Tag Archive for enjoy the ride

Garcetti forgets bikes in Green New Deal, a better take on how to ride a bike, and remembering West’s first collegiate cyclist

January 5, 2021 / / 10 comments

Infuriating, perhaps.

But not surprising.

Spectrum News 1 talks with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti about the current status of LA’s Green New Deal, but he doesn’t have a word to say about transportation beyond transitioning to electric cars.

L.A.’s Green New Deal is pursuing four basic pillars, to reduce emissions from energy generation, transportation, and buildings, and to reduce waste to zero. What have been the easiest and most difficult pieces to tackle?

It’s easy to say the goals of our Green New Deal, but they’re all incredible stretch goals. The one that is the most challenging is to create an electricity grid that has no carbon emissions and that in the middle of the night or in the face of an earthquake or disaster can still be dependable. It’s easy to turn on a coal or natural gas plant and have it churn out the electricity we need. Our solar project that we’re building in the high desert is cheaper than a natural gas plant. It can store maybe one to two days of power. If there’s an earthquake, we may need six months of power. We’re proudly moving off coal at our biggest power plant in Utah with a turbine plant that can be hydrogen. We believe we’ll be the first big utility to run partly on hydrogen.

Second is transportation. Everybody in this car culture of L.A. expects to go to a gas station, fill up your car, and keep going. It’s just as easy to have an electric car. You can just charge it at night, and it takes two seconds to plug it in, but that draw on our grid will be immense. We have to double the amount of electricity we generate and make sure that it’s renewable.

Which pretty much confirms suspicions that he’s abandoned once ambitious plans to reshape how we get around the city, from adding a network of safer bike lanes to installing bus-only lanes throughout the city, in the face of the usual opposition to virtually any non-car transportation project.

Because in Los Angeles, when the going gets tough, we just give up and call it an incredible stretch goal.

Today’s photo is by Adrien Olichon from Pexels, depicting the kind of projects that should be built under LA’s Green New Deal, but probably won’t, because it’s hard.

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Every now and then, someone says it exactly right.

Like this opinion piece from Road.cc.

Ride your bike as much as you like, as far as you like, but don’t judge yourself or your riding success by volume of miles. Measure all of this by what happened along the way, the stories you can tell, the places you visited, the views you paused in front of, and the people and characters you met.

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Nice piece from Cal Lutheran, as a woman remembers her late husband, who passed away from cancer after a lifetime of bicycling.

The couple met as students at the Thousand Oaks university in the ’60s, after he competed for the school as one of the first college bike racers on the West Coast.

Yet he continued to work on his bike collection even after the disease robbed him of his ability to ride in his 70s — including the Pinarello that Alexi Grewal rode to gold in the ’84 Los Angeles Olympics.

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Mark your calendar for Streets For All’s next Zoom happy hour next week.

https://twitter.com/streetsforall/status/1346167985166290945

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Nothing like making little kids dodge parked cars where there used to be a bike lane just a week before.

But if you don’t see anyone using a regular traffic lane, that means it’s not needed.

Right?

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Sometimes you don’t have to speak the language to get the idea.

https://twitter.com/piotr_makowiec/status/1346044554022187008

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

No bias here. It turns out the incident where a group of teenaged bike riders attacked a pair of New York drivers began when a BMW driver brake-checked one of the kids — intentionally or otherwise. But naturally, it was the kid on the bike who got the blame for crashing into it. On the other hand, violence is never the answer, regardless of the reason.

No bias here, either, as a British bike rider on a Penny Farthing gets the blame for crashing into a delivery van, even though the driver clearly cut him off.

Life is cheap in the UK, where a 20-year old British man walked with a suspended sentence for reaching out of a car and pulling a man off his bicycle, leaving the victim lying in agony on the side of the road with a broken elbow and fractured hands.

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Local

Criminal proceedings have been suspended in the case of an ex-con who ran down a Glendale bike rider with a stolen car before crashing into a pair of cars last month, after questions arose about parolee Sean Slade’s mental fitness and his ability to understand the case against him.

 

State

A Seal Beach police lieutenant says yes, anyone under 18 has to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle in California, and you have to have reflectors on your bike after dark. Although you’d think he might have mentioned that you’re required to have a light, too.

San Diego police are looking for the hit-and-run driver who left a 70-year old man with a broken leg after slamming into him while he was riding his bike in a crosswalk.

 

National

The woman who starred as the much-maligned Peloton wife says she has a sense of humor about it a year later, and rides the stationary bike the company sent her virtually every day.

A coalition of Las Vegas-area advocacy groups is holding a competition to design a memorial jersey and bibs to honor the five bicyclists killed by a truck driver last month, to raise money for the Las Vegas Cyclist Memorial Fund.

The accused meth-using driver in that Las Vegas crash continues to be held without bond as a flight risk, as he faces a possible 100 years behind bars if he’s convicted on all 14 charges.

Kindhearted Indiana cops teamed with the local Walmart to replace the bike a young girl got for Christmas, after a thief cut the lock and stole it off her porch.

An Ohio city is looking to improve pedestrian safety, but only after a seven-year old was killed by a driver while riding his bike. As usual, city leaders were only spurred to action after it was too late for an innocent victim.

‘Tis still the season. Bike donations continue to make the news, as 135 kids got new bikes in a contactless, drive-through bicycle giveaway in upstate New York. So were kids out of luck if their parents don’t have a car?

VeloNews talks with a member of New York’s Major Taylor Iron Riders bicycle club about what it means to be a Black bike rider in the US bicycling scene.

The New York Times examines why emptier streets led to a jump in New York traffic fatalities, as deaths climbed to their highest level since the city adopted Vision Zero in 2014.

 

International

Greenpeace highlights eleven places that put people over cars, including a bike-friendly cities and countries around the world.

Your next ebike could be a 102-pound, 30 mph electric motorcycle with pedals.

Another one bites the dust, as the annual London Bike Show is cancelled after the owner goes belly up due to the pandemic.

Here’s another one for your bike bucket list. An off-road gravel path winds a 125 miles through the Pyrenees, connecting the French Basque Country to Basque villages in Spain.

Singapore bike riders support a call to require fixies to have at least one working brake.

 

Competitive Cycling

Cycling Weekly plays fashion cop, judging this year’s kits for WorldTour cycling teams.

Pro cyclists give their tips on how to keep riding through the winter.

 

Finally…

That feeling when you find yourself sharing the bike path with a Giant Galapagos Tortoise. If you’re going to write about how to avoid bike crashes to show your law firm’s expertise, get it right, already.

And those damn cyclists always insist on riding on the sidewalk.

Right?

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Be safe, and stay healthy. And wear a damn mask, already. 

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