If you haven’t already, stop what you’re doing and sign this petition demanding a public meeting with LA Mayor Karen Bass to listen to the dangers we face just walking and biking on the streets of LA.
Then share it — and keep sharing it — with everyone you know, on every platform you can.
Photo by Artyom Kulakov from Pexels.
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Today’s must read is a deep dive from the New York Times into the culture of driving to explain why traffic deaths are once again surging, thanks largely to dangerous drivers.
The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak. In a report published in November, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit, concluded that S.U.V.s or vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches — standard-issue specs for an American truck in 2023 — are 45 percent more likely to kill pedestrians than smaller cars.
Above all, though, the problem seems to be us — the American public, the American driver. “It’s not an exaggeration to say behavior on the road today is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Capt. Michael Brown, a state police district commander in Michigan, told me. “It’s not just the volume. It’s the variety. There’s impaired driving, which constituted 40 percent of our fatalities last year. There are people going twice the legal limit on surface streets. There’s road rage,” Brown went on. “There’s impatience — right before we started talking, I got an email from a woman who was driving along in traffic and saw some guy fly by her off the roadway, on the shoulder, at 80, 90 miles an hour.” Brown stressed it was rare to receive such a message: “It’s got so bad, so extremely typical,” he said, “that people aren’t going to alert us unless it’s super egregious…”
Then there’s the problem all of us seem to encounter sooner or later, as drivers cut traffic law corners for their convenience, and take their anger out on the most convenient targets.
And aggressive driving, defined by AAA as “tailgating, erratic lane changing or illegal passing,” factors into 56 percent of crashes resulting in a fatality. (Distressingly, this statistic does not cover the tens of thousands of people injured, often critically, by aggressive drivers, or the 550 people shot annually after or during road-rage incidents — or the growing number of pedestrians and cyclists deliberately targeted by incensed motorists.)…
Every year for the past decade and a half, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety has published something called the Traffic Safety Culture Index — a kind of State of the Union of American roads. I had thought the 2022 edition was bleak (the headline from AAA’s news release: “Going in Reverse: Dangerous Driving Behaviors Rise”), but the 2023 report was equally grim. Of the 2,500 licensed drivers who responded to the AAA survey, 22 percent admitted to switching lanes at high speeds or tailgating, 25 percent admitted to running a red light, 40 percent admitted to holding an active phone while driving and 50 percent admitted to exceeding posted speed limits by 15 miles per hour or more — all within the last calendar month.
Worse, a sizable number of respondents said they knew that people important to them would somewhat or completely disapprove of much of the behavior. They did it anyway, despite the risk of opprobrium and despite the fact that, as the AAA dryly noted in an accompanying news release, “a motorist’s need for speed consistently fails to deliver shorter travel times. It would take driving 100 miles at 80 m.p.h. instead of 75 m.p.h. to shave just five minutes off a trip.”
It’s not a quick read. But it’s worth taking the time to read the whole thing.
Because this is the most detailed examination and best explanation I’ve seen for why things continue to get worse on our streets, despite Vision Zero plans — at least in the cities that have bothered to fund and implement them, unlike a certain SoCal megalopolis I could name.
And this is literally who we share the road with.
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Thanks to Mitchell Guzik for forwarding more information on the LA and Ventura County editions of Sunday’s international series of bike rides calling for the release of hostages from the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israeli settlements, which we mentioned yesterday.
And you can find information on a Dana Point ride on the link to yesterday’s post.
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South Bay Forward offers a Twitter/X thread recounting the carnage on the South Bay section of SoCal’s killer highway.
Click through for the full thread.
A brief overview of major crashes on this stretch of PCH:
In 2017, middle school student Ciara Smith was crossing PCH and Knob Hill on a bike when she was struck and killed. https://t.co/Km384gmRIl
— South Bay Forward (@southbayforward) January 12, 2024
Meanwhile, yet another apparent high speed crash on PCH in Malibu left one person with life-threatening injuries.
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22 days since the California ebike incentive program’s latest failure to launch, which was promised no later than fall 2023. And 30 months since it was approved by the legislature and signed into law, and counting.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
Unintelligible, “barmy” bike lane markings make British bike riders want to go back home and get in bed.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
A 75-year old New York man died in the hospital, ten days after he was struck by an ebike rider while walking in the Jackson Heights neighborhood. But at least the bike rider did the right thing and remained at the scene following the crash.
A artist in New York’s Greenwich Village used a graphic novel format to illustrate the pain of getting hit by an ebike rider, along with a shoutout to the mayor calling for ebike licensing and registration.
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Local
SoCal Cycling considers why bicycle crashes happen, and how you can protect yourself.
Alhambra residents will get another month to review the city’s new bike/pedestrian plan, after complaints that it was released just days before it was scheduled for a vote.
State
Encinitas approved a new bike safety plan, including protected bike lanes, new striping, signage, and school entrances as the first step in addressing the city’s bicycling state of emergency. Maybe if other SoCal cities would declare a bike and pedestrian safety state of emergency, we might actually get somewhere. Are you listening, Los Angeles Mayor Bass?
The CHP is now offering ebike safety instruction in the San Diego region, as ebike riders present new challenges for the state highway patrol.
Goleta is hosting an Ebike Safety Awareness Week next week, after devoting a single day to the subject last year.
National
Yes, you can get in shape riding an ebike.
Three US companies are teaming up to introduce a non-flammable replacement for lithium-ion ebike batteries, which have been blamed for a number of deadly fires around the world.
A Denver man has struggled to find justice after he was struck by four e-scooter riders while riding a bike, after Lime refused to release the names of the people who rented them.
Momentum profiles New York’s Cargo Bike Momma, as part of their efforts to celebrate “cyclists with sass and attitude.”
New York installed K-rails to keep drivers out of bike lanes in the Bronx, but drivers somehow manage to park in them anyway.
A Facebook page memorializes New York food delivery riders who have been killed while working, with over 40 victims just since 2020.
Florida bicyclists have responded to the recent wrong-way crash on the coast highway that injured seven bike riders, two critically, by forming a coalition of ten bike clubs to demand safety improvements. Which is exactly what we need on PCH, where it would make a huge difference if all the bike clubs who regularly ride the killer highway would start demanding a safer roadway.
International
Bike Radar offers their choices for the year’s best endurance, race, women’s and entry-level road bikes.
That’s more like it. A British hit-and-run driver has been sentenced to six years and nine months behind bars for downing a bottle of vodka while high on weed, ecstasy and coke prior to killing a 54-year old man riding a bike.
France is now offering residents up to 2,000 euros — the equivalent of nearly $2,200 — on the purchase of a bicycle or ebike; the incentive program also includes refurbished bicycles from a professional dealer. Meanwhile, California’s moribund ebike incentive program continues to be nothing more than vaporware.
Electrek recounts a 2019 Danish study showing just 4.9% of cyclists broke traffic laws when riding on bike paths, increasing to 14% when bike paths were not present; that compares to previous Danish studies showing 66% of drivers broke traffic laws.
More people than ever are riding a New Zealand bike trail, which is also seeing a surge in vandalism and bad behavior, including prohibited motor vehicles.
Competitive Cycling
New Zealand’s Ally Wollaston won the first stage of the Women’s Tour Down Under to claim her first WorldTour win; 36-year old Aussie cyclist Matilda Raynolds led much of the race in a breakaway in just her second race at the WorldTour level, before being reeled back in by the peloton — despite riding without the aid of a cycling computer.
Former teammates remembered Melissa Hoskins ahead of the first stage of the Women’s Tour Down Under race, after she was killed falling off the hood of a pickup driven by her husband, pro cyclist Rohan Dennis.
Velo talks with the founder of the relatively rule-less LA Tourist Race.
Finally…
Who really needs a wheel hub, anyway? Then again, who needs a bike chain or belt drive, either?
And apparently, hover bikes and self-repairing frames are what you get when you ask AI to predict the year ahead in the bike world.
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin
