in separate hit-and-runs last week; one of the victims was remembered as a rising star in the tech world.
People for Bikes is taking applications for a new program to double or triple bike ridership in select city neighborhoods while reducing crashes. I’d like to nominate Hollywood, thank you. That leaves nine others.
Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama and Washington DC, still have contributory negligence laws that keep cyclists from recovering any damages in a crash if they’re found just one percent responsible.
A Washington appeals court rules that bicycles are an integral part of the state’s multimodal transportation plan, so cities must make streets safe for bike riders. Now if we can only get California courts to follow their precedence.
Colorado authorities widen the shoulder of a highway after a cyclist was critically injured while riding on the fog line; fortunately, the victim is slowly recovering.
San Antonio TX is facing a lawsuit for diverting funds from a transportation sales tax to build sidewalks and bikeways.
Good news from Kalamazoo, as the most seriously injured survivor of the hit-and-run DUI wreck that killed five riders and injured four others is released from the hospital.
Caught on video: New York’s 8th Street bike lane is consistently filled with everything and everyone but bike riders.
Pastors of Black churches in DC’s Shaw neighborhood continue to fight plans for bike lanes. Evidently, African Americans must not ride bikes to church in DC. Then again, they might if they had a safe way to get there.
This is why you have to lock up a ghost bike. A Canadian man simply walks off with one, claiming he didn’t know its significance. On the other hand, he probably did know it didn’t belong to him.
Windsor, Ontario’s mayor enjoys his first bike ride to work so much he promises to keep riding over the summer.
Former Brit pro David Millar ranks the world’s ten best places for a bicycling vacation. Surprisingly, he puts Boulder and Aspen CO number two, ahead of Tuscany and anywhere in France, while Maui checks in at number ten.
Bike riders aren’t always the good guys. A BBC presenter is the victim of a racist attack after she intervenes with a bicyclist who was telling an Asian man to go home. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with the UK these days?
Vice offers photos of Berlin’s brutal Bike Wars competition, which one of the founders describes as a destruction derby with bicycles.
The Guardian asks if inter-city bikeways like Germany’s coming bicycle autobahn could revolutionize our daily commute. I’d settle for a decent bikeway connecting Los Angeles with itself. Thanks to Erik Griswold for the heads-up.
Maybe if you didn’t call it the Loop of Doom it might go better next time. Probably not the best idea to throw a knife at — let alone try to shoot — the bike-riding acquaintance you owe money to.
The LAPD asks us to be on the lookout for a bike-riding robber victimizing Hollywood parking lot attendants.
Hollywood Bicyclist Robber Sought
Hollywood: The Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Area robbery detectives are asking for the public’s help in providing any information that will lead to the identification and arrest of an armed suspect that was involved in a series of parking lot robberies.
From June 11, 2016 through June 25, 2016, between the hours of 11:35 A.M. to 10:50 P.M., there have been multiple robberies in the Hollywood area involving parking lot attendants.
The suspect armed with a handgun confronted the victims and demanded money from each of them. The suspect then fled with the victims’ money on a mountain bike. The mountain bike is described red and/or black in color.
The suspect is described as a 40 to 60 year old male Black. He stands approximately 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs between 130-150 pounds. He was seen wearing a ‘Flat Bill’ style baseball hat during the robberies. The suspect is to be considered armed and dangerous.
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Bikeshare officially comes to Downtown LA on July 7th.
For people who sign up in advance, anyway; walk-up users will have to wait until August to take advantage of the system.
According to Streetsblog’s Joe Linton, Metro is teaming up with the LACBC and Multicultural Communities for Mobility on a $100,000 program to make bikeshare services available to low-income riders, making it one of the first systems anywhere accessible to people with limited incomes and no credit cards.
Meanwhile, you’re invited to join Metro for a grand opening celebration and ride-off at Grand Park on the 7th. You can learn more and RSVP here.
Consumer Reports rates bike helmets for adults, including some with the relatively new MIPS technology to help reduce the risk of concussions.
A New York public health professor credits a bike helmet with saving his son’s life, and extrapolates that to mean every bike rider, everywhere, should be required to wear one — even on bikeshare systems, which have yet to experience a single fatality in the US. Of course, by that logic, everyone should wear a bulletproof vest, too.
And a Canadian coroner concludes that a helmet could have saved a cyclist’s life, even though the victim was hit by a car with enough force to throw him over 50 feet through the air. He fails to mention that stopping for the stop sign the rider ran would have done a lot more good.*
*Just a reminder for new readers: I’m a firm believer in bike helmets, and never ride without one. But I also recognize that they are designed to protect against slow speed falls, not high speed collisions, and should be seen a last resort when everything else fails.
The Tour de France isn’t the only major race kicking off this weekend, as the last remaining Grand Tour in women’s racing, the Giro Rosa, starts on Friday.
Canadian pro Mike Woods talks about the journey that brought him to the threshold of the Tour de France and the Rio Olympics, starting when he had to give up his running career due to injuries and took up cycling just four years ago.
LA resident, Olympic medalist and seven-time national champ Dotsie Bausch credits bicycling with saving her life as she recovered from an eating disorder.
Cycling in the South Bay’s Seth Davidson reveals that underneath his curmudgeonly façade, he’s a begrudging optimist when it comes to making Palos Verdes Estates a better, safer, more enjoyable place to ride a bike.
Shrink it, pink it and charge more for it. The so-called “pink tax” survives a challenge in the state legislature, allowing companies to continue overcharging charging women more for bicycles and other items that are virtually identical to less-expensive men’s models.
Legendary bike maker Masi will host screenings of Breaking Away in Carlsbad this weekend to celebrate its 90th anniversary.
A Boulder CO drunk driver faces charges after fleeing from a fatal cycling collision; despite a witness’ assertion that she was laughing hysterically following the collision, she was actually hysterically freaking out. Or so her lawyer says, anyway.
Instead of bikeshare, Golden CO opens a bike library offering two styles of American-made Jamis bikes in various sizes for adults and children.
A Michigan driver tries riding a bike to get a better perspective on what cyclists experience, and gain some insight into how to avoid more tragedies.
A cranky Ottawa, Canada writer pens the bicycling equivalent of “get off my lawn,” while somehow concluding that cyclists are responsible for avoiding collisions, even when drivers are at fault.
June 29, 2016 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Morning Links: Good news on LA bike collisions, and Floyd Landis goes from doper to dope purveyor
My apologies for the late post; blame a late night Internet outage that kept me offline until this morning.
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A couple of interesting tidbits from yesterday’s LAPD bike liaison meeting.
While traffic collisions are up overall in the San Fernando Valley compared to last year, there’s been a 23% decrease in bicycling collisions. And a 37% drop in collisions resulting in serious injuries to bike riders.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of bike lanes in Downtown LA has resulted in an overall slowing of traffic speeds, as well as improved compliance with traffic laws by bike riders. Demonstrating once again that if you want bicyclists to obey the law, just give them a safe place to ride.
Speaking of the department’s bike liaison program, you can find email addresses for each of the bike liaisons for the city’s four traffic divisions listed on the Resources page.
These officers are here to help if you have any problems resolving bicycling issues involving the police. So feel free to reach out to them when you need help, whether it’s dealing with harassment or dangerous traffic conditions on your ride, unfair treatment by police, or officers refusing to accept a report or complaint.
No, seriously. That’s what they’re here for.
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Disgraced ex-Tour de France champ Floyd Landis used to insist his Mennonite upbringing meant he wouldn’t have doped.
Landis, who won the 2006 Tour on an artificial hip, has teamed with former teammate Dave Zabriskie to create a new line of marijuana-laced lotions called Floyd’s of Leadville to treat pain and inflammation.
So far, it’s only available in Colorado, where virtually all things marijuana are legal.
But we may eventually see it here under California’s medical marijuana laws.
An Aussie pro cyclist says living the lifestyle isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, explaining why she’s stepping away, if not retiring, at the ripe old age of 20.
Just one day after a bike rider was shot and killed in Compton, another bike rider shot three men in a car, killing one.
Forty cyclists ride to protest a lack of infrastructure and police action to protect bike riders in Palos Verdes Estates by scrupulously obeying the letter of the law; one driver who clearly didn’t get it swore at riders because he had to go around them. Which is kind of the point.
Solvang puts a planned bike and pedestrian bridge on hold after Caltrans finds deficiencies in a nearby vehicle bridge, which could require replacement while costing the city $600,000 in funds allocated for the bike/ped project.
An East Coast group is working on completing a continuous bikeway stretching from Florida to Maine. We can’t even get a continuous bikeway across Los Angeles.
An anonymous bicycling superhero rides to the rescue of a paint-covered kitten someone abandoned in an Albuquerque dumpster. Which is exactly what should happen to the person who put it there. Without the rescue part.
A Michigan paper asks if the Kalamazoo bike crash reflects a statewide trend, where bike-involved collisions were up 57% last year.
A Boston drunk driver gets eight to twelve years behind bars for the collateral damage death of a teenage bike rider, after he crashed into a car stopped at a red light and knocked it into the waiting cyclist. Although someone should tell Patch that when a person drives drunk, whatever happens as a result is not an accident.
Police in Ottawa, Canada are using a sonar device to help catch drivers who pass too close to cyclists.
A crazed Brit cyclist who was deliberately holding up traffic reached in and stole the car keys from a BBC presenter who was acting in an entirely reasonable manner. Or at least, that’s his version of the story; something tells me the rider in question might see it a little differently.
Rome plans to create a 27-mile inner city bicycling route linking the city’s tourist attractions. Unlike LA, where there’s no viable way for most tourists to visit the city’s many attractions by bike.
Apparently, Pakistani bike riders need a helmet with front and rear cams, blind spot detection, brake lights, turns signals, Bluetooth and WiFi, and built-in GPS. But no word on whether it will actually protect your head if you fall off your bike.
An Aussie driver’s grandmother says he just made a mistake and he’s terribly sorry for fleeing the scene after killing a bike rider. Which makes it all okay, of course.
But what he hates even more is stupidly illegal regulations.
Like the one on the relatively new protected bike lanes in Redondo Beach, which, like on the Strand in Hermosa Beach, restrict bicyclists to a measly eight mph speed limit.
Except, as someone on his site pointed out, it would appear to be in violation state laws. So hold on to that one in case you get nailed by a radar-toting South Bay cop for going nine in an eight mile per hour zone.
Wired gets all science-y to explain why added mass on your wheels is your worst enemy. But only when you accelerate.
A Las Vegas man is riding 4,000 miles in 70 days to fight cancer, despite losing his left femur to Stage 2 Ewing’s Sarcoma.
The 10 best gonzo bike rides in Colorado for your next trip to the Mile High State. Which takes on a whole new meaning these days.
A Colorado driver faces charges for vehicular homicide, hit-and-run and DUI in the death of a bicyclist Saturday; she was already on probation for driving while impaired, and had another DUI arrest in Texas just three years ago. Nice job of keeping a dangerous driver on the road until she kills someone.
An Ohio driver faces multiple lawsuits for killing two cyclists and injuring three others, after being acquitted of vehicular homicide by claiming the sun was in his eyes, and it was the bike riders’ fault for not wearing hi-viz.
Something’s seriously wrong when a photo of a Dutch bike rider in an Aussie airline ad violates the country’s helmet law.
The bighearted people at a local bike shop replaced a tandem bike stolen from a blind and autistic New Zealand man.
Finally…
When store employees stop you from buying two bikes with a stolen credit card, don’t try to grab another one on the way out — and don’t punch the cop who tries to stop you. If you’re carrying crack, dope and a pipe in your sock, seriously, don’t ride salmon.
A special thanks to ReaniMac for getting my Macbook up and running again in less than an hour, after a bad hard drive cable put me out of business over the weekend. If, as Steve Jobs famously said, computers are the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds, they’re my LBS.
