He died at the scene. Which is not surprising, assuming he was struck at highway speeds.
The driver remained at the scene.
Unfortunately, that’s all we know right now. There’s no word on the identity of the victim, or why he was riding on the freeway. However, in virtually every other case where someone was killed while riding a bicycle on a freeway in the middle of the night, the victim turned out to be homeless.
Which should not lessen the tragedy in any way.
This is at least the 38th bicycling fatality that I’m aware of in Southern California this year, and the 13th we know about in Los Angeles County.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for the victim and his loved ones.
Then share it — and keep sharing it — with everyone you know, on every platform you can. We’re up to 871 signatures, so let’s try to get it up over 1,000 this week!
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We could be looking at major changes on Hollywood Blvd.
Fingers crossed.
Thursday’s public meeting unveiled plans for one of the city’s first major lane reductions in the past several years for the east end of the boulevard, along with new protected bike lanes, providing a major safety improvement in addition to traffic calming.
Let’s just hope this moves beyond just talk and vaporware, for a change.
Click through on the links if the tweets disappear, which seems to be happening a lot lately.
Twitter post
Twitter post
Twitter post
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It’s not just the mayor.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has gotten a lot of the credit — or blame, depending on your perspective — for the recent changes making the city more climate friendly and livable, from new bike lanes to planning for a 15-minute city.
And not by a small margin. Nearly 55% of voters agree to triple the cost to park an SUV on city streets, raising the cost for a private vehicle weighing over 1.6 tons — 3,200 pounds — to $20 an hour, in an effort to discourage their use in the city.
After all, few people will buy — let alone drive — oversized SUVs if they can’t afford to park them.
Your move, Los Angeles.
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Apparently, Metro’s cancellation of plans to widen the 710 Freeway really wasn’t a cancellation at all.
According to Streetsblog’s Joe Linton, a new proposal from the agency still includes plans to widen the freeway, and may require demolishing homes along the route, which led to the original cancellation.
And the much-promised improvements for transit, walking and biking along the corridor apparently don’t amount to much.
All of which goes to show just how little the agency has changed its stripes.
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GCN examines the all-important question of how much speed can you actually buy, as we’ve all heard — or yes, said — that you can buy speed, but you can’t buy skill.
The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
With friends like these, who needs enemies? An op-ed from a Boulder, Colorado bicyclist asserts that bicyclists needs to take responsibility for their behavior, because “Most bicycle accidents are caused by improper, sometimes illegal, cyclist behavior,” and adding “There is almost no excuse for a single-operator (bicycle) crash.” As if drivers and poor road conditions have nothing to do with it.
Colorado will host its Winter Bike to Work Day this Friday, including in my bike-friendly hometown. Which is our annual reminder that Los Angeles still doesn’t have a Winter Bike to Work Day, despite having a much more inviting climate — this week excepted. Then again, we didn’t have much of a summer one last year, either.
Sad news from Bengaluru, India, where the man known as the Century Cyclist or the Cycle Yogi for his unbroken streak of 42 months of daily metric century rides — 62 miles — died of a heart attack just days after finishing the streak; he was just 45.
Estonia’s Madis Mihkels and Belgian pro Gerben Thijssen made a donation to their Intermarché–Wanty cycling team’s junior team, and were asked to make a presentation to the junior team members on the values of cycling after they were yanked from last year’s Chinese Tour of Guangxi for making a common anti-Asian racist gesture.
Today’s must read belatedly came to my attention, after a week lost in my spam folder.
Calbike took a look back at best and worst of California biking last year, from Glendora’s low-cost quick-build Complete Streets demo, to proof that traffic jams improve safety, as bike and pedestrian deaths went up even as traffic levels decreased during the pandemic.
A few other highlights —
A pair of San Diego area bikeway prove persistence pays off
The Eastside’s Roadkill Gil gets a nod for worst abuse of political power
The failed anti0bike recall of Nithya Raman
Calbike’s big win on California’s new ebike subsidy program
The LA Times investigation of biased bike stops by sheriff’s deputies
Take a few minutes to read the whole thing. It may the most entertaining and informative thing you’ll read all day.
Sometimes I don’t know what the hell to make of something.
Especially when it involves widening a freeway in a soon-to-be-failed attempt at relieving traffic congestion, as if induced demand isn’t even a thing.
Not to mention make a complete mess of things when it comes to bicycling.
The $6 billion project was put on pause after decades of community complaints, cancellation by the EPA, pausing by Caltrans and suspension by the Metro board.
Which is one hell of a losing streak, if you ask me.
Now the project is once again rearing its ugly head, this time accompanied with references to rail and NextGen bus service.
And bike lanes. Well, sort of.
Or maybe not.
We’ll let Linton take it from here.
Metro’s video states that there is a “protected bike lane” along the L.A. River, when the river facility is actually a bike path. The presentation emphasizes that there is “a lack of designated bike routes,” though cyclists know that bike routes are typically meaningless. Metro’s “Bike Routes [sic]” map labels many bike paths as protected bikeways, and maps numerous protected bikeways in lots of places where they don’t exist: East L.A., Vernon, Carson, etc. (Hint for Metro’s intern: the only protected bikeways in the study area are in the city of Long Beach.)
I hesitated writing about this for over a week, thinking my feeble diabetes and drug addled brain just couldn’t make sense of it.
Then I finally realized it didn’t make sense to me because it just doesn’t make sense.
Like Metro somehow not knowing the difference between an imaginary protected bike lane and an actual riverfront bike path, albeit one with an eight-mile gap through DTLA.
Or that they would somehow invent a network of nonexistent protected bike lanes that would make vaporware look good.
I’d suggest Metro needs to get their shit together, but it looks like they already put their #2 staffer on it.
Unless maybe you’re the bike rider waiting patiently for a little old lady to make it all the way to the other side, while an impatient driver runs up on your ass, horn blaring.
This is who we share the road with. The LAPD is looking for a trio of hit-and-run drivers who injured one pedestrian and a person riding an e-scooter, and killed another pedestrian in three separate crashes the Jefferson Park neighborhood this month.
Seriously? A Massachusetts letter writer complains that a new bike lane is dangerous and will get someone killed because drivers have to cross it to make a right turn, and have to watch out for people on bikes when leaving a parking space. You know, pretty much like virtually every other bike lane on the face of the earth, aside from Denmark and the Netherlands, of course.
Speaking of Denmark, it’s the bike-friendly country’s Year of the Bike, with the Tour de France scheduled to start in Copenhagen, and a commitment to spend $64 million on bike lanes this year — part of a whopping $458 million bicycling infrastructure plan. Then again, every year is the year of the bike for Danish residents.
