A 46-year old bike rider is dead, the innocent victim of a speeding carjacker trying to make his escape through Downtown Los Angeles Saturday morning.
Now police are looking for the car thief and killer, who simply walked away after a second crash.
According to KABC-7, the series of events started when a passing pedestrian asked a newspaper delivery driver for a ride on the 900 block of Wilshire Blvd. When the driver refused, the man jumped into the running pickup while the man was stocking a newsstand.
Unable to get back into the truck, the delivery driver jumped into the back as the man sped off towards DTLA, then wisely jumped out a few blocks later, tumbling to the ground.
Witnesses saw the carjacker careening through the streets, weaving from side to side at a high rate of speed while driving on the wrong side of the roadway.
After turning onto eastbound 7th Street, he slammed into a man who was riding east just before 7th and Olive Street.
However, according to the police flier, the victim riding against traffic in the westbound bike lane — which means the driver rear-ended him while all the way on wrong side of the street.
The victim landed on the hood of the truck, and was carried nearly 100 feet before being thrown off, then tumbled another 150 feet before coming to a rest at Hill Street, a full block from where he was hit.
Paramedics attempted without luck to revive him, before declaring Finley dead at the scene.
Meanwhile, the driver continued east on 7th until he crashed into a pair of vehicles and took off on foot, melting away on the Downtown streets.
Bizarrely, he was walking barefoot and carrying a steering wheel, presumably from the truck he stole.
He was described as a Black man around 5 foot 6 inches tall and 150 to 160 pounds, and may have suffered a head injury from hitting his head on the windshield.
The suspect was last seen wearing a white hoodie and black pants, after removing the blue hoodie he was originally wearing.
As always, there is a standing $50,000 reward for any fatal hit-and-run in the City of Los Angeles.
Anyone with information is urged to contact LAPD Detective Juan Campos at 213/833-3713, or e-mail hm at 31480@lapd.online. During weekends and off-hours, call 1-877/527-3247.
This is at least the fifth bicycling fatality in Southern California this year, and the first that I’m aware of in Los Angeles County and the City of LA.
Three of those deaths have been the result of hit-and-runs.
“I still don’t even think it’s real. I feel like it’s a dream. Right now, it’s a nightmare, and I feel tomorrow I’m going to wake up and this day will never exist,” his daughter, Koi Finley, told ABC7.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for Branden Finley and his loved ones.
January 15, 2021 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on County releases draft LA River master plan, making bike theft a tad too easy, and gravel biking to the Hollywood Sign
Thank you all for the kind words yesterday.
I’m still riding that diabetic rollercoaster, for no apparent reason other than my body wants to do to me what rioters did to the Capital last week.
But if you’re reading this, it means I managed to power through this time.
The county river plan is trying to strike difficult delicate balance on many issues. At this morning’s press event Supervisor Sheila Kuehl mentioned the balance between an overall “coherent holistic” vision and a “great deal of local community control.” Solis touched on the need for river revitalization to serve park-poor low-income communities of color, while addressing issues of gentrification and homelessness. Historically plans for the river have struggled to find the space to address a broad range of needs in communities it flows through; these needs include parks – with both active and passive recreation – housing, schools, and much more.
The plan ends up trying to address all of these issues within a fairly limited jurisdictional corridor. The river system is a tangled jurisdictional mess. County Public Works (acting as the County Flood Control District) controls the river channel structures, but the adjacent, and in cases underlying, land is the jurisdiction of various cities. The county’s jurisdiction is constrained by the federal U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which mandates flood damage minimization standards. The county has little control over the numerous freeways and several rail lines constrain the river. Many of the complex issues that impact the river – from watershed rainwater runoff to homelessness to gentrification – are largely situated outside the waterway corridor itself.
You can watch the presentation, recorded on Zoom like everything else these day. Just ignore the first minute where everyone sits around trying to not look awkward before it gets going.
Of course, what matters to a lot of us is the ongoing plan to complete the gaps in the bike path, particularly through Downtown Los Angeles and the meat packing district to the south, to create a continuous bikeway along the full 51-mile length of the river.
But speaking strictly for myself, I’d much rather ride along a park-filled natural riverbank than on a concrete river underneath a lush park.
Thanks to Fatema Baldiwala for the heads-up.
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Seriously. At least make it hard for them.
Bike thefts, neighbors complaining biggly this the 2nd bike he's had stolen. Gosh he sure makes it easy to steal. https://t.co/NFn9DhblB6
Someone appears to be targeting the owner of a Poway bike shop, after burglars broke in and vandalized the shop while stealing several high-end mountain bikes worth up to $9,000; another of his shops suffered a second high-end break-in, while a third was vandalized with swastikas and racist graffiti, causing $20,000 damage to a new shop truck.
Police in Austin, Texas have a new bicycle supplier, after Lance’s Mellow Johnny’s bike shop refused to sell to them any more in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the weaponization of police bikes by the cops.
A New Orleans woman awaiting trial for the hit-and-run death of a bike rider last January is back in jail for choking her drunk fiancé to death; she has a history of domestic violence arrests, despite blaming her late boyfriend for attacking her. On the other hand, she apparently only kills in January, so we should all be safe the other eleven months.
A 36-year old Japanese company specializing in unique panda, dinosaur, cucumber and eggplant shaped bicycles is struggling to survive the Covid-19 pandemic. Sort of like everyone else these days.
Women’s cycling great Anna van der Breggen will don double rainbow jerseys reflecting world titles in last year’s road cycling and time trial championships as she enters her final year in the pro peloton.
While environmental and advocacy groups have been working for years to restore the river to a more natural state, Gehry, who was invited to reimagine the river by LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, wants to cover it up instead.
Gehry proposes addressing decades of social injustice by leaving the concrete river channel alone, while building a continuous park on platforms stretching above the river.
What that would mean for long-time plans to finally complete the LA River bike path along the full 51-mile length of the river isn’t clear.
There’s no word on whether it would be left where it is along the banks of the river, moved onto the new platforms, or buried beneath them.
Or just forgotten entirely as yet another inconvenience in the path of progress.
But the simple fact is, Los Angeles has turned its back on the river at its heart for far too long.
And burying it, when we have a chance to finally revive it, isn’t any better.
Thanks to Fatema Baldiwala for the heads-up.
Photo shows the 4th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River during CicLAvia.
That compares to Los Angeles County, with over four times the population, where bicycling deaths inexplicably dropped from 34 in 2019 to just 16 last year.
Thanks to Phillip Young for the link.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes keeps going on.
This is the cost of traffic violence. A Long Beach mother and military vet was killed by a hit-and-run driver as she slept on a sidewalk; Stephanie Jackson became homeless after watching her fiancé die of liver cancer, but wouldn’t admit it even to her daughter.
The crash happened on Monday, January 4th, at the intersection of Adams Boulevard and Nevin Avenue in the Central-Alameda neighborhood.
The driver had just turned the corner when he struck the man as he knelt near the curb. He briefly stopped, then continued on without getting out of his truck.
The crash was caught on a security cam across the street.
But be warned before you click on it, because it clearly shows the innocent victim getting hit by the driver’s truck. And there’s no way to unsee it once you do.
The biggest and most important thing an ally can do is shut up, listen, and amplify the voices of Black and brown folks, who are often silenced.
That’s an important message.
Because too often I’ve heard well-meaning white people explain to people of color what they need, instead of asking them first.
And sometimes, I’ve been one of them.
We’ve come a long way from the days when a friend told me you’d never see him or any other Black person on a bicycle, because everyone would just assume they couldn’t afford a car.
The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes keeps going on.
No bias here. A Singapore news site somehow concludes a bike rider was in the wrong for getting right hooked after stopping a few feet beyond the stop line, as if the truck driver that nearly hit him had no obligation to see or go around him. I would have flipped him off, too, under the same circumstances.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
A bike-riding Chicago-area man was busted for allegedly committing 15 car burglaries while wearing ten different shirts and five pairs of pants; whenever he was caught on security cam he’d take off a layer to make himself less recognizable. Didn’t work, though.
January 11, 2021 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on The cost of traffic violence, vehicular cyclists versus protected bike lanes, and why people keep dying on the streets
I heard a loud bang. A heavy thud. A violent bump. It was me. It was the noise of my body slamming against the lorry. And then falling to the ground.
I couldn’t work out what was happening. My heart was in my throat. I was staring up at the beautiful, bright blue sky, but at the same time sinking into darkness.
I was in excruciating pain as the heavy truck’s wheels – of which there were 12 in total – ran over my leg.
It’s a powerful story.
Especially this part.
I was desperate to see my kids, but I didn’t want to scare them. After two days, I put on my bravest face and held them when they visited me.
My son said, “Mummy, you’re not ready to die. We haven’t finished our story yet.”
Fortunately, she made it. And kept her leg, thanks to five separate surgeries, including one 12 hour marathon.
But something else to consider.
While she doesn’t mention it in her story, one vital aspect in getting back on her feet was the UK’s National Health Service, which meant she didn’t leave the hospital with a massive bill like she would have in the US.
In fact, chances are, she paid little or nothing, despite her month-long hospital stay.
So she was able to go home to her family and resume her life, even writing a book about her experiences.
Instead of being forced into bankruptcy like so many Americans after a similar experience.
“This is to attract the all-ages and abilities groups that are just trying to go places within their communities, but if you need to go fast, the (car) lane is always open,” said Everett Hauser, a traffic engineer focusing on bicycle infrastructure for the city of San Diego.
Many new projects around the region also include bicycle-specific traffic lights at busy intersections and reconfiguring streets to encourage slower driving especially at tight turns.
Still, not everyone’s convinced.
“These protected bike lanes that have appeared in the last few years are the most dangerous thing that’s ever happened to bicycling in San Diego,” said Ralph Elliott, 70, historian of the San Diego Bicycle Club and a member for more than 50 years. “They’re unsafe. If there’s a car door in your face, somebody’s walking in the protected bike lane, skateboarding in the lane, dog in the lane all that’s dangerous because you can’t get out.”
But as the story points out, protected bike lanes are designed for casual bike riders who might not feel safe mixing with motorists.
Club riders and other experienced bicyclists who don’t want to slow down should be free to continue riding in the regular traffic lanes, where their speed won’t pose a danger to themselves or others.
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Sadly, two SoCal bicycle riders lost their lives over the weekend.
Two more tragic reminders that our streets aren’t safe enough for people on bicycles. And our safety is still in the hands of those we share the road with.
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This is why people continue to die on our streets.
An Iowa man who deliberately drove his car through a group of racial justice protestors because he thought they needed “an attitude adjustment” walked without a single day behind bars, despite leaving several injured people in his wake. To make matters worse, his conviction will be expunged if he stays out of trouble for three short years.
Former Los Angeles City Councilmember Tom LaBonge died unexpectedly last week at 67; he was known for his frequent recreational rides through his district, though he also blocked a number of bike projects, including the long-planned 4th Street Bike Boulevard.
No bias here. A Singapore paper asks if bicyclists and drivers can ever get along — but only includes rules for the people on two wheels, with barely a word on how motorists can drive safely around people on bikes.
January 8, 2021 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on LA brags about modest bike lane mileage, resource guide for traffic violence victims, and Trek sued over WaveCel claims
That includes nearly 13 miles of new bike lanes on South LA’s Avalon Blvd.
However, it’s important to remember that LADOT measures bike lanes in lane miles, which means that each side of the roadway is counted separately. So that 61 miles really means bike lanes were added or improved on just 30 miles of streets.
That’s a big step up from the ten lane miles installed in the 2017-18 fiscal year, but still just a fraction of the annual totals built during Antonio Villaraigosa’s tenure as mayor — although the city is installing more protected and separated bike lanes now.
However, it still neglects large segments of the city, and makes no attempt to create a connected bike lane network crossing Los Angeles — let alone the three interconnected networks called for in the city’s mobility plan.
Bike lane construction for 2021 is expected to concentrate on Figueroa Blvd in DTLA and Broadway in South LA.
So who knows?
Maybe someday the city will finally get around to building bike lanes where you ride while you’re still young enough to use them.
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Losing a loved one is hard enough under any conditions.
Let alone losing someone you love to traffic violence.
The guide was prepared by people who have gone through it themselves, including tips on how to turn your grief into effective action.
Let’s hope you never need it.
But roughly 3,500 California families did in 2019. And probably will this year.
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Why wait for local leaders to rip out a bike lane, when you can just turn an offroad bike path into your own personal car lane?
Not every day you find a car on Hyde Park's cycle path. But of course this is Kensington in @RBKC, where the council is ripping out cycle lanes — so some drivers think they can go wherever the hell they want pic.twitter.com/7HRIZ4rTA7
It’s not new, but this video offers a recumbent tour of a unique California neighborhood where homes have hangers instead of garages, and taxiways in place of streets.
Forget the latest high-end, high-tech wonders. Pink Bike takes a look at what everyday bike riders are riding.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
Someone has been removing bollards from a protected bike lane in the UK and just tossing them across the surrounding area, creating a hazard for people riding bicycles, as well as others who might trip or drive over them.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
An Aussie bike rider unloads on a motorist after the car’s passenger threw litter at him. Seriously, don’t do this, kids. Violence is never the answer. Although I may have been known to toss trash back through the driver’s window.
Las Vegas bike advocates are responding to the recent death of five experienced bicyclists at the hands of a meth-using truck driver by pushing for greater safety for people on two wheels, including a call for a presumed liability law that would shift the burden of proof to the person in the more dangerous vehicle.
A horrifying crime, as Indian vigilantes kidnapped 30 women and children because they suspected men in the nomadic tribe of stealing bikes. Although they may have accused them of stealing motorcycles, rather than bicycles, since the Indian press uses the same term for both.
January 7, 2021 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on The war on bikes keeps on going, bike riders behaving badly, and that really was Chris Froome riding that bike in SaMo
It’s a light news day in the big, wide, wonderful world of bikes, after yesterday’s DC shit show sucked up all the oxygen.
CityLab looks forward to the incoming Biden administration, saying it could take steps to make motor vehicles a lot safer, especially for bike riders and pedestrians. Let’s start by banning oversized private trucks and SUVs, and redesigning the high, flat grills on SUVs and pickups.
This is why people keep dying on our streets. A Syracuse NY judge undercuts prosecutors by offering a hit-and-run driver a reduced sentence for killing a beloved local street musician as he was riding his bicycle — even though the driver, who was out on parole, was driving without a license.
The question remains why, since motor vehicle traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels, while bicycle ridership is up.
Maybe it’s safety in numbers. Or maybe there’s something else going on.
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More sad news.
With a heavy heart we learned of the passing of Jay Walljasper, a longtime active transportation advocate. We're thankful for his contributions to the movement, including his 2018 report with @PedalLove, "The Surprising Promise of Bicycling in America". https://t.co/qQrsq7vNH9
— League of American Bicyclists (@BikeLeague) January 5, 2021
The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
Once again, someone has sabotaged a British bike trail, planting upright nails in the dirt to puncture the tires of unsuspecting riders, with the potential for serious injuries.
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Local
It looks like Adams Blvd could get a new bike lane on a two-mile stretch between Fairfax and Crenshaw. As always though, what if anything ends up on the streets depends on how loudly the drivers and NIMBYs complain.
Now we’re starting to get somewhere. A new clip-on, throttle controlled motor promises to convert your bicycle to an ebike in just minutes, for around four hundred bucks.
A former mountain biker who competed for the UK says ebikes helped him get his life back, despite a serious heart condition that means never raising his heart rate above sedentary levels.
Cycling Tipstalks with American cycling legend Connie Carpenter-Phinney, road cycling Gold Medal winner in the ’84 Olympics and one of the era’s top women’s pros; she’s also the wife of fellow Olympic cyclist David Phinney, and the mother of recently retired pro Taylor Phinney.
Apparently, British women’s cycling great Beryl Burton doesn’t get any respect these days.
L.A.’s Green New Deal is pursuing four basic pillars, to reduce emissions from energy generation, transportation, and buildings, and to reduce waste to zero. What have been the easiest and most difficult pieces to tackle?
It’s easy to say the goals of our Green New Deal, but they’re all incredible stretch goals. The one that is the most challenging is to create an electricity grid that has no carbon emissions and that in the middle of the night or in the face of an earthquake or disaster can still be dependable. It’s easy to turn on a coal or natural gas plant and have it churn out the electricity we need. Our solar project that we’re building in the high desert is cheaper than a natural gas plant. It can store maybe one to two days of power. If there’s an earthquake, we may need six months of power. We’re proudly moving off coal at our biggest power plant in Utah with a turbine plant that can be hydrogen. We believe we’ll be the first big utility to run partly on hydrogen.
Second is transportation. Everybody in this car culture of L.A. expects to go to a gas station, fill up your car, and keep going. It’s just as easy to have an electric car. You can just charge it at night, and it takes two seconds to plug it in, but that draw on our grid will be immense. We have to double the amount of electricity we generate and make sure that it’s renewable.
Which pretty much confirms suspicions that he’s abandoned once ambitious plans to reshape how we get around the city, from adding a network of safer bike lanes to installing bus-only lanes throughout the city, in the face of the usual opposition to virtually any non-car transportation project.
Because in Los Angeles, when the going gets tough, we just give up and call it an incredible stretch goal.
Today’s photo is by Adrien Olichon from Pexels, depicting the kind of projects that should be built under LA’s Green New Deal, but probably won’t, because it’s hard.
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Every now and then, someone says it exactly right.
Ride your bike as much as you like, as far as you like, but don’t judge yourself or your riding success by volume of miles. Measure all of this by what happened along the way, the stories you can tell, the places you visited, the views you paused in front of, and the people and characters you met.
The couple met as students at the Thousand Oaks university in the ’60s, after he competed for the school as one of the first college bike racers on the West Coast.
Yet he continued to work on his bike collection even after the disease robbed him of his ability to ride in his 70s — including the Pinarello that Alexi Grewal rode to gold in the ’84 Los Angeles Olympics.
Nothing like making little kids dodge parked cars where there used to be a bike lane just a week before.
Small children cycling in Kensington this morning — now in greater danger since the protected cycle lane was ripped out. The space is now blocked by parked cars. pic.twitter.com/uHQU2i49ts
The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
No bias here. It turns out the incident where a group of teenaged bike riders attacked a pair of New York drivers began when a BMW driver brake-checked one of the kids — intentionally or otherwise. But naturally, it was the kid on the bike who got the blame for crashing into it. On the other hand, violence is never the answer, regardless of the reason.
Life is cheap in the UK, where a 20-year old British man walked with a suspended sentence for reaching out of a car and pulling a man off his bicycle, leaving the victim lying in agony on the side of the road with a broken elbow and fractured hands.
An Ohio city is looking to improve pedestrian safety, but only after a seven-year old was killed by a driver while riding his bike. As usual, city leaders were only spurred to action after it was too late for an innocent victim.
We made it. Not just through the holidays, which is always a challenge. But through the most difficult year in recent memory.
So pat yourself on the back, and take a celebratory bike ride to mark your achievement. And if you already did, go out for another one.
Thanks to John M, Eric B, James V, Steven F, Grace P, John H and everyone else who donated their hard-earned money to the 6th Annual BikinginLA Holiday Fund Drive to help keep SoCal’s best source for bike news and advocacy coming your way every day.
This year’s donations ranged from $5 to $250. I appreciate the smallest donations every bit as much as the largest ones, because I know all too well how hard it can be to give when money is tight.
I am also incredibly humbled and grateful for the kind words that accompanied so many of the donations. It was a struggle just to get through the past year while keeping up with the demands of this site, for a number of reasons.
It means more than I could begin to say to know those efforts are appreciated. And I’ll do my best to live up to all you had to say.
Beginning January 1, a new law that makes misdemeanor DUI eligible for diversion changes that. Once diversion is completed, it’s as if the crime never happened – and those prior convictions wash out, despite the fact that state law allows prior DUIs to be pled and proven for up to 10 years. They can’t be used as a prior – and the families whose lives were shattered by an impaired driver will not get the justice they deserve.
Assembly Bill 3234 does not impose a limit on how many times someone can be given diversion. How many times are we going to give someone a break before they kill someone? And now if they do, we won’t be able to prosecute them as more serious crimes.
Seriously, this could be a disaster.
Our legal system will now be actively working to keep dangerous drivers on the road. And free from consequences for actions that could lead to more deaths on the state’s roadways.
Looks like a new sort-of protected bike lane has popped up in Culver City. Although I’d call something with flimsy plastic bendy posts a separated lane, instead.
This is why LA-based former pro Phil Gaiman should be second in line for cycling sainthood behind Gino Batali. Even if he’s not dead yet.
LAST PUSH FOR THIS YEAR! If 100 people give $100 each, you'll each be responsible for 1000 meals for folks who didn't have a good year and didn't have a good Christmas, I'll chip in the last $2000, and it'll put my campaign at 2 million meals for 2020. https://t.co/A8JveuvQ3t
This is who we share the road with. Rebecca Grossman, co-founder of the prestigious Grossman Burn Foundation, has been charged with two counts each of murder and vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence for the hit-and-run deaths of two young brothers who were walking with their parents in a Westlake Village crosswalk. She was released on $2 million bail, pending the results of toxicology tests.
London’s tony Kensington neighborhood ripped out a new bidirectional bike lane, after accusing it of causing traffic congestion. So now it’s blocked by parked cars 80% of the time, instead. Let’s be honest — the real cause of traffic congestion is all those cars, not the bike lane.
One of the first casualties of the UK’s ill-advised separation from the European Union turns out to be handmade Brooks saddles, which are now owned and distributed by Italian saddle maker Selle Royal, and as a result, won’t be sold in the UK for the foreseeable future because of Brexit.
Peloton Magazinetells the groundbreaking story of Shelley Verses, who shattered the gender barrier in pro cycling by becoming the first female team trainer in European cycling, with the late great 7-Eleven team in 1985.
Today is JRR Tolkien's birthday. Did you know the writer was a lifelong cyclist, and deplored how Oxford was becoming dominated by motoring in his letters? Read this fascinating blog that shares a little more https://t.co/q2QyoU5YTLpic.twitter.com/qnSSnHJ3d2
