Tag Archive for Los Angeles

Long Beach moves forward with Orange Ave Bikeway, protected bike lanes boost ridership, and moving an apartment by bike

June 9, 2026 / / No comments

Just a quick note before we get started. 

From time to time, someone will reach out to me about a bicycling crash, sometimes asking for advice, sometimes just to share what happened. 

If I think they should talk to a lawyer, I’ll usually recommend those guys over there on the right side of this page.

Just to be clear, I don’t get any kind of referral fee for that. I recommend them simply because I know and trust each one, and know they all ride bikes themselves, as well as understanding the intricacies of bike law and bicycle crashes. 

And I would trust any one of them with my own case if I needed one. 

I know there are a lot of other good lawyers out there — as well as the other kind — but I don’t recommend them simply because I don’t know them or their qualifications. 

But I would offer one piece of advice.

Okay, two. 

One, make sure the person whose name is on the door will be involved in your case. Trust me, it makes a difference.

Second, make sure they understand bike law, how your particular crash happened and why you have a case. 

If you’re not comfortable after talking with them, don’t sign anything. Just walk out or hang up the phone, and talk to someone else. It’s your case, and your future, that’s on the line. 

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Oops.

Yesterday I linked to a story about an ebike crackdown in Long Beach. I removed the item after Andrew pointed out that the story was about Long Beach, New York, not the one here. So thanks to him for the correction.

It’s not the first time that has happened, either.

I strongly suggest that one city or the other change its name ASAP to end the confusion.

Please.

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The Long Beach Post — which is, in fact, here in the SoCal one — reports the city is ready to move forward with the 2.66-mile, $22 million Orange Avenue Backbone Bikeway.

The project, which also includes “15 new or relocated bus stops, 10 upgraded crosswalks with flashing beacons and five fully protected intersections,” is expected to be competed in two years.

On the other hand, the city is also raising the speed limits on 24 arterial streets to dangerously high levels, thanks to the state’s deadly 85th Percentile Law.

The speed limits go up as much as 20 mph, to 45 miles per hour in some cases, in clear contradiction to the city’s Vision Zero plan, because it’s impossible to reduce traffic deaths while simultaneously raising speeds.

One more reason that damn law has to be taken off the books. Now.

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If you build it, they will come.

A new study from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering examining 72 million New York bikeshare trips found that “protected bike lanes increased ridership after accounting for confounding factors, while painted lanes and sharrows showed no detectable causal effect.”

In other words, more people chose the safety of protected bike lanes, while rejecting paint and sharrows.

Then again, as we’ve said before, the arrows on sharrows are only there to help drivers improve their aim, while painted bike lanes may give us our own space on the roads, but offer no protection from errant drivers.

Then again, those little plastic bendy posts that too often pass for protection in Los Angeles won’t keep anyone out, either.

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A construction website says work has begun on a six-year, $208 million project to rebuild the century-old Glendale-Hyperion Bridge.

According to the site,

Crews also will restore historic balustrades, pylons, towers and light poles, with a goal of keeping the bridge’s look consistent while bringing it up to modern safety standards…

A consultant, Psomas, said the redesign will realign ramps and the LA River bike path, while building new bicycle and pedestrian facilities and upgrading drainage systems to protect river water quality. Those changes are designed to improve the connection between Atwater Village, Silver Lake and Los Feliz and the expanding LA River greenway, according to hoodline.com.

The project also aims to improve safety complaints from cyclists who squeeze into narrow shoulders on the bridge.

Although it’s a little disquieting that they chose to rely on Hoodline, rather than a more authoritative source like the City of LA, or even The Eastsider.

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A Minnesota advocate moves his entire apartment by bicycle, and kindly shares the project on video, offering a rebuttal to everyone who insists you can’t move some object or another by bicycle.

That would have been easy for me when I was fresh out of college; not so much after 27 years of marriage.

And yes, I’m still on my starter wife.

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

Hats off to San Mateo County for “balancing bike lanes with auto needs.” Because clearly the needs of cars must at least equal, if not outweigh, the lives and safety of people on bicycles.

But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.

The granddaughter of an 86-year old British woman who was killed when an 18-year old ebike rider crashed into her while she was in a crosswalk says his six year and nine month sentence is an insult to her life. Even though it’s a hell of a lot more than most drivers usually get.

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Local 

Walk ‘n Rollers will host a free community Bike Repair Workshop at Ivy Station this Saturday.

The Pasadena Department of Transportation will host a public meeting on the city’s Greenways Project at the Jefferson Branch Library tomorrow evening, presenting plans for new greenways on El Molino, Wilson, Sierra Bonita and Craig avenues.

Streetsblog says the new protected bike lanes on Colorado Ave in Santa Monica appear to be complete.

The Bieb is now one of us, after Justin Bieber bought a secondhand bicycle and rode through the streets of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills with fellow musician Eddie Benjamin. Kind of refreshing that he would buy a used bicycle, when he could easily get any bike he wanted.

 

State

The California Air Resources Board appears to be doing Trump’s work for him, approving sweeping changes to the state’s cap-and-trade program that slashes funding for the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, just as the president is stepping on the gas to keep dirty fuels in demand. That comes after CARB killed the state’s ebike incentive program, because cars needed the money more than we do.

Calbike says a petition sponsored by the Marin County Bicycle Coalition makes clear that California needs to clarify the definition of ebikes, rather than further regulate them.

A San Diego reporter talks with a man who was riding his bicycle when the Sorrento Fire broke out Monday morning.

A bike rider identified only as a man in his 50s was killed by a driver who passed another car in Merced County early Thursday morning, and failed to see the victim crossing the road when the driver cut back over to the right.

San Francisco Streetsblog says a curb-protected bike lane the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has spent years advocating for is finally coming together.

A hit-and-run bear either collided with or attacked a bicyclist in the Pinecrest area of Tuolumne County on Sunday, leaving the victim with a head injury and broken arm; no word on any injuries to the bear, who failed to provide any ID or insurance, and fled the scene before police arrived.

Nearly 3,000 people took part in America’s Most Beautiful Bike Ride around Lake Tahoe over the weekend.

 

National

A “bike-obsessed dad” recommends 24 Father’s Day gifts handpicked for the bicyclist in your life, even if that’s you. And I think we can all agree that “bike-obsessed” beats the hell out of the vastly overused “avid cyclist,” mais non?

Good news from Ohio, where the man accused of punching out one man riding a bicycle, then purposefully driving into another before engaging in a lengthy standoff with police, will be held without bail pending trial.

Members of the Vermont/New Hampshire Upper Valley Cycling Club penned a powerful piece about “the unnamed person in North Haverhill,” a bike rider whose death at the hands of a motorist went unmentioned in the local press, as if it wasn’t even a person who died. Which is why I try to cover every bicycling death, because every person who loses their life deserves to be remembered. And every death is a reminder that one is one too many.

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel completed his 113-mile fundraising ride across New Hampshire to buy bikes for children, fueling speculation about a possible run for president. I, for one, could go for having another bike rider in the White House.

New York Streetsblog says a horrific crash on a street where a bike lane was removed at the insistence of local leaders “underscores anew how dangerous the roadway has become.” Too often we forget that bike lanes aren’t just for people on bicycles, but also serve as vital traffic calming measures that improve safety for everyone.

 

International

A Dutch town is putting up 20 kmph speed limit signs — 12.4 mph — on a local bike path, but won’t enforce it. So instead of a speed limit, it’s just a suggestion. Like pretty much all the speed limits here in California. 

Great idea. A Swedish town is launching cargo bike-mounted chess sets, bringing the game to public spaces across the city.

Amber Heard is also one of us, going for a casual bike ride with her young daughter in Madrid, under the ever watchful eyes of the paparazzi.

Huh? A Kuwait appeals court acquitted a Kuwaiti man who killed an “Asian” man riding a bicycle, because the victim had not followed “required safety and security procedures,” negating the negligence required for criminal liability. So, the driver was negligent, but not responsible. Got it. 

A Dubai website offers five things you must know before switching to from a car to a bike — in America.

A region in Ghana is using bicycles to transform the lives of young girls in the community, while calling for “greater investment and support to expand opportunities for aspiring female bicyclists.”

 

Competitive Cycling

Cycling Weekly’s Undercover Mechanic says that in enforcing pro cycling’s antiquated weight rule, UCI has taken on the role of the Death Star, aka “the big evil empire that sits above cycling and rubs its hands together while the little people try to bullseye womp rats.” Come to the dark side, they have donuts. 

Velo says the biggest crit in America was just won on a gravel bike, when Matthew Wilson followed up on the 200-mile Unbound Gravel race by switching wheels, and winning Cry Baby Hill at Tulsa Tough on the same bike.

 

Finally…

You can find a lot of things while riding a bicycle, like a body with “obvious signs of decomposition.” That feeling when French gendarmes forcibly remove you from a bike race.

And nothing beats riding a bike in Superman’s hometown.

Which raises the question of whether they call him the Man of Steel because of his bike frame preferences?

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Survivor finishes the ride to mark 10th anniversary of Kalamazoo massacre, and 8 years behind bars for Point Loma DUI driver

June 8, 2026 / / No comments

Evidently, the concept of finishing the ride is spreading eastward.

As hard as it is to believe, it’s been ten years since the infamous Kalamazoo, Michigan massacre, when a speeding, stoned driver plowed into a group ride, killing five people and seriously injuring four others.

Now one of those injured victims, who woke up in the hospital with no memory of the crash, intends to finish the ride they all started a decade ago.

The 75-year old man now rides a bike with the names of all the victims on the crossbar of his bike. Those who survived, and those who didn’t.

The other survivors plan to join him for a ceremony on Wednesday’s 10th anniversary to remember the five riders who lost their lives, then join him to finish the ride, or meet them afterwards.

The driver, Charles Pickett Jr., was sentenced to a well-deserved 40 to 75 years in prison.

He was reportedly doing 20 miles per hour over the speed limit, and had taken a large amount of muscle relaxers and pain pills before getting behind the wheel; toxicology reports found meth, hydrocodone (aka Vicodin or Norco), tramadol, ketamine, and cyclobenzaprine, a muscle relaxant.

Pickett was convicted on all counts, including operating while intoxicated causing death, operating while intoxicated causing serious injury and second-degree murder.

He’ll be at least 90 years old before he’s eligible for release, which still seems like too soon.

The survivors turned to advocacy following the crash, successfully pushing Kalamazoo and other local town into passing a five-foot passing law, as well as convincing the state legislature to pass a hands-free law.

They’re working now to get the state to expand the definition of a vulnerable road user, which currently doesn’t include bicyclists or horse-drawn buggies.

The first formal Finish the Ride I’m aware of was in 2014, when Damian Kevitt invited the community to join him in finishing the bike ride he and his wife had started a year earlier, before he was run down by a hit-and-run driver on Zoo Drive and dragged onto the 5 Freeway.

The crash cost him his leg, and nearly his life, before he was able to free himself.

But it’s a concept I’m very familiar with.

The first ride I took when I was finally allowed back on my bike following the infamous beachfront bee incident was to go right back to the spot where I had crashed, and finish the ride I had planned to take.

Something tells me I wasn’t the first to do that.

And chances are, we’ll be far from the last.

………

This is who we share the road with.

A 22-year old San Diego woman was sentenced to a well-deserved eight years and four months behind bars for a drunken crash that critically injured a five-year old girl.

The victim was riding a scooter on a bike path in the Point Loma neighborhood when Savannah Monique Taylor crashed into her, dragging the girl with her car until crashing into a steel bench.

Police found an almost empty bottle of booze inside her car.

According to the Peninsula Beacon, the victim’s father brought the girl, Olive Tomasevic, into the courtroom in a stroller so the judge could see her.

“She came close to dying several times because of the defendant’s actions,” said Alex Tomasevic. “This is what life is like for her today. She can’t walk. She can’t use the toilet. She uses diapers. She cannot eat on her own. She has a feeding tube. She can’t bathe herself. She can’t attend regular school. She can’t talk. She can’t crawl into bed…”

“I see a tenacious little girl,” said (Olive’s mother) Leeann Tomasevic. “She gets hours and hours of physical therapy. I watched the toughest of nurses cry when she was not looking.”

Taylor was ironically residing in a sober living facility at the time of the crash.

There’s no word on what she was doing driving on the bike path.

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My dad landed on Normandy Beach 82 year ago today, beginning an odyssey that would take him through France, into Belgium, skirting the Battle of Bulge and helping liberate a concentration camp, before ending the war Germany with Patton’s troops.

Then they sent him to Okinawa to prepare for D-Day Japan. He would have been one of the first to land, and was told his unit could expect 100% casualties. If the war hadn’t ended, I probably wouldn’t be here.

Although the only time he ever rode a bike in Europe, he borrowed it after getting separated from his unit.

And no, I don’t know if he ever returned it.

Bluesky post

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Giving a whole new definition to mountain biking.

Bluesky post

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Always pull over to the side of the road if you’re falling asleep behind the wheel.

Twitter post

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

A new protected bike lane in Philadelphia’s Old City brings out all the same complaints from the same people as every other bike lane in any other city. So if you’ve ever read a story about reactions to any new bike lane, you can probably skip this one and recite the arguments from memory.

London’s not-exactly bike-friendly Telegraph blames a new bike lane for a 500% — actually 600% — increase in serious bicycling crashes after a the two-way protected lane was installed, even though that represents a jump from just five to 30 over a five-year period. And even that is meaningless without putting it in context of the increase in ridership from the beginning of the first period to the end of the last.

A British bike rider was lucky to escape with minor injuries after he was kicked off his bike by the passenger on a passing motorcycle.

But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.

A 17-year old Florida boy was hospitalized after he allegedly blew through a stop sign on his ebike and crashed to a driver’s car because he was “vibing.” Maybe they meant “vaping,” unless he was just moovin’ to the groovin’, and gettin’ into the vibes. It could happen. 

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Local 

No bias here. The Santa Clarita Signal reports a man was hospitalized following an ebike crash — but fails to mention in the headline that there was a car involved, or say anywhere that the car presumably had a driver. 

 

State

Both the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center are disavowing any connection to a new six-day Joy Ride CA from San Francisco to Los Angeles, accusing it of riding on the popularity of the former AIDS/LifeCycle Ride.

No, a Chula Vista man riding an ebike didn’t “collide with a vehicle,” he was injured when he was struck by the motorist.

A trio of Ventura bike shops sponsored a Pride Ride in the city, with several bike routes depending on the riders bicycling skills

 

National

American Lael Wilcox is attempting to break her own record as the fastest woman to ride around the world, and set a new record as the fast human to do it by completing the ride in less than 80 days.

I want to be like him when I grow up. A 73-year old man is riding across the US to raise awareness of childhood hunger, and hopes to raise $1 million for No Kid Hungry.

Bicycling may be great for your overall health, but your bones are another matter.

Members of Seattle’s Critical Mass fanned out to set a number of informal road blocks, giving the family of a fallen bike rider room to grieve as over hundred bicyclists installed a ghost bike for the popular elementary school teacher.

A trio of Denverites raced to the city’s famed Red Rocks amphitheater by car, bikeshare and public transit; the driver won after the bikeshare bike refused to leave the city, and the transit took forever. Never mind that the public transit system bizarrely won’t be available for showtimes.

A Texas driver turned himself in for a hit-and-run crash, a day after the victim was found in a ditch after going for a bike ride the night before. Giving the driver plenty of time to sober up if he was under the influence, or come up with an excuse if he wasn’t.

An eight-year old Oklahoma boy’s mountain biking crash turned out to be a blessing in disguise when a brain scan revealed a mass in his brain, giving him a chance of survival he might not have otherwise found; video of the crash while he was riding with his dad and younger brother has been viewed over 62 million times.

Tragic news from Chicago, where a 35-year old man was killed in a dooring when someone exiting a car hit him with a car door while he was riding in a painted bike lane, and knocked him into the path of a semi truck; the victim was a planner for the city’s Complete Streets program, responsible for redesigning roads to make them safer for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to make it safer for himself.

A New York op-ed writer tries to find common ground between bike advocates and anti-ebike forces, but Streetsblog editors remain unconvinced that said common ground exists.

Trump’s plans to redevelop a popular Washington DC public golf course into an upscale “championship-level” course also threatens the city’s iconic Noon Ride, a daily bike ride that brings “wealthy riders perched on $15,000 bikes riding alongside restaurant workers just getting into the sport,” as well as federal workers, law enforcement officers, political operatives and several fitness professionals; L39ION of Los Angeles founder Justin Williams joins in when he’s in town.

Speaking of DC, 300 second graders got matching new blue bicycles after completing a bicycle safety course.

 

International

It’s easier to keep your KOM when it’s on a remote Atlantic island no one can get to without major difficulty.

I want to be like him when I grow up. An 83-year old man is attempting to ride across Canada in what’s being called the “Octogenarian Odyssey;” he’ll turn 84 before the ride is finished.

She gets it. A British Columbia woman writes that bike lanes are not a luxury, as a previous op-ed writer suggested, but a necessity for her family, who rely on bicycles for all the destinations of their daily life, from work and daycare to school, shopping and all their other activities.

An awkward Toronto intersection is being closed to motor vehicles, using diverters including flex posts, planters and Muskoka — aka Adirondack — chairs, to improve safety for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Um, no. A London borough council apologizes after saying ebikes help women “perform their traditional domestic responsibilities” and “stay looking nice.” Maybe someone can send them a link to join the current century. 

A writer the UK says he’ll skip a new shared-use pathway thanks to rippled pavement, debris from trees and difficulty accessing it without crossing a busy roadway. But other than that, it’s just fine, apparently. 

An Irish advocacy group says the problem isn’t that bike lanes are too wide, like the critics say, but that most bike lanes in the country are too narrow to safely ride side by side, as well as to meet EU standards.

The Guardian shares the best new bike and ebike trails surrounding Melbourne, Australia, for your next trip down under.

 

Competitive Cycling

UCI rules that current screens are big enough, and bans any bike computers bigger than the biggest one currently available — and you can kiss jersey pockets goodbye, too.

Sad news from New Hampshire, where American road racing and mountain bike pioneer Andy Bishop died after battling stomach cancer; Bishop competed in four editions of the Tour de France in the late ’80s and early ’90s, including for the old 7-Eleven team. He was just 61.

Apparently #1 is the #1 problem in professional cycling this year, as Pee-gate hits the women’s peloton, too.

 

Finally…

Close encounters of the bear kind — and now the coyotes are out to get us, too. Bike dates aren’t just for “Bicycle Boys” anymore.

And seriously, if you’re going to do crime, don’t ride a distinctive pink bicycle.

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ackerman ghost bike returned, Long Beach 2nd on CA bike-friendly list and 10th is US, and educating LA bicyclists and drivers

June 3, 2026 / / One comment

Happy World Bicycle Day!

Or as it’s known in Los Angeles, Wednesday.

It’s also the day after Election Day. And if past is prologue, it could be a week or more before we know who actually won and lost, despite last night’s breathless news reports.

So take a breath, go for a bike ride, and pretend the past several weeks never happened for a few hours.

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Blake Ackerman’s ghost bike is back.

The memorial to Ackerman, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver while riding home from work at a downtown law firm last July, bizarrely disappeared without a trace from its location at Fountain and Gardner over the weekend.

However, WeHo Times reports it was returned after being discovered inside the garage of a nearby building, with no explanation of how it got there.

It’s possible that it was removed by someone who wanted to get rid of it. But it’s equally possible that it was taken in a misguided attempt to protect it, or by someone who didn’t understand its significance.

Meanwhile, 73-year old Douglas Morton Adams is still awaiting trial for fleeing the scene after killing Ackerman. He faces a maximum of just four years behind bars under California’s lenient hit-and-run laws

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Long Beach is number two.

As opposed to Los Angeles, which only feels like it these days.

According to a new study from Holland Bikes, the beachfront city is the tenth most bike-friendly city in the US, and the second in California, behind only San Francisco.

The City by the Bay also ranked number one nationally, followed by Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington DC, New York City, Portland, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston and Long Beach.

As nice as the recognition is, however, and deserved though it may be, it’s important to remember that we see rankings like this at least every other month, and they all come up with different results.

So take it with a grain of salt.

Or maybe a bag, since decidedly bike-unfriendly Los Angeles is ranked as a country’s 22nd most bike friendly city, just four notches behind San Diego; Bakersfield just barely made the list at number 50.

Meanwhile, my platinum-level bike-friendly Colorado hometown is nowhere to be seen, along with a number of other notably bike-friendly cities, like Boulder, Colorado and Davis, California.

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According to LA Weekly, what we have in Los Angeles isn’t a lack of safe bicycling infrastructure, but a lack of bicycling education, as more people continue to ride after the Covid bike boom.

Still, Andrea Aponte of CycleSafeLA believes the city has not fully caught up to this shift.

A League of American Bicyclists-certified cycling instructor, Aponte has spent more than a decade teaching riders how to safely navigate city streets. According to her, LA has embraced the conversation around bike infrastructure while overlooking the equally critical need for public education.

She points to Los Angeles’s Vision Zero initiative, launched in 2015 with a goal of eliminating traffic fatalities. Yet, she cites recent city data that shows roadway deaths continue to rise. With that context in mind, Aponte believes the conversation has become too heavily centered on physical infrastructure without enough attention placed on the human element of transportation safety.

She’s got a point.

Not that we shouldn’t focus on safer streets, but that we should also focus on surviving the streets we have. And too many people riding bikes today have no real concept of how to do that, simply because no one has taught them.

Although it can’t stop there.

Because every day, I read about experienced, if not expert, bicyclists who became the victims of people who apparently didn’t know how to share the road with them.

Or, perhaps, care.

Aponte also believes the responsibility for coexistence cannot rest entirely on cyclists themselves. “We need to start teaching drivers those same things,” she explains. “Sharing the road with micromobility users should be a much bigger part of driver education.” At the same time, she notes that pedestrians, wheelchair users, scooter riders, and anyone outside a vehicle occupy a vulnerable position within LA traffic systems. Keeping that in mind, Aponte argues that a safer transportation culture depends on recognizing those road users as active participants instead of hindrances.

“We are traffic, in fact, an active part of the traffic. A delay for a driver is an annoyance that can be simply fixed with a lane change, but for the cyclist, that can be a matter of survival,” she states, noting that this perspective often gets lost in public discourse surrounding cyclists. She believes misconceptions around riders tend to shape hostile attitudes on the road.

Aponte explains, “People think cyclists don’t belong there, but we absolutely do, based on the vehicle code. Many of us own cars too, we’re paying our taxes, we’re still contributing to the system, and we have our rights in it.”

It’s relatively easy to educate beginning drivers, since they’re required to take a test on their knowledge of traffic laws.

The problem is educating the great mass of motorists who took their tests long ago, and promptly forgot much of what they learned. And many whom learned the rules of the road when bikes were expected to stick to the gutter, if not the sidewalk.

The greater problem is how to educate bike riders, whose only barrier to using the streets is having a bike, and knowing how to pedal it without falling off.

We assume they know the rules of the road because they also learned to drive. Except roughly a third of Angelenos don’t drive, for whatever reason. And those that do may fall into the same problem we just discussed above.

I don’t have an easy answer to the problem. Or even a hard one, for that matter.

We’ve relied on educating bicyclists, in place of building safe bike infrastructure, since Forester wrote Effective Cycling back in the ’70s. And even before that, for those of us who remember the simplistic children’s bike safety books of the ’50s and ’60s.

All that got us was a small core of highly educated cyclists, and an ever-rising casualty rate.

Paris has shown us what can be done, virtually overnight, to turn a city from a series of traffic-choked car sewers to a bikeable, walkable 15-minute city.

But unless and until that happens here — which seems highly unlikely in the current environment — we’ve got to find another answer.

Because our lives literally depend on it.

……….

The next time someone insists roads were built for cars, point them to this piece from the History Channel.

The site explains that America’s first highways were built by The Good Roads Movement, a group of wealthy bicyclists on Penny-Farthings who were tired of riding in the mud.

And points back to our old friend Carlton Reid, who reminds us that the freedom promised by car ads was originally delivered by bicycles long before cars existed.

The first vehicle to deliver that sense of freedom was the bicycle, says Carlton Reid, a cycling journalist and historian whose book Roads Were Not Built for Cars traces the overlooked origins of America’s highway system. Before cars, before timetables-be-damned road trips, the bicycle was the first machine that let ordinary people go where they wanted, when they wanted, under their own power. No rail schedule, no horse to feed. Just themselves and the road. The winged logo of the League of American Wheelmen, the cycling organization that helped reshape American infrastructure in the 19th century, wasn’t decorative. It meant exactly what it looked like: flight.

When automobiles eventually promised this same unencumbered movement, much of the infrastructure they required already existed. Between 1880 and 1900, the Good Roads Movement, led by an unlikely coalition of urban cyclists and rural postal workers, overhauled the country’s abysmal dirt paths into a coordinated network of paved streets. By the time motorists claimed the movement as their own, cyclists had already established the Office of Road Inquiry and laid important legislative groundwork for the National Highway System we use today.

But as Reid notes, those highways carried the seeds of their own gridlock: “Cars are only useful when there’s a few of them. When there are millions and millions of them, their utility shrinks.” The open road, it turns out, was never meant for everyone.

Yet somehow, all those drivers never wrote to thank us for the roads they use every day.

Although as anyone who has ever ridden their bike past a long line of cars can tell you, that sense of freedom still exists. But only for those of us on two wheels.

No wonder they hate us.

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

Toronto police are claiming a man rode his bicycle through a stop sign at a high rate of speed and shouted a profanity at officers before they tackled him to the ground, after twice shouting at him to stop; however, a bike lawyer says it reflects excessive force and a deeper anti-cyclist bias.

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Local 

The Venice Neighborhood Council’s Parking, Transportation & Infrastructure Committee heard options for improving safety on the west end of Washington Blvd, including survey results calling for protected bike lanes.

 

State

Over 150 bicyclists turned out to remember a 7th grade Grass Valley, California student who died weeks after he was struck by a driver last month, and to call for drivers to watch for bikes.

 

National

Cycling Weekly offers more information about the America Bikes Act, a bipartisan effort to expand bicycling in the US, while improving safety and re-shoring bicycle manufacturing. Although its chances in the current political climate compare somewhat unfavorably to a snowball in hell.

A 66-year old ultra-endurance cyclist is attempting to become the first person to ride the entire 2,448-mile length of US Route 66 without stopping; Joe Barr left from Santa Monica Tuesday morning in his attempt to set a new Guinness World Record.

Hats off to an 11-year old Washington State girl, who built a bicycle repair station on a local bike path for her Girl Scout service project.

A man in Kent, Washington got his purloined pooch back when an enterprising cop tracked down the man’s stolen adult tricycle, complete with dognapped dog ensconced in a carrier on the back.

Colorado opened a new $1 million bike park between the towns of frostbitten Fraser, which is often the coldest spot in the continental US, and the Winter Park ski area, where I learned to ski, badly.

Ebikes of all kinds are even invading Iowa.

Three men from Argentina completed their 10,500-mile bicycle trip through a 17 countries by arriving in Kansas City to see their home country represented in the World Cup.

Thirty-nine bicyclists from the University of Texas are two weeks into a 4,000-mile ride from Texas to Alaska to raise funds for cancer research; one of the two teams has made it to Mesquite, Nevada.

Sad news from Indiana, where a 68-year old retired pastor was killed by a driver while riding his bike last month.

Kim Kardashian and F1 star Lewis Hamilton are officially a thing, outing their relationship while riding bikes together in New York.

Tiny Punta Gorda, Florida represents a bike-friendly dot in the country’s deadliest state for people on bicycles.

 

International

If you were riding your bike in Cambridgeshire, England on January 24th with your butt crack showing, police want to talk with you about a murder.

Your money at work. A London borough is promising to move a digital ad screen from the middle of a bike lane, after admitting the city built the bike lane around the digital sign, which has been at that location for four years.

London’s edition of the World Naked Bike Ride expects to draw more than 1,000 nude and partially dressed riders to the city’s streets to promote bicycling safety, environmental awareness and body positivity. And yes, as an American, I reject the yoke of oppression represented by the Oxford comma.

Forget Kenny, they killed Santa Claus. A 77-year old British bicycling instructor, known for portraying Father Christmas for local kids, was killed by a driver while on 24-hour, 240-mile fundraising ride in support of Motor Neuron Disease.

A Malaysian man continues to ride his bike, despite losing the use of his right hand in a motorcycle crash a dozen years ago.

 

Competitive Cycling

Your favorite cycling team could look a lot different next year, and some pros could end up on the outside looking for a team to ride with, in pro cycling’s annual game of contract musical chairs.

 

Finally…

Evidently, if you carry a surfboard on an ebike, you’re one of “the kookiest people on earth.” Wind tunnel tests prove tying long hair into a bun is more aerodynamic than a ponytail.

And a pub can somehow survive two world wars, a flood and a pair of pandemics, but can’t make it with a new bike path.

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Traffic safety ignored in LA election, bipartisan bike bill in US Congress, and Long Beach man killed by driver while biking in SLO

June 2, 2026 / / One comment

Seriously, if you haven’t already, get out and vote. And remember to Bike the Vote while you’re at it.

Aside from Streets For All, there’s not a lot of guidance on who to vote for, unfortunately. But you can get a little help from Calmatters and LAist on who and what the candidates and issues are, while Streetsblog recommends other sources for endorsements. 

Metro and LADOT transit are both free to help you get to the polls today.

Twitter post

Twitter post

 

Once again, our spokescorgi urges you to vote early and often. 

……….

He gets it.

Writing for Golden State, former Los Angeles Times Opinion editor Paul Thornton, who wisely opted out when Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong gutted and neutered the section, writes about the public safety crisis you barely heard about in the LA mayor’s race.

That’s right.

Your right to bike, walk or drive on the streets of Los Angeles, and get home again in one piece.

Hundreds of people are killed on the streets of Los Angeles every year. But you barely heard about it during the mayoral primary.

I’m not referring to criminal homicides, which last year dipped to their lowest tally in 60 years, but an even deadlier menace.

Drivers and their cars kill a lot of people in this city. You’d think someone running to unseat an incumbent would mention this: L.A.’s streets have never been more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians than under Mayor Karen Bass.

Because for the third straight year, traffic deaths outnumbered murders in the City of Angels, the latter which have continue to fall, despite perceptions fueled by the news media.

And the former are far worse now than when the city adopted, and promptly ignored, Vision Zero a decade ago.

This public safety discordance played out conspicuously at the most high-profile candidate forums. The May 6 NBC debate opened with a jarring montage set to scary music that showed (no joke!) hooded marauders, shotgun-wielding cops and people saying things like “I don’t sleep well at night at all.” The ensuing exchange between Bass and her main challengers, Spencer Pratt and City Councilmember Nithya Raman, featured memorable utterances on trash, “super meth” (which may or may not exist) and the “thousands” of moms who’ve talked to Pratt about not feeling safe.

But not one of the candidates mentioned the hazard that Angelenos have good reason to worry about: Getting killed by a speeding vehicle while driving to work, walking to the park or out for a relaxing bike ride.

Streets Are For Everyone and People’s Vision Zero have been pressing city officials to declare a traffic violence state of emergency in Los Angeles, and are preparing to send a letter to that effect when they get it up to 1,000 signatures.

Wait, you have signed it, right?

But even with that, and the failure of Vision Zero and former Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Green New Deal — let alone the coming World Cup and ’28 LA Olympics — no one is even talking about the lack of action improving city streets.

Or paving them.

That’s what led to the passage of Measure HLA two years ago, when two-thirds of city voters mandated that the city build out the already-approved Mobility Plan.

And you know how that went.

Instead of complying with the law by following the Mobility Plan when a significant amount of work is done on any city street, they simply stopped almost all street work.

Then the city invented the term “large asphalt repair” to get around complying with the law, as well as the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Meanwhile, the condition of our roads continues to get worse.

Twitter post

Again, according to Thornton,

Long Beach, Santa Monica, Glendale and other cities rooted in the same car culture as L.A. are at least trying to address the problem by adding infrastructure to protect cyclists and pedestrians from bigger, faster and deadlier vehicles. South Pasadena is re-working Huntington Drive, one of its most dangerous roads, and South El Monte has made numerous upgrades in the last few years to protect non-drivers.

Yet Angelenos wait for the progress they overwhelmingly demanded in 2024.

Apparently, we’ll continue to wait.

Unless we all demand that whoever makes it to the November runoff addresses the issue.

The first step is signing that letter.

The next is attending candidate forums, debates and open houses, and not letting them leave until they tell you exactly what they intend to do to bring traffic deaths and serious injuries down, too.

If you haven’t yet, donate to Golden State today to support local, independent news.

……….

A new bipartisan omnibus bike bill sponsored by the co-chairs of the Congressional Bike Caucus, California Democrat Mike Thompson and Florida Republican Vern Buchanan, hopes to improve and expand bicycling in the US.

According to the Fairfield CA Daily Republic, HR 9041 The America Bikes Act,

  • Improves cyclist safety by expanding access to federal funding for local governments to improve roadway safety for bicyclists and pedestrians. It would help local, regional, and tribal governments to fund safety action plans and infrastructure projects aimed at preventing roadway fatalities and serious injuries. It makes bike safety education a standard part of youth learning nationwide and expands access to funding for on-bicycle education to elementary and secondary school students.
  • Encourages more people to bike by improving access to programs that help kids safely bike and walk to school. It expands biking and walking infrastructure on federal lands. It reauthorizes federal funding for communities to plan, design and build walking and biking infrastructure. It expands incentives so more Americans switch to bicycle commuting. It creates a grant program to connect biking and transit stations, including supporting bike parking at transit stations and expansion of bikeshare programs.
  • Brings bike manufacturing back to our shores by creating incentives to manufacture bikes in the United States.

Good luck with that last one.

But it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Although I don’t have a lot of faith in anything getting out of this Congress. Or an administration that has already doubled down on highway funding.

………

Sad news from San Luis Obispo County, where a 64-year old Long Beach resident was identified as the victim killed by a driver while riding his bicycle near Edna Valley last month.

Gregory Koch died following the May 20th collision at Orcutt and Tiffany Ranch roads.

There’s still no word on how the crash occurred, nor any mention of his death in the Long Beach media.

………

If you need a good laugh, Metro Bike Share says they’re ready for the World Cup.

Which they may be.

As long as tens of thousands of foreign visitors, who may or may not even know English, don’t mind mixing it up with LA’s famously patient drivers, who never, ever touch their horns or force someone off the road if they impede their progress for even a millisecond.

Because we’re still waiting on all those bus and bike lanes we were promised to get ready for those foreign visitors.

So have fun, sportsball fans.

Rent a bike, and just ride to the venue, restaurant or bar of your choice.

After all, getting there is half the fun, right?

And surviving it is the other half.

………

Megan forwards news that Sacramento is facing the same problems with ebikes and e-motos you’re seeing just about everywhere else.

Even though it’s only the later that’s really the problem.

……….

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

Outrage in Toronto, as multiple cops are shown on video tackling a bike rider and holding him down, for the apparent crime of rolling a stop sign — even though provincial law prohibits using force to stop someone for a routine traffic infraction “unless the circumstances present an immediate and serious threat to public safety.” Which is like cops ramming and handcuffing a motorist for turning right on a red arrow.

………

Local 

WeHo Times reports that Blake Ackerman’s ghost bike disappeared from its location at Fountain and Gardner Street sometime Saturday night; no word on who took it or why. I noticed it was missing Sunday afternoon; not seeing it there hurt almost as much as watching it being placed last July.

Four Master of Public Administration (MPA) students from USC’s Price School were recognized for their work advising CD11 Councilmember Traci Park on how to make part of Washington Blvd safer for bicycle riders.

 

State

The Hustle takes a look at California’s 50-year old Santana Cycles — just “30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles” — as it tries almost singlehandedly to prop up the tandem industry in the US.

Fontana police warn parents about the dangers of kids riding ebikes and e-motorcycles, especially when fleeing from police. So if you’re an adult on an electric motorbike, go ahead and flee, evidently. 

 

National

Velo considers the year’s best road bikes, but kindly hides most of the prices to avoid scaring the crap out of us; fortunately, Road.cc has more affordable options for under the equivalent of two grand.

A Minnesota radio station says yes, bicyclists are legally allowed to roll a stop sign in the state, if the intersection is clear.

An “avid cyclist” took up bicycling at age 30 at the urging of his bike-commuting wife, and now bikes to work at the US Department of Justice, while leading DC’s Jew on Bikes.

 

International

Momentum offers tips on how to have your best summer ever on two wheels. Although it would be pretty damn hard to beat when I was ten or so and riding my bike all over town. 

No bias here. Canada’s CTV News offers everything you need to know for a safe bicycling season, from an ABC check to the 2V1 helmet fitting method. Although there’s no mention of bike lanes, lane sharing or how to ride around inattentive drivers, or anything else that would actually help you, you know, stay safe.

London maps out the city’s most dangerous intersections for bicyclists, as injuries climb to their highest level in eight year, even though bicycling deaths are down.

British bicyclists mostly support the country’s first “cycle street,” though at least one considers the $3.2 million bikeway a “bleedin’ waste of money.”

Sad news from France’s Loire Valley, where 54-year old gravel influencer Stéphane Goyard was killed by a driver while competing in the “Défi200” event at the country’s Nature is Bike festival, just hours after posting his last video to Instagram.

The Türkiye Cycling Federation will mark World Bicycle Day with coordinated bike rides throughout the country formerly known as Turkey. Or as World Bicycle Day is known in Los Angeles, Wednesday.

Speaking of Türkiye, a 32-year old Italian man has reached the northwestern part of the country on his way from Milan to Tokyo by bicycle. Although that last part of the ride could get a little damp. 

 

Competitive Cycling

Cycling Weekly lists all eight cycling greats who have won all three Grand Tours, starting with France’s Jacques Anquetil in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

 

Finally…

That feeling when you turn your bike ride across the country into an audiobook and record album 25 year later. Or when you make history by winning a Grand Tour with hairy legs.

And when you’re carrying meth in your mouth while riding an ebike, put a working headlight on it, already.

The bike, that is. Not the meth.

Or your mouth.

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Show you don’t understand bike projects without saying so, Pride Rides in states red and blue, and no one ever died of Bicycle Face

June 1, 2026 / / No comments

Not a lot of major bike news over the weekend, as tomorrow’s Election Day seems to have sucked all of the oxygen out of the room. 

So let’s jump right in. 

And if a corgi can make time her busy schedule to vote, you can, too. 

……….

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

Britain’s Daily Mail demonstrates they have no idea how bike safety projects get done by their shock — or pretending to be shocked — that the country’s first bike boulevard cost the equivalent of $3.25 million to build, but still could get ripped out because the work won’t be considered permanent until the actual, factual results are in — or that some locals will complain no matter what gets built. In other words, kind of like every other safety improvement, everywhere.

Good point. The communications manager for a Minnesota advocacy group says your rage at dangerous drivers may feel like cathartic justice, but it won’t get the bike lanes fixed.

………

Local 

Altadena community members took part in the city’s inaugural Golden Poppy Bike Ride to promote wildfire recovery and resilience, and gather input for a community-driven effort to reconnect the area through a multimodal trail network.

If you ride the Arroyo Seco Bike Path in Montecito Heights, you might find it a tad scorched but in good condition, after firefighters held a brush fire to a mere quarter acre.

 

State

A man is riding down the entire California coast on a tandem bike, and inviting strangers to join him for part of the ride.

This is who we share the road with. The CHP conducted a 24-hour special enforcement period in San Diego County on Wednesday, writing 1,023 citations, most for speeding, including 17 drivers cited for doing than 100 mph, and another 17 for DUI. Although anyone driving that fast should be arrested on the spot, rather than ticketed.

 

National

Velo has a list of Pride Rides throughout the country to help find one wherever you are, even in red states.

PeopleForBikes looks at what’s in The BUILD America 250 Act being considered by Congress for people on bikes.

Salt Lake City opened a new bike and pedestrian bridge along an existing viaduct, featuring the state’s longest continuous piece of public art. Or as most of us would call it, a nice fence. 

The local Durango, Colorado paper finally features a story about the recent Iron Horse Classic ride that isn’t paywalled.

Um, okay. A Minneapolis writer says even if everyone in the city stopped driving cars entirely, it wouldn’t make a significant difference in global CO2 emissions. On the other hand, it would make the air locally a hell of a lot cleaner. And if everyone, everywhere, did what they could to cut emissions, it might make a real difference. 

Good news from Indiana, where an autistic 21-year old man was found safe two days after he disappeared while riding his bicycle.

Members of a Buffalo Bills supporters group set out on a week-long, 665-mile bike journey from Chicago to Rochester NY for mental health. Which they probably needed after that overtime playoff loss to Denver last year.

A New Jersey dad riding an illegal, high-powered scooter was attempting to pass a slower rider on the Queensboro Bridge bike path when he slammed head-on into another man on a bicycle last week, killing them both. Then again, when you’re riding in a bike lane on a scooter that can do up to 55 mph, everyone is a slower rider. 

A writer for Gothamist declines to take World Cup officials at their word that it’s too dangerous to skip the high transit fees and bike to the venue at New Jersey’s Met Life Stadium, but concludes that it’s actually sound advice.

It’s bibles, books, and bicycles in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to get kids to read and practice their faith — or whatever is equivalent for your faith. Although when I was down there, bibles were what was read on Sunday, before they threw books and rocks and beers at bike riders the rest of the week. 

An Alabama nonprofit surprised kids at a local elementary school by giving 120 bicycles to underserved first graders; for many, it’s the first bike they’ve ever owned.

 

International

Thousands of Edinburg, Scotland bicyclists took to the streets to demand safer roadways in the annual Pedal on Parliament ride. And yes, I’m proud to have a Pedal on Parliament t-shirt hanging in my closet, even though I’ve never been.

A British program is using the equivalent of a $135,000 grant to fix up broken and abandoned bikes and loan them out for free in an effort to get more people riding.

A mountain biker in the UK thanks a mysterious stranger who took his bike to his home when he had a heart attack while on a descent — and perhaps more surprising, that it was still leaning against his garage when he finally returned home. Proving once again that there are a lot of good people in this world. 

A British TV host had a full meltdown in reaction to a respected bike journalist, screaming that bike riders go faster than cars, only 75,000 people live in Amsterdam, and the whole damn country can’t be 25-year olds in Lycra. Although admittedly, we often can go faster than drivers because their 100 mph+ machines are stuck in traffic. 

A 34-year old Dutch man completed a seven-country, 1864-mile bicycle journey from Amsterdam to Istanbul in 46 days to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s disease in honor of his late grandmother.

A woman in Hangzhou, China was lucky to survive when a fishing line wrapped around her neck as she rode her bike past a crowded bridge, before finally snapping on its own; she suspects a careless angler was responsible.

Bicycling Australia complains about “bicycles by name only,” aka so-called ebikes that are actually electric motorbikes.

 

Competitive Cycling

To the surprise of no one, Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard became the eighth man to win all three Grand Tours by claiming the Giro on Sunday, over five minutes ahead of second-place Felix Gall, while Jai Hindley completed the podium.

Bicycling Australia charts how Vingegaard took control of the race on the road from Bulgaria to Rome.

Before the Giro came to a close, 31-year old American Sepp Kuss soloed to victory on the queen stage.

In a bizarre development, Giro points leader and triple stage winner Jhonatan Narváez withdrew after stage 18 after colliding with the team bus following the race.

The women’s edition of the Giro took the extraordinary step of kicking stage one winner Lorena Wiebes out of the race entirely for violating UCI’s 6.8 kilograms weight limit by just 0.02kg — less than one ounce underweight — transferring the first maglia rosa and stage win to Italy’s Elisa Balsamo.

Wiebes’ SD Worx Protime team blamed a faulty scale for her DQ, and threatened legal action.

Cycling News says an unexpected rainstorm changed everything at Unbound Gravel, and apparently, 32-inch wheels didn’t roll over the field, after all.

 

Finally…

No one ever died of Bicycle Face. That feeling when your mountain bike pratfall circles the globe, or when your new bike lane isn’t any wider than your handlebars.

And seriously, no matter how big a hurrying you’re in to get out on your bike, try not to forget your pants.

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: ,

Crackdown on illegal e-motos passes Senate, 2 dead in NY illegal e-scooter/bicycle crash, and road-rage driver shoots ebike rider

May 29, 2026 / / No comments

My apologies for yesterday’s unexcused absence.

Wednesday was a very long day, and by the time I finally had a chance to write about the bicycling death in Santa Ana, it was too damn late to start on anything else.

On the other hand, this is the first time I haven’t had a migraine all week.

So there’s that, anyway. 

Apropos of nothing, today’s photo is my coffee cup and a little light reading. 

………

In late-breaking news — as in a 1 am press release — Streets For All and Streets Are For Everyone announced that SB 1167, which addresses the problem of illegal electric motorbikes being sold as ebikes by unscrupulous dealers, passed the state Senate and will move on to the Assembly.

Given the late hour, I’m just going to let you read the whole thing, rather than trying to rewrite it and edit it down.

This bill partially addresses the problem I’ve complained about for some time, that legal ped-assist ebikes too often get conflated and confused with illegal e-motos.

And this may be the first time I have so scrupulously used unscrupulous in any context on here.

California Senate Passes SB 1167 to Crack Down on Illegal E-Motos Fraudulently Sold as E-Bikes

SACRAMENTO — Recent news has seen a spike in reports of injuries or fatalities caused by “e-bikes,” such as 13-year-old Benson Nguyen or gangs of teenagers and young adults riding  “e-bikes”. What is often missed is that most, if not all, of the vehicles being ridden are not legal e-bikes but are more correctly called e-motos (sometimes incorrectly called e-motorcycles). E-motos are high-powered two-wheeled electric devices that look similar to e-bikes or more like a cross between an e-bike and a motorcycle.

Under California law, legal e-bikes are limited to 750 watts and must fall within the state’s three-class e-bike framework.

But consumers, parents, schools, retailers, and law enforcement are increasingly encountering devices being fraudulently sold as e-bikes that can travel at much higher speeds – 30, 40, 50+ mph, and may legally require registration, licensing, insurance, or safety equipment.

SB 1167, legislation authored by Senator Catherine Blakespear of Encinitas, directly addresses the problem of e-motos and other high-powered electric devices being marketed and sold as street-legal “e-bikes” even when they do not meet California’s legal definition of an electric bicycle and are not street-legal. SB 1167 would make it clear that these devices cannot be falsely advertised or sold as e-bikes and can’t be ridden on the roads without proper registration, rider training, and safety features such as rear taillights, turn signals, and helmets.

Streets For All and Streets Are For Everyone (SAFE) today applauded the California State Senate’s unanimous 37-0 passage of SB 1167.

SB 1167 strengthens consumer protections by requiring clearer labeling and disclosure when a device does not meet the legal definition of an e-bike. The bill also requires every e-bike sold in California to include a visible frame label identifying its class and maximum assisted speed, making it easier for riders, parents, retailers, schools, and law enforcement to understand what kind of device is being used.

“The e-bike panic in California has too often missed the real problem. Legal e-bikes are helping people replace car trips, save money, and get around more easily — but high-powered electric motorcycles being sold as e-bikes create confusion, real safety risks, and reasonable public backlash. SB 1167 is exactly the kind of smart, targeted legislation we need: protect consumers, crack down on misclassified devices, and keep legal e-bikes moving,” said Marc Vukcevic, Director of State Policy at Streets For All.

Under SB 1167, e-motos up to 3000 watts of power would be categorized the same as a moped, requiring the same registration, driver training, and safety features (taillights, turn signals, front lights, etc.) in order to be legally ridden on the road. E-motos above 3000 watts would be classified as either a motor-driven cycle or a motorcycle.

“We know we aren’t going to be getting rid of e-motos. That genie is already out of the bottle. The point of SB 1167 is not to outlaw e-motos but to bring them back under the law and ensure they are being used in a way that is safe for the rider and those around them,” said Damian Kevitt, Executive Director at Streets Are For Everyone.

The legislation also improves incident reporting by requiring law enforcement to include e-bike label information when documenting crashes and other incidents. That improved data collection will help California better distinguish between legal e-bikes and other electric two-wheeled vehicles, ensuring future policy is based on the actual source of safety concerns.

E-bikes are an increasingly important transportation option for Californians. They help families replace car trips, give young people and older adults more independence, support workers who rely on affordable transportation, reduce emissions, and make biking a more practical option for longer trips and hilly communities. Streets For All and SAFE support policies that protect legal e-bike riders and responsible retailers while ensuring that e-motos sold are used safely, with proper registration, training, and safety features one would expect of any high-powered vehicle used on our roads.

SB 1167 is co-sponsored by  Streets Are For Everyone, Streets For All,  Calbike, and PeopleForBikes. The bill now heads to the Assembly for consideration.

………

Horrible news from New York, where two men were killed in head-on collision on the city’s Queensboro Bridge Wednesday morning.

No drivers or motor vehicles involved.

Instead, a 35-year old bike rider was hit by a 39-year old man riding the wrong way in the bike lane, on an illegal e-scooter capable of up to 53 mph. Both men died after being taken to a hospital.

A photo shows the carbon-frame Factor bike snapped in half, with the scooter embedded in between.

The scooter should have never been on the streets, where New York has a 20 mph speed limit for stand-up e-scooters, which is common in many cities and states; California has a 15 mph limit for throttle-controlled scooters.

Never mind that the rider wasn’t legally allowed in the bike lane, let alone riding salmon.

Now two people have paid the price for one man’s bad choices.

Thanks to Edward for the heads-up. 

………

While we’re on the subject of horrible news, a Fairfax, Virginia man is fighting for his life after he was shot multiple times by a road-raging driver.

According to witnesses, the driver was chasing the ebike rider when he caught up to the victim at a stop sign, then got out of his car and fired several shots as the bike rider tried to back away.

Despite taking two to three bullets to the chest, the victim got back on his ebike and rode to the next town over, where a friend called 911. He was hospitalized in critical condition.

Police arrested the driver hours later. Possible charges will likely depend on whether the victim survives his injuries.

………

Calbike says the untenable ten-year delay in building active mobility projects in LA’s Boyle Heights, Skid Row and Wilmington, which could result in the loss of $100 million in state grants, shows why California has to fix its Active Transportation Program.

AB 2168, authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, would strengthen California’s ATP by making it more focused, more coordinated, and more accountable. The bill requires updates to the ATP guidelines to give greater emphasis to safe routes to transit, including projects that improve biking and walking access to transit facilities, school bus stops, transit station areas, planned stops, transit corridors, transit-oriented development areas, and underserved or rural areas.

The most important change in AB 2168 is also one of the most practical: it pushes California to stop treating active transportation as a small, separate category of transportation spending. The bill calls for commitments of State Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) funds to ATP-funded projects so California can scale up larger and network-level active transportation improvements. Committing STIP funds, which typically funded larger general roadway projects, to active transportation projects increases available funding for biking and walking infrastructure, increasing the reach far beyond the oversubscribed, underfunded ATP. In plain terms, that means ATP dollars should be used as a corollary, complementary piece for bigger investments, not as the only money available to build safer streets.

………

Personal injury attorney Steven M. Sweat emailed with a good reminder that California’s three-foot passing law was changed three years ago to require drivers to change lanes to pass a vulnerable road user when there’s a lane available.

Sweat has a guide to California bike laws on his website, in case you’re in need of a quick refresher.

But drivers still can’t legally put two wheels across the magic yellow line in the center of the road to pass a bike rider safely on a two-lane road, thanks to our outgoing governor’s overactive veto pen.

………

Bike Angeles rides the D.

Twitter post

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If, like me, you’re still making last-minute decisions on local offices before Tuesday’s Election Day deadline, LAist offers a detailed Voter’s guide.

Meanwhile, Streets For All endorses Nithya Raman, my fellow corgi dad Kenneth Mejia, and Marissa Roy in the upcoming election.

Twitter post

……….

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

The head of a Florida homeowner’s association faces charges for chasing down a 12-year old boy who had just moved to the area, knocking him off his bicycle and throwing the bike in his car, in an extreme case of “you don’t belong here.”

Clean Technica says Berlin is ground zero in the war between bicycles and cars, following the progress Paris has made. To which LA drivers said “hold my beer.”

………

Local 

Los Angeles officially opened Phase 3 of the Griffith Park Safety and Active Transportation Improvement Project, adding protected bike lanes, speed humps, new signage and traffic-calming measures along Crystal Springs Drive. Someone sent me a photo of k-rail barriers being removed in Griffith Park, but I seem to have lost the email, so please resend it if you can. 

Metro approved a number of motions at Thursday’s board meeting, including a new budget that will continue to flush nearly a billion dollars down the induced demand toilet, along with a motion to move the plans for the LA river bike path forward with a lower-cost design that could possibly, maybe, kinda hopefully be finished in time for the ’28 Olympics. LA Mayor Karen Bass was also voted in as board chair for the upcoming fiscal year, though voters may have a say in that come November, if not on Tuesday.

 

State

Another Orange County mom could face charges for the sins of her son, after the teenager fled from cops attempting a traffic stop by riding against traffic at a high rate of speed and blowing through a red light, following several previous warning about his alleged illegal behavior.

The driver charged with killing six-year old Hudson O’Loughlin in a January Pacific Beach hit-and-run was formally charged on Wednesday, as 32-year old Tiffany Sanchez pled not guilty to felony counts vehicular manslaughter and hit and run causing death; in gut wrenching testimony, Hudson’s father said the boy was still alive and trying to move his bike following the initial impact, when Sanchez stepped on the gas and ran the boy over. And yes, this one still makes me cry.

Better news from San Diego’s Carmel Valley, where a 12-year old boy was moved from the ICU nearly a month after he was struck by a driver while riding his ebike; Mark Maldonado has shown significant improvement since he was removed from a ventilator and a medically induced coma. A crowdfunding page has raised nearly $21,000, while classmates at his elementary school raised over $1,800 with a bake sale and lemonade stand.

San Diego County health officials warn about the dangers of ebikes. Even though it’s only the illegal ones that cause the problems. 

 

National

Even tiny and cold Nome, Alaska now has a bike bus with nearly two dozen students.

A former Chicago Peace Corps volunteer has helped send over 7,000 bicycles to Africa’s Kingdom of Lesotho since founding Bikes for Lesotho 13 years ago.

Sad news from Cleveland, where the landmark former home of a 143-year old bike shop was partially demolished when the building was declared unsafe, two years after the business had closed.

Damn. A Tampa, Florida man was struck and killed by a driver while riding his bike, just six months after surviving a cardiac arrest.

 

International

What could possibly go wrong? A pedestrian walkway in Oxfordshire, England will be widened slightly so bike riders can share the route, but for just a little more 400 feet — one and a third the distance of a football field — likely leaving both walkers and rider confused and conflicted.

Life is cheap in the UK, where Road.cc catches up on sentencing for several drivers who killed or injured bike riders, including just four years for a woman who killed a 70-year old man while driving drunk and stoned, with an open wine bottle next to her and her kids in the car.

A British advocacy group says the government should invest in electric bicycles, because ebike incentives are twice as effective as grants for electric cars. Maybe someone should tell the California Air Resources Board, since they stole the funding for the state ebike incentive program to give it to electric car buyers, instead. 

 

Competitive Cycling

Velo digs into the numbers to show that Jonas Vingegaard really might be better and stronger than ever.

Thirty-four-year old Danish cyclist Michael Valgren fought his way to his biggest victory since a devastating crash at the 2022 Route d’Occitanie nearly ended his career, by winning Wednesday’s stage 17 of the Giro.

Twenty-two-year old French pro Paul Magnier won stage 18 of the Giro on Thursday to reclaim the ciclamino points leader’s jersey, while Jonas Vingegaard remained far ahead in the GC. And yes, I had to look up ciclamino, too. 

Velo looks back fondly at the “storied history” of Pennsylvania’s 50-year old Trexlertown Velodrome, saying it set a new standard for US bike racing.

 

Finally…

That feeling when your new bike lane becomes a giant ad and a carnival ride. Or when your new cargo bike could double as a racing bike, unless maybe you prefer your next bike to be hydrogen powered.

And who needs a piano when you have a bicycle?

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

A DIY Pasadena bike plan, US ebike panic ignores the real problem, and riding in LA feels like #2 because we’re #3

May 27, 2026 / / No comments

I’m writing this with a migraine that’s threatening to make my head explode. 

So if you see this, it means my meds finally kicked in; if not, someone please clean up whatever is left of me. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter. 

Photo by Aidan Nguyen from Pexels.

………

That’s more like it.

The Pasadena Complete Streets Coalition is leading a community-driven effort to draw their own bike plan for the Rose City, proposing a connected, all-ages-and-abilities network of Greenways on low-speed streets, with protected bike lanes on faster roadways.

The map will be unveiled on June 3rd for World Bicycle Day.

That will come about a month before the city begins work on a new Active Transportation Plan intended to update the 2006 Pedestrian Plan and 2015 Bicycle Transportation Action Plan, as well as other documents, combining them into a single comprehensive blueprint.

………

He gets it.

Writing for Electrek, Micah Toll argues that America is panicking over ebikes while ignoring the real problem.

As in, cars, and the people driving them.

If you spend enough time reading local news headlines these days, you’d be forgiven for thinking electric bicycles are one of the greatest threats facing American streets. Teenagers on fat-tire e-bikes, viral videos of wheelies, stories about injuries complete with ER doctor interviews… the same themes are playing on repeat…

Some riders behave irresponsibly. Some companies sell vehicles that blur the line between e-bikes and electric motorcycles. Some inexperienced riders are suddenly traveling at speeds they aren’t prepared to handle.

But somewhere along the way, the conversation seems to have lost all sense of proportion.

According to Toll, ebike and e-scooter deaths are averaging around 135 a year across the entire US. That includes everything from Lime scooters to illegal, high-speed motorbikes passing as bicycles.

Meanwhile, motor vehicles kill over 40,000 people every year. A difference of a mere 29,500%.

Clearly, we have to do something to rein in ebikes that exceed the legal limits, and don’t meet the definition of a bicycle, ped-assist or otherwise.

But focusing on the dangers posed by ebikes is like trying to swat a fly on a crashing jet.

A point made by a columnist for Cycling Weekly, who says recent concerns over speeding bicyclists also missed the mark.

In practice most of the people with an instinct for obeying a speed limit aren’t going to be the people who were any sort of problem – morons will continue to moron, delivery riders will still need to earn enough to eat. Why am I so sure, you ask? I’ll refer to you our roads in general. And, as on the roads in general, enforcement will be minimal. Meanwhile, cyclists will continue to take abuse from everyone, from the local paper to the House of Lords, much of it because of a group who aren’t actually riding bicycles. Honestly, it’s time to start treating different things differently.

And yes, “morons will continue to moron” sums up the debate as well as anything else I’ve seen.

But at least a California bill intended to address the illegal e-moto issue is moving forward.

Twitter post

………

Riding a bicycle in Los Angeles may feel like number two, but we’re actually number three, according to a Texas law firm.

In a story focusing on how safe Salt Lake City is for bicycling, ranking 53rd out of the 55 most dangerous cities for bicyclists, there’s an almost casual mention of which cities came out on top.

New York was number one, Houston number two. LA finished third.

Clearly, local drivers have to try harder.

We also ranked third for air quality, which is only surprising because we’re usually ranked as the nation’s worst.

………

Streets Are For Everyone urges you to sign their open letter demanding that city leaders declare a Traffic Violence State of Emergency in Los Angeles; they’re nearing the goal of 1,000 signatures before it’s delivered to the city council.

And yes, my name is on it.

………

We have Megan to thank for a trio of news stories, beginning with a report on Boise, Idaho’s “Blessing Bike” getting seniors back out for a ride.

Karim Alim, co-founder of the Gaza Sunbirds paracycling team made up of Palestinians who have been injured or lost limbs as a result of the Israeli invasion, says their riding is a form of resistance.

And a group of Austin, Texas bike riders are roaming the city delivering food to people who may otherwise fall through the cracks.

………

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

A suspected “bike racing hater” is being blamed for removing over 50 route signs over a 12-mile stretch of Germany’s Rhön Cycle Marathon, the country’s most important long-distance bike race.

………

Local 

Public radio program Marketplace profiles LA’s Black-owned Ride On! Bike Co-Op, which is surviving difficult market conditions thanks to an ebike library program.

This is who we share the road with. Former NYPD Blue star Kim Delaney reportedly settled a lawsuit over a hit-and-run crash that injured a motorcycle rider on Venice Blvd; witnesses say she appeared to be intoxicated, but she insists she only left the scene since she felt threatened because of her celebrity. Terms of the settlement were not made public.

The West Hollywood Bicycle Coalition will host the annual Pride Ride on Sunday, June 7th, departing from the Hollywood and Highland Metro Station at 10:30 am, and riding to the WeHo Pride Parade and Street Fair in West Hollywood.

 

State

Carlsbad cops can start ticketing ebike riders for violating the city’s crackdown, after a two-month warning period ended.

A San Raphael man must not like bike riders. The 64-year old man was arrested after he allegedly confronted a bunch of bike-riding kids, swinging a fist at one before grabbing another child’s bicycle, first threatening to steal it, then throwing it at the kid when they wouldn’t let go; the same man was arrested three years ago for punching a man on a bicycle, knocking him off the bike, then striking him with a pipe during an apparent theft attempt.

A 75-year old Bay Area man says he’ll be riding in a SAG wagon in support of one of the two two legacy events replacing the AIDS/LifeCycle Ride, which ended last year; he’s aiming to raise $1,500 supporting the ride, after raising over $6,000 riding in the other legacy ride — and surviving with HIV since before the disease had a name.

Davis will host an all-ages bicycle scavenger hunt on Saturday, the seventh edition of the bike ride; this year’s theme is Music, with a goal of helping a band get their sound back together.

Speaking of Davis, police investigators have closed the case of a 60-year old woman killed when her bicycle collided with a teenager who was legally riding a class 2 ebike on a local bike path, confirming that no charges will be filed.

 

National

A law group ranks the 25 bridges that bike riders fear the most; surprisingly, none are in Southern California. Although the results were based on a survey of just over 3,000 bike riders nationwide, raising questions of how someone is capable of judging bridges across the country that they’ve likely never seen, let alone ridden. 

That neo-Nazi adjacent “Bikes Will Not Replace US” sign we linked to yesterday was part of a protest against the weekend closure of a Seattle lakefront to motor vehicles. Because nothing says your cause is just like linking it to a Nazi slogan. 

A writer for a Washington State website recommends exploring Lummi Island by bicycle. However, riding to it requires communing with the fishes, since it can only be reached by boat.

Oceanside bike lawyer and BikinginLA sponsor Richard Duquette forwards a story about the economic impact of Durango, Colorado’s annual Iron Horse Classic offroad race. Unfortunately, though, you’ll have to find a way around the paper’s paywall. And have I mentioned lately that paywalls suck and are self-defeating?

It’s been a bad few weeks for bike-riding kids in the Great Lakes region, with a 12-year old Michigan girl dying six days after she was struck by a driver while riding home from an ice cream shop, and a 14-year old boy killed by a driver in Illinois — even though the story doesn’t even mention anyone operating the apparently driverless vehicle.

The participants in this year’s Remember the Removal Bike Ride set off from Tahlequah, Oklahoma on a nearly 950-mile ride retracing the infamous Trail of Tears, one of the most shameful acts in American history.

The Sierra Club and Sunrise Movement are hosting the Ride to End Fossil Fuels, a century ride across Connecticut calling for elected leaders and state agencies to take action to address the climate crisis.

That’s more like it. A Florida woman was sentenced to ten years behind bars for the hit-and-run death of a Navy veteran as he rode his bicycle in Pensacola three years ago, before fleeing to Kentucky to avoid prosecution, and having her car towed to Alabama to hide it from investigators; she will also face 18 years probation and lose her driver’s license for life.

 

International

Cardiff, Wales is combining new bike infrastructure with water conservation, designing bikeways that function as rain gardens and wildlife habitat, as well as providing shade, cooling the surrounding area and filtering air pollutants.

Bicycle ridership is surging and pedestrian injuries dropping on an Edinburg, Scotland bike path described as a “transport hell” and “the worst cycle lane in the world.”

An Irish study shows that over 80% of the country’s serious or fatal bicycling collisions occur during daylight hours and on straight roads, rebutting demands that bike riders be required to wear hi-viz.

 

Competitive Cycling

Jonas Vingegaard won his fourth mountain stage in this year’s Giro, taking stage 16 by more than a minute in a dramatic solo finish, while building a 4:03 lead over second place Felix Gall.

Defending Unbound 200 champion Cam Jones says he’s “genuinely scared” how fast he will be this weekend, as he defends his title on a prototype gravel bike with 32″ wheels, which will never be released to the general public.

A writer for Road.cc says gravel bikes go back at least 103 years to the 1923 Tour de France.

 

Finally…

Even the trees are out to get us these days. That feeling when bikeshare bikes outnumber seagulls on the local beaches. Nothing like relaxing with your three grand Zwift espresso maker.

And the deer are out to get us, too.

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Results are in — bikes for the win, the normalization of anti-bike rage, and the great ebike battle goes on…and on

May 26, 2026 / / No comments

No surprise here.

A scoping review of 87 studies from 19 countries found clear benefits for social wellbeing in every study that measured it, concluding that bicycling not only improves physical fitness but also enhances mental well-being, reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression, strengthens social connections, and sharpens cognitive function.

But you probably didn’t need a study to tell you that, since you live it every time you ride.

At least, when the angry people in the big, dangerous machines let you.

Photo by Olya Kobruseva from Pexels.

………

Road.cc readers set off a minor online tempest over the weekend by questioning whether anti-bicyclist abuse on the roads of the UK and Ireland is getting worse.

That was posed this week by road.cc reader the little onion, who sparked the debate by revealing that they are shouted at by people in vehicles “once per hour or so of riding” in the north of England.

And almost always, the commenter noted, at the hands, horns and lips of male drivers.

“I reckon that about once per hour or so of riding, I get someone in a vehicle – almost exclusively male – winding down their window to randomly shout abuse at me, telling me to get a car, get off the f***ing road, or something like that.

“Mostly it is people overtaking, sometimes people travelling the other direction. And completely unprovoked, not reacting to anything I may have done, other than existing as a cyclist. Am I unique here? Does this chime with other people’s experiences?”

Evidently so, since that observation has been born out by recent studies.

A recent government report in Ireland found that a high percentage of women are put off riding a bike on the road thanks to an increasing “car culture”, “aggressive” driver behaviour, and potential abuse.

And earlier this year, a women’s cycling safety audit carried out by the Norwich Cycling Campaign noted that female cyclists are disproportionately affected by verbal abuse, intimidation, and street harassment while on their bikes.

However, while men are the usual perpetrators, the abuse seems to fall equally on both sides of the saddle.

“Unfortunately, it isn’t just you,” said NickSprink. “South of England here, I’d say just as common, especially if beeping of horns and finger gestures are included.”

Clem Fandango wrote: “Twice in the last six months I’ve been making my way along a quiet two-lane road. No vehicles behind me and no drama. Until on each occasion the driver of a vehicle coming the other way, and in no way affected by me minding my own business on the other side of the road, decided to roll down the window as they passed, to drop a C-bomb on me.

“No need for any conflict or interaction of any kind in that situation, it’s just pure narrow-minded abuse.”

Meanwhile, Momentum says the question isn’t whether anti-bicyclist abuse is getting worse, but why has it become so normal?

In North America especially, roads have been culturally framed as spaces built for cars first. So when someone rides a bike in traffic, some drivers react as if a social rule has been broken.

And because cycling has become tangled up in conversations about climate change, bike lanes, urban politics, and “car culture,” a simple bike commute can suddenly become symbolic to people already angry about broader social changes.

At the same time, roads themselves feel more hostile than they used to. Drivers are stressed, distracted, impatient, and increasingly isolated from one another inside vehicles. Cyclists — visible, exposed, and vulnerable — become easy targets for frustration that often has nothing to do with them personally.

One Reddit commenter captured it perfectly: “You are subject to this abuse simply because you are vulnerable to it.”

USA Today picks up the same theme in another story examining the “alarming rash of bike crashes” in the US.

“People have the opinion that cyclists don’t have the right to use the public roads,” said Maggie Ardito, who advocates for greater safety for cyclists as president of the St. Johns River-to-Sea Loop Alliance and as a board member of the Florida Bicycle Association.

Ardito says the sight of a group of cyclists can enrage drivers, and – in Ardito’s experience as a cyclist and a leader of the biking community in Florida – it’s been happening more and more.

And with predicable outcomes.

Data shows a concerning trend: Recent years have seen a sharp increase in bicyclist fatalities among men over the age of 20, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute. Deaths have increased 15% since 1975, and 86% since an all-time low point in 2010. Meanwhile, fatalities have decreased for children. In 2024, 1,103 bicyclists died in traffic crashes, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data shows.

Granted, not every crash or death is the result of enraged drivers. The paper also blames over-engineered roads that encourage higher speeds and reckless driving.

Another reason, they say, is simply a numbers game. More bicyclists on the roads, combined with a post-pandemic rebound in motor vehicle traffic and a lack of safe bicycle infrastructure, means more people competing for the same space on the roads.

And yes, sometimes it’s the people on two wheels who are to blame, for crashes as well as going ballistic on the roads.

People who are more prone to road rage are more easily triggered than others by their experiences on the road, and may tend to perceive incidents (whether accidental or not) as personal slights, Hennessy said. Bikers can be just as guilty of aggressive behavior or dangerous driving, said Hennessy, who is a frequent cyclist himself.

“There are some cyclists who are antagonistic toward drivers,” he said. A cyclist might think a driver is coming up too close to them “because they’re a jerk,” he said. “In their mind, ‘How do you deal with a jerk? Well, you just piss them off even more, maybe you teach them a lesson.’ ”

Admittedly, we’re not all saints. Some of us are assholes most of the time, while most of us are assholes some of the time.

The difference is that people who ride bikes aren’t operating multi-ton weapons of mass destruction, capable of mowing down anyone and anything in their way.

Intentionally or otherwise.

But physically protected bike lanes can make a difference.  There are situations where even in the presence of a dedicated bike lane, unless it is protected by barriers, it may still be safest for a cyclist to ride in the road, Von Hagen said. Bike lanes can be risky if they are too narrow, and it’s all too easy for a car to drift or swipe a rider with a side mirror, she said. Bike lanes tend to be where people illegally park, or where garbage cans or accumulating fall leaves pile up.

The team at Rutgers studied driver and cyclist behavior before and after the implementation of a temporary bike lane in New Jersey. Men are generally more likely than women to ride in the street, while women are more likely to ride on the sidewalk, Younes said. When there is a protected lane, with physical barriers or a parking lane between a bike lane and car traffic, use is more universal, and people who are more risk-averse will use it instead of the sidewalk, Younes said.

And there’s nothing like that heady blend of antisemitic and anti-bike hate. Thanks to Ted Faber for the heads-up. 

Reddit post

………

Streets For All reports they helped kill two bad ebike bills in the state legislature, and are working to get two others over the finish line.

Last week, two bills that would have devastated e-bike access in California died in the legislative process. Your advocacy helped make it happen.

AB 1557 (Papan) would have severely limited access to legal e-bikes by dismantling the standard 3-class e-bike system and limiting the speed and power of e-bikes. AB 1942 (Bauer-Kahan) would have required licensing and registration for e-bikes, products which do not currently exist in California.

Both AB 1557 and AB 1942 died in the Assembly Appropriations Committee after hundreds of you called, wrote, and lobbied your legislators.

This means that California just narrowly avoided the fate of New Jersey, where a new e-bike law going into effect in July is creating massive new bureaucratic hurdles to owning and riding an e-bike.

But we’re not stopping at just killing the bad bills.

This Monday our team went to Sacramento to build on the momentum for e-bikes. We met with legislators to make the case for SB 1167 (Blakespear), which would establish clear labeling requirements that distinguish legal e-bikes from illegal e-motos. We also pushed for more funding for California’s Active Transportation Program and a new statewide e-bike incentive program.

Here’s what we’re seeing: legislators want to get e-bike policy right. When they understand the real issue — that illegal e-motos, not legal e-bikes are what need regulating — most of them get it. SB 1167 already has strong bipartisan support. And AB 1569 (Davies), which directs the department of education to create an e-bike education curriculum for 7th-12th graders, just passed the Assembly and is heading to the Senate.

The two harmful bills are dead for this year. But they could easily return next session.

That’s why Streets For All works year-round in Sacramento: So the people making policy understand the difference between a legal e-bike and an illegal e-moto before the next bill drops.

Meanwhile, CNN breathlessly proclaims what ER doctors, prosecutors and parents want you to know about ebike dangers. But evidently, they don’t want you to know, since the story is hidden behind their paywall for subscribers only.

Apparently, things are no different north of the border, either.

Or even in Amsterdam, where officials want to implement a 12.5 mph speed limit to rein in illegal ebikes, but others warn that “young people don’t give a damn about a sign.”

On the other hand, New York State won’t take up consideration of an ebike bill this year, after legislators ran out of time to put one together.

………

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

No bias here. A South Seattle writer complains about the city’s closure of a lakefront drive to motor vehicle traffic for 15 “Bicycle Weekends” this summer, framing it as a gentrifiers’ assault on “one of the very few simple pleasures enjoyed by the BIPOC and other marginalized communities that have been push-broomed into South Seattle,” because they can’t take a drive along the shore from Friday night to Monday morning. Apparently only wealthy, white people ride bicycles and “the BIPOC and other marginalized communities” never, ever want to take pleasant strolls or ride bikes on the lakefront. 

An Irish writer complains about commenters who insist on dissecting every positive comment about bicycling while proclaiming that not everyone can ride a bike for every purpose, as if no one had ever thought of that before. And that no one ever makes the same comments about car ads, even though many people can’t drive.

But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.

The husband of an 80-year old woman who suffered a fatal brain injury when she was hit by a bicyclist participating in the Tour de Manc sportive on the Isle of Man complains that “it’s unbelievable” that people on bicycles can’t be prosecuted for speeding in the UK — even though the bike rider never topped the 30 mph speed limit, and had only two seconds to brake after she came into view on a descent.

A man riding salmon in Singapore stuck out his leg as a driver went past, in an apparent attempt to kick the car, for reasons known only to him.

@asiaone

The incident happened along the East Coast Park Service Road on Saturday (May 23) evening. #sgnews #Singapore #Cyclist #Road #Safety 📹: Facebook/SG Road Vigilante

♬ original sound – AsiaOne – AsiaOne

………

Local 

LADOT is asking the city council to speed the implementation of the city’s pilot speed cam program without putting it through the usual competitive bid process, instead piggybacking off a contract approved by Oakland after going through competitive bidding up there. After all, what could possibly go wrong, since Los Angeles and Oakland are identical in every way?

The Eastsider features of photo by Gavin Brennan of E Bike Tours LA showing at least 15 dogs lined up in Griffith Park overlooking the city. Although that strikes me as about one corgi short of a pack. 

Streetsblog reports the half-mile Move Culver City Eastern Segment closed a key bikeway network gap with new bus and bike lanes on Washington and Adams.

There’s a special place in hell for the hit-and-run driver who knocked a 13-year old boy off his bicycle as he rode home from school in Cerritos last week, leaving the kid with a mouth full of broken teeth.

 

State

Calbike is hosting a webinar at noon tomorrow to discuss their strategic plan for 2030. My strategic plan is to still be on this side of the dirt by then.

A 46-year-old Rancho Cucamonga man faces a murder charge for attacking a homeless man riding a bicycle in a parking lot May 6th; 57-year-old Ricardo Castanon died of his injuries on Saturday.

A 15-year old boy suffered a broken leg when he slammed his Class 2 ebike into the side of a car in Pacific Beach, after the 17-year old driver made an illegal U-turn in front of him.

More proof there are still good people in the world, as the Ramona community rallied around a 37-year old autistic man after his ebike was stolen from the Circle K where he works, as one person donated a used ebike, others raised over $1,500 on a crowdfunding campaign, and a nearby business owner confronted the thief directly, demanding he return the ebike — which he did.

Like mother, like daughter, I guess. When Britney Spears was being arrested for DUI in Ventura County in March, she blurted out that her mom had killed a bicyclist in 1975; her mother Lynne was acquitted for killing a 12-year old boy when she was 20 years old.

An award-winning San Francisco chef reduces the stress of running two restaurants in the city while opening two more in Napa with “lethally fast” century rides.

Sad news from Roseville, where a bike rider was killed in a collision Monday morning. Or at least everyone is assuming it was the bike rider who died, and not the driver.

 

National

A writer for CNET says yes, you can replace your ebike with an AI-powered exoskeleton and a regular bicycle, but maybe you don’t want to.

Cycling West looks at “the incredible life of Paul Willerton,” a nearly lifelong bicyclist and founder of the bicycling sock brand DeFeet, who helped Greg LeMond recover his bike skills after he got an accidental shotgun blast to the gut courtesy of LeMond’s brother-in-law, who mistook the cycling great for a turkey.

Electrek examines the rise of the bike bus, and why people love them so much — like the weekly Roosevelt Bike Bus to Burbank’s Roosevelt Elementary School.

Now you, too, can be replaced by a robot, as engineering students at Olin College in Massachusetts have designed and built an autonomous self-balancing bicycle.

The New York Times examines the free adult bicycling classes offered by a local nonprofit group, full of nervous novice riders, many of whom are women.

A Complete Unknown and Marty Supreme star Timothée Chalamet is one of us, riding a bikeshare around New York on Friday.

A 48-year old Queens, New York man was critically injured when he was doored by a 15-year old girl opening the back door of the car she was in, knocking him into the path of an oncoming car. Dooring is one of the most common types of bicycling crashes, which is why both the Bike League and CyclingSavvy recommend riding in the middle of the traffic lane, away from swinging doors. 

No need to complain about the new bike lanes in the Town of Carthage, North Carolina, because they aren’t.

A Naples, Florida man faces charges for intentionally crashing his car into a child riding an ebike, swerving towards the victim before revving his engine and crashing into the kid — apparently for the crime of being out riding the bike after getting suspended from school.

 

International

A couple men are in the midst of a 50-day, 2,500-mile bike ride to raise awareness of the plight of Whooping Cranes, North America’s most endangered bird; the men are following the Central Flyway migration route from the Gulf Coast through central Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and the prairies of central Saskatchewan, Canada.

She gets it. A British Columbia woman writes that bike lanes aren’t a luxury for her family, and that “blaming traffic problems on bike lanes ignores the fact that an increasing proportion of people are choosing or needing to bike.” Amen, sister.

British taxpayers can continue to claim a 20 pence per mile credit on their taxes for riding a bike to work, which works out to about 27 cents a mile on this side of the Atlantic.

Spandau Ballet lead guitarist and songwriter Gary Kemp is one of us, bicycling for “fitness, camaraderie and stories,” as well as his mental health.

Cops in an Irish town face a backlash after accusing abusive “male youths on bicycles wearing dark clothing” of damaging the local castle’s gardens by building a bike ramp. But why would bicycles need to wear dark clothing?

An Irish woman explores why making sustainable choices like giving up meat and riding a bicycle prompt such rage and outsized emotions.

The Global Times offers photos from the weekend’s spring bicycle festival in Moscow, Russia. Which looks like what you could expect at any CicLAvia.

ABC — no, the other one — examines the long and painful road to a bike-friendly Australia.

 

Competitive Cycling

You can probably close the door on this year’s Giro d’Italia, after Jonas Vingegaard claimed the maglia rosa leader’s jersey on Saturday, while his Visma Lease a Bike team took firm control of the race.

Italian cyclist Enrico Zanoncello learned the hard way that one of the easiest ways to get kicked out of the Giro d’Italia is headbutting a competitor, after knocking rival sprinter Bob Donaldson off his bike in the closing meters of stage 15.

Belgian pro Victor Campenaerts fessed up to being behind the Giro’s pee-gate, admitting that he was the one who relieved himself in empty water bottles and tossed them to the side of the road.

Cycling Weekly takes a look at the competitors for this weekend’s 20th edition of Unbound Gravel in the Flint Hills region of east-central Kansas, including defending champ Cam Jones and our old favorite Taylor Phinney, with Polish cyclist Karolina Migoń and three-time US gravel champ Lauren Stephens heading up the women’s roster.

 

Finally…

Treat your kid to an officially branded Peppa Pig bike. That feeling when your Amazon cargo bike gets tree-bombed. If you’re going to steal a bicycle from under the nose of a cop, make sure they’re busy with more important things, first.

And yes, it is possible to make cars go bye.

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

LA begs for six more years to start state-funded low-income community work, and Long Beach boy dies chasing ball into street

May 22, 2026 / / One comment

I hope y’all have recovered from your Bike Day hangovers, and come down from the high of a free transit day.

Something the corgi and I tried to take advantage of, but had to wait more than half an hour for the damn 2 bus to come. So if you ever wonder why people refuse to get out of their cars and use transit, put that kind of unreliability near the top of the list.

Speaking of getting people out of their cars, though, Metro is suing Burbank over its refusal to grant construction permits for the NoHo to Pasadena rapid bus route.

Maybe they should build it on Sunset Blvd, instead.

As usual, I’ll be taking Memorial Day off to remember those who gave their lives to give the freedom we seem so willing to give away these days.

And stay safe out there. I want to see you back here on Tuesday.

………

More evidence of the glacial pace and basic incompetence of LA City Hall.

According to LAist, the city says it needs six more years to complete safety projects in underserved communities, already as much as four years after Los Angeles received $100 million in grants from the state to do the work.

Which, by my count, makes that a ten year timeline, just to get started.

Los Angeles won more than $100 million from California in 2022 and 2023 to improve crosswalks, bike infrastructure and general mobility in historically underinvested communities. But it just doesn’t have enough people to implement the three projects in time, city officials have said.

To retain the entirety of the grant funding, the city has requested a six-year time extension on state-mandated deadlines to complete the pre-construction phases of the projects in Boyle Heights, Skid Row and Wilmington. The city is hoping the California Transportation Commission will evaluate its request in June.

Unless the California Transportation Commission, which administers the grant program, grants the city an extension, they’ll have to give all the money back.

One. Hundred. Million. Dollars.

In a city already experiencing a traffic violence emergency, where Vision Zero has failed, and traffic deaths significantly outpace murders. And for communities that bear the brunt of that violence, on both counts.

Los Angeles has always been inefficient, with city departments needlessly siloed when they should naturally work together.

Those same departments — LADOT, Engineering, City Planning and Street Services — have been historically understaffed, leaving LADOT basically begging for someone to work on bike projects.

That problem is compounded by the city’s financial problems, due largely to its penchant for paying outsized legal settlements, usually because of our cops. The same cops who got a big unfunded raise three years ago, along with a smaller increase for other city workers, also unfunded.

Leaving the city with a whopping $1 billion budget shortfall; planned layoffs were averted only by moving people around and making cuts in other areas.

Like repaving streets and fixing potholes. Never mind the six month wait to repair streetlights stripped of their copper wiring.

All of which resulted in virtual skeleton staffs unable to complete basic tasks, such a completing pre-construction work to fulfill state grants.

And resulting in shameful ten year-plus timelines just to get them shovel ready, despite all the talk we’ve heard about preparing city streets for the World Cup and the ’28 Olympics.

Maybe they’re just planning to hide communities like Boyle Heights, Skid Row and Wilmington.

You know, out of sight, out of mind.

And not a damn thing on the streets but trash and homeless camps.

………

Traffic violence clearly isn’t just a problem in Los Angeles.

Family members are mourning a Long Beach boy who was killed by a driver when the eight-year-old chased his ball out into the street, on a street where the posted speed limit is 40 mph.

Which means, at that speed, he only had about a 20% chance of survival — if the driver wasn’t speeding.

Never mind that most LA area drivers consider an extra five to ten mph over the posted limit their God-given right.

………

Culver City-based Walk ‘n Rollers is hiring an Administrative Assistant / Assistant Outreach Coordinator.

But you may have to guess how to contact them, because I can’t get the link to work. Maybe you’ll have better luck.

………

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

Medford, Oregon is ripping out a downtown protected bike lane to make room for 40 angled parking spaces. Because who cares about the safety of bike riders when the convenience of drivers is at stake?

Life is cheap in Georgia, where a road-raging driver was released on a lousy $12,500 bond after he threatened to shoot two men for riding their bicycles on the road, then backed into one of the victim’s bicycles — and even though it was the driver’s third arrest in three years. Although something tells me he’d still be behind bars if he wasn’t white. 

………

Local 

No surprise here, as the subway rider won Streetsblog’s race from Beverly Hills to DTLA on the D Line; the only surprise was that the driver beat the bike rider by a few minutes.

 

State

San Diego had over 100 pit stops for the city’s Bike Anywhere Day yesterday, while the Naval Base San Diego took part, too. Which compares favorably with the one pit stop that we know about in the LA Area, at Pasadena City Hall. 

The Bay Area saw a dramatic increase in participation in the area’s Bike Anywhere Day, with actual swag bags given to passing riders at numerous “energizer stations.” Which compares favorably to Los Angeles, where no one knows how many bike riders participated, or even knew about it, and most who did got nothing but a good ride on a nice day.

Sad news from Grass Valley, north of Sacramento, where a 7th grade schoolboy died nine days after he was struck by a driver while riding his bike.

A Chico man got his bike back when police spotted it outside a homeless camp, after it was one of several bikes stolen from a local bike shop

 

National

Reuters puts licensing rights up for sale on a photo of the ghost bike for two bike riders killed in the Goodyear, Arizona crash, in 2023, which injured 19 other people. Feels kind of like grave robbing to me, with the company attempting to profit off the grief of others.

A Vermont man is still refurbishing bicycles at 81 years old, selling the finished bikes for $25 to $50, or just giving them away if the mood strikes.

That’s more like it. A 68-year old Philadelphia man will spend a minimum of six-and-a-half years behind bars, and possibly as much as 21 years, for the hit-and-run death of a lawyer riding in a bike lane, while the driver was allegedly under the influence and doing 65 mph; he also struck another bike rider, who survived the crash.

The 26-year old grandson of basketball legend Mike Krzyzewski has been charged with felony death by motor vehicle and involuntary manslaughter for killing a 15-year old North Carolina kid riding an ebike.

If you want to keep your bike safe from thieves, Florida researchers have determined that you should leave it on top of a hill. Because thieves evidently don’t like climbing hills, even if they can ride a hot bike down.

A Vero Beach, Florida bank president is postponing his planned 70 mile fundraising ride to mark his 70th birthday for about six months, after he broke his leg in four places when he lost air from his tire on a training ride.

 

International

Three men rode their bikes from Argentina to the United States, crossing more than more than 10,000 miles and 17 countries to follow the Argentine national team at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Sounds kind of Messi to me.

Canadian mounties are looking for a hit-and-run dirt bike rider who knocked a 63-year old woman off her bicycle and into a Vancouver Island ditch, leaving her with broken ribs.

No bias here. Readers of a newspaper in Leeds, England, debate the expansion of the city’s bike lanes, which have grown 113 miles over the past ten years — or an average of just 11.3 miles a year.

I want to be like her when I grow up. A 78-year old British woman is setting off on a nearly 400-mile solo bike ride across Europe, her 32nd fundraising ride in the past 32 years.

A writer for Cycling News goes down an AliExpress rabbit hole in search of low cost deals on bike gear on the Chinese website, and discovers a Wild West of fake parts, misspelt brands, dubious deals, and no safety guarantees.

 

Competitive Cycling

Cycling News says Italy’s Filippo Ganna just wants to win a race that isn’t a time trial, after taking the Tuscan time trial stage of the Giro d’Italia — his eighth Giro stage win, seven of which have been TTs.

Speaking of the Giro, Belgian Alec Segaert claimed a solo victory in Thursday’s stage 12 with a perfectly timed breakaway less than two miles from the finish, as teammate Afonso Eulálio held onto the pink leader’s jersey.

 

Finally…

This is what too many bike lanes look like.

Bluesky post

No, seriously. That’s all we’ve got today. 

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Happy Bike Day such as it is, sex workers protest Mexico City bikeway, and summing up CA candidates in a single sentence

May 21, 2026 / / 3 comments

My apologies for yesterday’s unexcused absence.

I’m learning in real time that my body no longer responds like it did when I rode a bike every day, which seems like something I should have learned a long time ago.

Okay, so I’m a little slow.

There’s a limit to what I can do now before I just shut down. And trying to dig a little deeper like I did on m bike just makes it shut down harder.

Oh, and diabetes sucks.

That one I already knew. But still. 

Today’s photo: Metro Bike is free today for Bike Day, no matter how many legs you have, and whether you fit on the seat or in the basket. 

………

Happy Bike Day in Los Angeles County.

No, seriously, that sound you hear is me whipping out the noisemakers.

Metro and Metrolink buses and trains will be free today for anyone with a bicycle or a bike helmet, along with free Metro Bike bikeshare rides; some other bus lines will likely participate, but your mileage may vary.

Twitter post

Pasadena will host a Bike Day pit stop at City Hall from 7 am to 9:30 am handing out free coffee, snacks, and giveaways for anyone who shows up on a bike.

Meanwhile, a San Diego bike co-op is bypassing that city’s Bike Anywhere Day because the San Diego County Association of Government, aka SANDAG, which is sponsoring it, is selling information from a criminal database to the feds.

………

Um, okay.

NPR reports that Mexico City is getting pushback after preparing to host the World Cup by opening the new 15-mile Great Tenochtitlan Bike Highway, running from the center of town all the way to the main World Cup stadium.

Not from drivers. Or business owners.

Sex workers.

Like other professionals that claim their sales are down after a bike lane goes in, the street walkers of Calzada de Tlalpan insist their earnings are down 70%, because the bike lane now covers the outer lane of the roadway where they used to stand and negotiate with customers.

And while bikes may be good for business, as a rule, they offer very little privacy.

Although they do travel at a slower pace, allowing riders more time to examine their, uh, options. And giving everyone more time to drive a hard bargain or lend a hand.

Thanks to Joel for the heads-up. 

………

If you’re still stuck on who to vote for, the Golden State Report’s Mariel Garza offers the most concise summary of the candidates running for California governor I’ve seen.

The former Los Angeles Times Opinion editor says forget about the polls, and vote for the candidate who most closely matches your values, while somehow managing to accurately capture the gist of each one in just a single sentence.

For example,

Vote for:

Xavier Becerra if you are happy with the way the state has been heading policy-wise and prefer a governor with unquestioning loyalty to the Democratic Party who is unlikely to make substantial changes…

Steve Hilton if you are a Republican or a conservative-leaning independent who is not super MAGA, but wants the state to abandon its climate-change objectives and focus on drilling and logging.

Matt Mahan if you want a business- and tech-friendly centrist Democrat as governor who will bring a flavor of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie to the whole state…

It’s worth clicking through to read the entire, very brief, piece.

Because she nails it.

And she did more to clarify my thinking than two months worth of angry debates filled with gubernatorial wannabes shouting over one another.

Speaking of Garza, she also considers LA Mayor Karen Bass’ concern about trash lining the streets of the Golden State, as if the mayor’s fair city isn’t the biggest offender.

Look, I’m not saying I’m old.

But I remember when Los Angeles had trash cans on every corner of every thoroughfare, and people who actually came out and emptied them once or twice a week.

Ask your grandparents, kids.

And I, for one, can’t wait for people come here for the World Cup, and return home talking about the squalor they found on the streets of Los Angeles.

Yeah, us.

………

Megan forwards news that San Jose bike riders will soon have to share bike lanes with DoorDash delivery robots. Never mind that people on bicycles could face added risk from motorists un inattentive motorists while swerving around the bots blocking the bike lane.

………

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

A New Jersey letter writer, who cites his experience founding a bike bus and as a Scouting Bicycling Merit Badge Counselor as his source of expertise, says opposition to New Jersey’s draconian licensing requirement for all ebikes is disingenuous, because it usually hinges on the benefits of ebikes for elderly people, who aren’t the primary buyers of ebikes. As if there aren’t multiple types of ebikes and users, with multiple motivations, and no possible options between no regulation and a heavy-handed crackdown.

Drivers in Oxfordshire, England oppose a new plan to convert ten streets, out of God only knows how many, into quiet streets for people who “walk, wheel, cycle, and horse ride.” Because of course they do.

This is what a punishment pass looks like. And why a driver got the equivalent of a $5,800 fine and lost his license for three months — even if video like that couldn’t be used as proof of a traffic violation in most of this country.

But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.

A website devoted to odd stories lists 15 crimes involving bicycles that you didn’t know, even though it’s actually 14, and only 13 if you don’t consider Lance’s doping a criminal offense. And they apparently don’t know that the outlaw Harry Longabaugh was better known as the Sundance Kid.

A Punjabi political writer complained about the state governor riding a bike to the capital on No Car Day, noting he lives directly across the street and could have just walked, instead of stopping traffic for his short bike ride.

………

Local 

Streetsblog says progress is being made on the long-delayed Mid-City Greenways project, including a new roundabout and diverter on Rosewood Ave; the project aims to connect Rosewood, Formosa Ave and Orange Drive to make them more conducive to walking and bicycling

Walk ‘n Rollers is hosting a walk to explore the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, while Bike Culver City is holding a feeder ride to get there.

 

State

Sad news from San Luis Obispo, where someone riding a bicycle was killed in a collision around noon yesterday.

This is who we share the road with. The CHP has identified the 24-year old driver who fled on foot after killing two 20-year old men who had stopped their e-motorcycles in the roadway, while allegedly speeding and under the influence.

 

National

CyclingSavvy offers advice on how to avoid potholes and the dreaded pinch flat. Although I’d be far more concerned about the dreaded face plant.

Velo offers their expert picks on how to pick the best gravel bike. And for a change, when they say expert, they might actually mean it. 

Officials in Eugene, Oregon discuss bike safety plans after four bicycling deaths already this year, ten years after committing to Vision Zero. Although they apparently didn’t have much to say. 

This is who we share the road with, part two. A Vancouver, Washington driver is accused of intentionally running down two teenaged kids who were sharing a dirt bike and allegedly harassing people in a parking lot.

Life is cheap in Denver, where a hit-and-run driver walked without a single day behind bars for killing a 21-year-old Turkish aerospace engineering student riding a bicycle in the city.

Colorado-based Niner Bikes is apparently the latest bike brand to bite the dust, pausing operations while its parent company ponders its future direction. Which is business speak for “We outta here.”

A Milwaukee writer debates her rights as a bicyclist versus her instincts for self-preservation, and to just, you know, be nice.

A new two-way bike lane will allow bicyclists to circle all of Belle Isle, Michigan, a nearly 1,000 acre island in the middle of the Michigan River off Detroit — even though the map appears to show it as a straight route through the heart of the island.

New York is preparing for next month’s World Cup by doubling the width of one of the city’s busiest protected bike lanes. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is preparing by doing what it does best. Nothing. 

 

International

Momentum offers tips on how to stay cool, hydrated and comfortable on your ride to work.

Bike Radar makes the case for why every bike should have mud guards, including your 4.5 oz Unobtainium-frame roadie.

Montréalais et Québécois are being urged to take the Metro or ride a bike to attend the Canadian Grand Prix, since the F1 event is ironically carfree.

Naturally, the popular “bun run” in the shadow of Windsor Castle has been reframed in the context of bike vs cars. Because when you only have one lens, that’s how you see everything.

I want to be like him when I grow up. A 91-year old British gent is in the midst of a 500-mile fundraising ride.

Now you, too, could own Albert Einstein’s German bike seat. Even though it was the other end of the famed physicist that came up with the Theory of Relativity and such. 

 

Competitive Cycling

In case you missed the more cryptic mention the other day, pro cyclists have been asked not to pee in their water bottles and toss them onto the side of the road. Because racing fans like to pick up discarded souvenirs.

Carson’s VELO Sports Center will host a UCI 2 six-event track cycling series, offering a preview of competition ahead of the ’28 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

The San Diego Velodrome will comply with new rules banning trans women by making all future sanctioned races “open” for competitors of any gender, with the expectation that most people will still select races that align with their gender identity.

 

Finally…

Your next ebike could be a woodie. That feeling when a bike lane is “failed” and “underutilized” because it’s full of parked cars.

And you can’t say we haven’t made progress over the past few millennia; thanks to Steven for forwarding.

………

Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

 

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