Before we start, don’t miss Doug Moore’s open letter to the LA city council if you didn’t read it yesterday.
You’ll also find instructions at the end on how to submit your own letter to the council if you can’t join us to #CrashCityHall this Friday.
Or even if you can.
These are the gifts we’ll have for the mayor and city councilmembers on Friday. Think they’ll get the message?
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You can run, but you can’t always hide.
The Chief Lunes bike ride reports that the hit-and-run driver who killed Frederick “Woon” Frazier in South LA last month has finally been arrested.
In addition, charges are pending for her two passengers, who encouraged her to flee and helped in the coverup that followed.
We’ll let them tell the story.
Let’s hope his family gets the justice they deserve.
Thanks to Sean Meredith for the heads-up.
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No bias here.
Writing on City Watch, where facts go to die, Selena Inouye, the “chief grassroots organizer” for Restore Venice Blvd, calls the Mar Vista Great Streets project an “epic fail.”
She demands that Mayor Eric Garcetti and Westside Councilmember Mike Bonin keep their promise to remove the road diet if the data shows it’s not working after a year.
Even though that year won’t be up for another week. And the data for that full year probably hasn’t even been compiled, let alone released yet.
Not that any decent traffic safety denier would let an inconvenient little fact like that get in the way.
Instead, she relies on — and distorts — the stats released at the six-month point to make her case, noting that collisions and injury collisions both went up.
Although what she presents as a dramatic increase, the city says was statistically insignificant.
In fact, there were just two — yes, two — more minor injury collisions during the first six months of the trial period than in the same six months the year before.
And let’s not forget that the purpose of the often misconstrued Vision Zero is not to prevent collisions, but to keep those collisions from resulting in serious injuries or death.
Which, based strictly on the data she’s using, the Venice road diet seems have done pretty well.
Or that any major change, to any street, is likely to result in an increase in collisions until drivers get used to it.
Then there’s her bizarre — and demonstrably false — statement that the $91 million devoted to street safety improvements in the mayor’s budget will be spent on road diets.
While Garcetti had initially stated that the budget for Vision Zero would increase to $91 million, he later corrected himself to say that figure referred to the city’s entire street safety improvement program.
Improvements to Vision Zero’s High Injury Network would only get a boost to a relatively paltry $37 million. With none of that specifically budgeted for road diets.
And with the way the city council has been cowed by the angry drivers Restore Venice Blvd and Keep LA Moving purport to represent, there’s not much chance of any many road diets getting installed in the near future.
Then there’s her claim that reducing the number of traffic lanes by one-third on Venice has resulted in gridlock, reflected by a nearly one-third drop in vehicles per day.
Yes, according to her, a substantial drop in vehicle in vehicle usage somehow managed to cause the entire street to become so congested that movement in any direction is impossible.
Or maybe she just doesn’t understand what gridlock means.
Never mind that those same six month figures show that average driver speeds remained unchanged from before the road diet. Yet miraculously, drivers still managed to exceed the speed limit, despite being unable to move at all.
But why let a little thing like facts get in the way?
Although I’d seriously like to know what kind of a person quotes herself in her own opinion piece.
Clearly, when you want to get the quote right, you go right to the source.
Unless you are the source, then you can write whatever the hell you want.
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Caltrans is looking for applicants for its new California Walk and Bike Technical Advisory Committee to help guide staff decisions about walking and biking design and policies.
Thanks to Marvin Davis for the tip.
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Metro offers their take on Bike Week activities.
MetroLink is hosting a Twitter party in honor of Bike Week tonight.
Tomorrow night is the worldwide observance of the Ride of Silence, with local RoS rides in the San Fernando Valley, the Rose Bowl, the Conejo Valley, and Orange County. My goal is to one day have a Ride of Silence that goes straight down Wilshire Blvd from Santa Monica to DTLA.
And it turns out that this isn’t just Bike Week, it’s also Infrastructure Week. Or as Treehugger suggests, let’s make it Bike Infrastructure Week.
Please.
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Local
Los Angeles finally broke ground on the long-promised bike, foot and equestrian bridge over the LA River, connecting Atwater Village to Griffith Park and the LA River bike path.
Mar Vista bike co-op Bikerowave is hosting a bicycle travel meet-up on June 17th, along with bike maintenance workshops this Saturday and May 27th.
When marketing your lightweight German ebike, always include a photo from the Santa Monica Expo Line station.
Best wishes to Santa Monica Next editor Jason Islas, who is scooting off to work for Bird.
State
Two guided bike rides will be held Sunday in honor of Grossmont College political science professor Brian Jennings, who was killed in a collision with a sleeping driver last month.
A bicyclist was seriously injured in a collision in Palm Desert yesterday morning; as usual, no information is available.
VeloNews looks at how the Montecito cycling community is coping with loss following the recent fires and mudslides.
A local paper offers ten reasons why you should ride your bike in Sonoma.
National
Bicycling says hill yes!
Life is cheap in Oregon, where the local DA determines that a FedEx driver didn’t commit a crime when he killed a bike rider by failing to yield, because he wasn’t drunk or distracted at the time. So go ahead and turn in front of that person on the bike; the worst you’ll get is a traffic ticket.
The local paper says Spokane WA has come a long way in the last decade, but still has a long way to go to be safe and inviting for people on bikes.
Sadly, bike theft is nothing new, as this Arkansas story shows.
An Indiana endurance cyclist talks about how her riding season ended when an aggressive driver tried to pass her on the left as she and a riding companion were trying to make a left turn, after already claiming the left turn lane.
More proof bike riders just can’t win. A Massachusetts bus driver calls the police because a bike rider was tying up traffic trying to save a turtle in the roadway.
A Brooklyn driver gets three to nine years for the drunken, high-speed crash that killed a teenager riding his bike; the driver was at twice the legal limit after drinking all day, and doing 80 miles an hour on a surface street when he hit the victim head on. You have to really fuck up to get nine years behind bars, and make it seem like it’s not enough.
A viral video shows a Philadelphia driver appearing to run down a cyclist from behind in a bike lane, apparently on purpose. Although the police question the validity of the video, in part because the rider doesn’t seem to have any hands.
This is the cost of traffic violence. A Florida woman calls for an end to distracted driving after the March crash that killed her husband; remarkably, she asked that the driver not be prosecuted, because living with what he did was punishment enough.
The head of a Florida rehab facility calls for Complete Streets so his clinic will get fewer customers.
Continuing our Florida traffic safety trifecta, a woman wins her decade-plus fight for red light cameras in the state. Los Angeles cancelled its red light camera program, caving to drivers who claimed it increased the risk of collisions when drivers jammed on their brakes to stop. Because they couldn’t, you know, just drive at a safe speed that would allow them to stop for red lights, or anything.
International
The CBC offers six reasons to ride a bike.
Bicyclists hope that the century-old traffic laws in Nova Scotia, Canada, will be rewritten with them in mind, for once.
The BBC, with its keen grasp of the obvious, says cheap dockless bikeshare bikes are flooding the world. Although that’s not exactly how they say it, being British and all.
A Chinese website asks if the country’s polluted cities can leave the car behind.
Competitive Cycling
No bias here, either. A writer for the Press-Telegram says the Long Beach start of the Amgen Tour of California on Sunday ruined Mother’s Day business for local restaurants. Or maybe some local restaurants. Or maybe having the race there was good for business after all. Seriously, there may be a good story about the effect the race had on local businesses, for better or worse, but this wasn’t it.
Cycling Weekly features highlights from stage one of the AToC, while the Long Beach Post offers photos of Sunday’s race. But sadly, none showing the countless mothers staying away from empty restaurants in droves.
Thousands turned out to see the riders off on yesterday’s Ventura start, which was won by a rookie rider on the WorldTour who may be destined for great things.
Now you, too, can own a bike ridden by the Rally Cycling team in the Tour of California, while you raise funds for the UnitedHealthcare Children’s Foundation.
And yes, there is still another race going on over in Italy.
Finally…
What kind of grownup attitude is saying if you break the law, I will too? So there. No, seriously, if you want safer streets, just stick a seat post up your ass.
And sometimes you just need the right motivation to set an even faster record.
Like making it to the royal wedding on time.
