March 20, 2025 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on NM kids face murder in death of bike-riding scientist; killer Playa street claims fresh victim; Metro threatens suit to prevent safer streets
This is getting old.
Nearly two weeks in, I’m still struggling with Covid, and need a few more days before I get back to our usual updates. Just another of the many joys of diabetes, which can make Covid hit harder and last longer than it might otherwise.
Hopefully, we’ll be back on Monday to catch up on what we missed.
But there are a few stories this week that can’t really wait, so let’s do a quick update in the meantime.
The victim, a beloved physicist at the nearby Sandia National Laboratory, was killed when the kids “bumped” him with the car.
The 13-year old driver and the 16-year old egging them on from the back seat both face murder charges — as could the 11-year old waving a gun and laughing from the passenger seat.
Yes, I said eleven. With a rap sheep of violent crimes that makes John Gotti seem like an extra from Westside Story.
Apparently, New Mexico law allows them to be publicly named, and charged as adults.
Police became aware of the video shortly after the May 29, 2024, murder of 63-year old Scott Habermehl, but it apparently took until now to uncover the identities of his teen and preteen killers.
The older teens each face felony charges of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, leaving the scene of an accident involving great bodily harm or death, and unlawful possession of a handgun.
The younger boy is likely to join them.
Thanks to Joel Falter for the heads up.
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It’s happened again, again.
Because once again, an innocent person has been killed on Vista del Mar in Playa del Rey, eight years after then Councilmember Mike Bonin tried to fix the deadly street, only to have then Mayor Eric Garcetti rip it out after caving to angry pass-through drivers.
Now, after another woman has been killed — at least the fifth in just ten years — that blood is on Garcetti’s hands, and everyone who demanded the removal of the safety improvements just so they could continue to go “zoom! zoom!”, innocent victims be damned.
Not to mention whoever designed the damn thing.
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Metro has bizarrely come out against bus lanes and safer streets.
According to a post from Streets For All, the ostensibly safety-oriented county transportation agency is threatening to sue if they are forced to comply with Measure HLA when they make changes to the streets.
Even though the law clearly applies to any significant street projects, regardless of who is responsible for them.
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Which is kind of like Metro arguing that speed limits and traffic signals don’t apply to them, either.
So, Metro will fight the city in order not to install bus lanes, bike lanes, crosswalks, curb ramps, all approved a decade ago.
Metro is blocking routine upgrades to all the ways their riders get to bus stops and rail stations, plus blocking bus lane facilities that would improve Metro bus speeds.
Really.
Really, indeed.
It’s worth noting that Metro’s board is made up of elected officials and appointees from cities throughout LA County, and led by board chair and County Supervisor Janice Hahn.
GLENDALE, Calif. (March 18, 2025) — Southern California’s newest open streets event, Let’s Go Glendale, will transform a portion of S Glendale Ave into a car-free space on Saturday, May 31 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The community is invited to explore the area on foot, bike, scooter, wheelchair or any other way that moves you.
The City of Glendale’s Open Streets Event, Let’s Go Glendale, is presented by Metro and produced by Community Arts Resources (CARS). This free day features a full schedule of carefully curated performances and activities along a meaningful vehicle-free route through the city’s south. People of all ages are invited to discover local businesses, enjoy delicious food, listen to live music and connect with the city’s vibrant cultures in the open streets. It’s an opportunity to walk, roll, shop and stroll through Glendale with a whole new perspective! A full schedule of event locations, activations and a detailed route map will be announced in April.
WHEN: Saturday, May 31 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
WHERE: City streets along S Glendale Ave will be closed to car traffic and opened to pedestrians. Full route details will be released soon.
ADMISSION: This event is free to attend and open to the public.
Back in 2019, a four-year old girl was tragically killed by a driver as she crossed the street in Koreatown, while holding hands with her mother.
In a crosswalk. With the light.
Alessa Fajardo and her mom did everything right as they crossed Olympic at Normandie that October day, yet she died anyway. Even though Los Angeles officials knew long before about the dangers of that area and intersection.
In fact, the school they were going to was ranked the city’s 13th most dangerous campus just six years earlier, while Koreatown as a whole was rated LA’s fourth most dangerous neighborhood for bike riders and pedestrians.
That’s pedestrians, like little kids crossing the street with their mothers.
It took four-and-a-half years, and a $9.6 million dollar settlement before anything was done about it.
Starting with the problem of each city councilmember acting like little kings in their own districts, responsible for identifying and approving any improvements before they are made.
Or not.
Neither former District 10 Councilmember Herb Wesson, who represented the district when Alessa was killed, nor his successor, Mark Ridley-Thomas, secured that funding. Ridley-Thomas was indicted on federal corruption charges, suspended from the council and later convicted and removed from his seat in late March 2022. Nobody represented the district until Heather Hutt was appointed that September.
Hutt identified and allocated $530,000 for the new signals in June 2023, but the installation work did not begin until April 2024, four months after the family’s suit against the city was settled.
District 10 staff would not comment on the record about why they could not secure the funds in 2020, 2021, 2022 and early 2023.
No surprise there.
Then again, even on the rare occasions when councilmembers really do try to do something, angry motorists too often rush for their torches and pitchforks — and threats of recall elections.
Two years before little Alessa was killed in Koreatown, the city agreed to another $9.6 million settlement, this time with the family of a 16-year old girl killed crossing — wait for it — Vista Del Mar to get to her car after leaving Dockweiler Beach.
The same beach where the kids were killed on Tuesday.
Then-CD11 Councilmember Mike Bonin responded by ordering long-delayed safety improvements on Vista Del Mar, and a handful of other streets in Playa del Rey. Both because too many lives had already been lost on the deadly roadway, and because the next settlement, for the next inevitable death, would be exponentially higher.
Now just three years after that, two more people have needlessly lost their lives on that same bloody stretch of road. And despite a breathless report from Fox-11, police reports said there was no indication either driver was under the influence.
Never mind that the settlement for this one will likely be exponentially higher than the last one, since Los Angeles installed, then removed, safety improvements that might have prevented it.
Yet despite at least four deaths on the same section of roadway in just nine years, some people still seem to think they should have the unfettered, God-given right to go zoom zoom whenever and wherever they want, innocent lives be damned.
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If you want to know why we can’t manage to do anything about the ever-rising rate of needless deaths on our streets, that’s it.
And it would be nice if our current mayor and council would somehow show they actually gave a damn, since the previous ones clearly didn’t.
Three of the kids were critically injured when the 83-year old driver hit them head-on as they rode single file, leaving the children screaming in terror and pain amid their mangled bikes.
She was arrested at the scene, then released and taken to a hospital after police concluded she wasn’t in a “fit state” for questioning.
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Speaking of deadly roadways, here’s your chance to fight for bike lanes on PCH in Long Beach.
A bike rider in Brussels, Belgium is lucky to be alive after he was knocked off his bike by a driver who tried to pass him and his companion while driving in a clearly marked bike lane, then the enraged motorist got out and slashed the victim’s throat with a knife; the victim managed to escape with just six stitches when the driver barely missed his jugular.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
Streets For All urges support for a proposed 28-mile The Hill to Sea transit corridor traversing 13 cities and unincorporated communities from Pasadena to Long Beach, which would “aggressively reduce car dependency by prioritizing high quality bus service, safe protected bike paths, and improved sidewalks for walking and businesses.”
Orange County supervisors voted to crackdown on ebikes, including restrictions on sidewalk riding, imposing speed limits and reclassifying bikes that generate more than 750 watts through their motors — even though the latter two could put them in direct conflict with existing state law.
Colorado took a step forward by creating a dedicated $7 million funding stream for “proven small infrastructure projects that improve safety for vulnerable road users,” such as bike lanes, sidewalks and other pedestrian improvements. While that’s far too little — even for a relatively small state — it’s a hell of a lot more than most are willing to commit to.
Sad news from DC, where a 34-year old White House staffer was killed while riding his bike when he crossed the center line on a sharp curve during a fundraising ride, and was struck head-on by an oncoming motorist; Jacob Thomas Brewer was the husband of Fox News contributor Mary Katharine Ham.
Just four years after a road diet was unceremoniously ripped out on deadly Vista Del Mar, a mother was killed by a hit-and-run driver while carrying her three-year old son.
And immediately, local residents jumped in to demand that something be done to stop the street’s speeding drivers.
A day after the tragic incident, some neighbors are saying that something needs to be done about people speeding down Vista Del Mar.
“Nobody respects the speed limit here,” said a neighbor Adolfo Navarro. “I mean, you’ll see the cops on motorcycles here during the day enforcing it, but at night, it’s…you can hardly see because the lights don’t even gloom right and then you can only see as far as you can using your headlights.”
Just like 33-year old Wendy Galdamez Palma on Saturday night.
Bonin understood that, without quick action, people would continue to die on the killer street.
And the next settlement would make that $9.5 million look like peanuts.
So he ordered LADOT to implement a long planned, and long delayed, road diet on Vista Del Mar, along with a handful of other local streets.
Unfortunately, the work was done over a weekend, without warning or public announcements, resulting in massive traffic backups and the inevitable hot tempers.
And somehow, everyone blamed bike lanes — and bike riders in general — for the road diet, even though LADOT used diagonal parking to narrow the street, rather than bike lanes, so speeding drivers wouldn’t keep killing people.
So in the face of demands from angry cut-through commuters, as well as lawsuits and threats of recalls — that was back in the day, before recalls were an everyday thing — Garcetti ordered all the road diets and bike lanes that had been installed on other streets removed.
Making Bonin look like a hapless fool.
And making more deaths inevitable.
As an added bonus, the actions of the future ambassador to India undercut virtually every road diet that had been planned anywhere in the City of Angels, as councilmembers ran scared, and quickly concluded they’d rather see more needless deaths than have those angry drivers come after them.
That’s how we ended up with bike riders and pedestrians continuing to die on our streets, six years after the city adopted Vision Zero, and just four years until traffic deaths were supposed to be a thing of the past.
Yeah, right.
Never mind an ever rising epidemic of hit-and-runs, as drivers recognized just how unlikely they are to be caught. And just how likely they are to get away with a slap on the wrist if they are.
All of which brings us to the needless death of a mother cradling her child in her arms, who reportedly turned away from the oncoming car to sacrifice her life in order to save his.
I honestly don’t know what to say anymore.
Wendy Palma did not need to die. Steps were taken to tame high speed drivers on deadly Vista Del Mar. And spineless cowards took them out.
Which means the next legal settlement won’t by $9.6 million, but significantly higher. Because the city knew there was a problem there, and not only didn’t fix it, they actually removed the fix.
And the one after that will be higher still.
And the one after that.
And people will keep dying, because the cowards in City Hall don’t have the courage to do anything about it.
Photo shows the road diet that was removed from Vista Del Mar.
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If a driver can’t see what’s on the road directly in front of them, they shouldn’t be allowed on the road.
Period.
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Everyone knows you can’t carry stuff home from the market or hardware store on a bicycle.
They get it. The Long Beach Business Journal makes the case that a $20 million reconstruction plan for Artesia Blvd through Compton, Long Beach, Cerritos and Paramount, including an upgraded bike lane, will be good for business growth along the corridor.
No surprise here. A Pottsville PA cop wasn’t charged for killing a 31-year old man who reportedly was struck when he rode his bike into an intersection; no word on who actually had the right-of-way, or whether the officer was using lights and siren. Unfortunately, police have a well-deserved reputation for blaming the victim in any crash involving a cop.
United Arab Emirates VP Sheikh Mohammed is one of us, taking to his bike to explore Dubai’s World Expo site ahead of its opening next month. Although he doesn’t look very happy about it, at least in the top photo.
He describes the one-sided videos and unsupported accusations that the lane reductions were harming businesses in Playa and Mar Vista. And that it was Mayor Garcetti who pulled the plug in Playa del Rey.
One unpublicized meeting spelled the end of the task force and the Playa del Rey road diet. In league with outside forces, lower Playa business owners — among them prominent members of the LAX Coastal Chamber of Commerce, already applying public pressure — demanded an audience with L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. People familiar with the proceedings tell me the group confronted Garcetti with a narrative that the road diet was destroying local businesses and made explicit threats to undermine the mayor’s political ambitions. These strong arm tactics set off a chain of events that led to the near-complete reversal of traffic-calming measures on Culver, Jefferson and Pershing…
This was a savvy move: Everyone cares about the health of small businesses in the community. As an advocate for pedestrian and cyclist safety, I will admit that I’m comfortable if peoples’ commutes get a few minutes longer if it makes our streets less dangerous, but I don’t want local merchants to suffer. Nobody does, and a perception that road diets harm local businesses could shift public opinion in a major way. Dozens of studies conducted in major U.S. cities have concluded that traffic calming efforts ultimately boost business, but that certainly hasn’t stopped opponents from arguing that these dynamics don’t apply in L.A.
He also points the finger where it belongs — at the mayor and city departments that have failed to lead and to stand up in support of their own programs.
The absence of facts is a defining problem in the public conversation about our roads. This cannot simply be blamed on one side of this dispute. Part of the problem is how poorly our politicians and transportation officials as well as the city’s dominant news outlets have communicated incontestable facts to people who live and drive in L.A. The mayor has been painfully silent.
This has created a void that allows a free-for-all on Facebook and Nextdoor, where people on both sides can essentially make up their own facts — about travel times, accident rates, business impacts, the laws governing speeding and jaywalking, the scientific underpinning of Vision Zero, and so on. Rather than form opinions about what to do on Venice Boulevard based on substantiated traffic or accident data, published studies on road diets, or an unbiased analysis of business impacts, the public has wound up getting informed and misinformed by social media, where people who are angry about traffic freely dismiss INRIX and LADOT data as #fakenews and then create memes with data they prefer.
It’s worth reading the full piece. Because this is the fight we’re all in if we want safer streets in the City of Angels, whether we like it or not.
And yes, I’ve felt a lot of that bullying myself, usually after something I’ve written has been mentioned on Nextdoor, a site I avoid like the plague.
Although nowhere near as much as Flax, who has been subject to more abuse and attempts at character assignation than anyone should have to tolerate.
All for the sake of safer and more livable streets, and a more vibrant community.
There is a sickness within our society right now, where what should be civil, fact-based debates too often degenerate into name calling and outright lies.
Not to mention the death threats I reported to the police earlier this year.
This is our city and these are our streets. They don’t belong to cars or the people in them.
They belong to all of us.
And we all have a right to live — and survive — on them.
Although they should start by educating the sheriff’s department, which frequently misinterprets CVC 21202 to ticket people for riding abreast or in the traffic lane, both of which are legal in most cases.
This is day seven of the 3rd Annual BikinginLA Holiday Fund Drive. Your support helps keep SoCal’s best source for bike news and advocacy coming your way every day.
You can donate withjust a few clicks by using PayPal. Or by using theZelle appthat is probably already in the banking app on your smartphone; send your contribution toted @ bikinginla dot com(remove the spaces and format as a standard email address).
As always, any donation, in any amount, is truly and deeply appreciated.
And thanks to J Patrick L, Michael Y, Jeffrey F, Mark J, Joel S, Ellen S and Evan B for their generous donations to help support this site. And a belated thanks to Robs M for being the first to donate using Zelle, which apparently doesn’t let me know when someone uses it.
The LA Daily News looks at Metro’s plans to address the eight-mile gap in the LA River bike path through Downtown LA — although construction won’t start for at least another five years. Good thing they weren’t planning to use it for the road cycling course in the 2028 Olympics.
UCLA’s student newspaper say’s Elon Musk’s tunnels won’t solve LA’s traffic problems, and represents the same old thinking that got Angelenos stuck in this mess. Although the point of the tunnels isn’t to solve traffic problems, but just to let wealthy drivers avoid them.
Once again, authorities managed to keep a dangerous driver on the road until he killed someone. A Houston woman calls for changes in DUI laws after her bike-riding husband was killed by an alleged drunk driver who was already facing a previous drunk driving charge. Anyone arrested for DUI should automatically have their license suspended and the car they were driving impounded until the case is resolved.
Israel may be paying Chris Froome two million euros — the equivalent of $2.37 million — just to participate in next year’s Giro d’Italia, which is scheduled to start in the country.
And probably not the best idea to interrupt your 25-year ride around the world by getting drunk and assaulting cops just hours after entering a new country.
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Thank you all for the kind words about my wife. It looks like she may be doing a little better, and may be able to avoid additional surgery for now.
And in the process, throwing bicyclists and anyone else who fought for the changes under the bus. Perhaps literally.
They present it as a compromise, with a long list of pedestrian-focused improvements that won’t do crap to protect people on bikes, slow traffic or prevent crashes between motorists.
But let’s be honest.
This is a compromise like Jim Bowie and Davey Crockett compromised at the Alamo.
Those pedestrian improvements were already planned as the next phases of the community-driven process to improve safety in Playa del Rey — after the road diets, not in place of them.
So instead of improving safety and livability in the area, it will go back to being a virtual freeway for pass-through motorists.
Except now the city will be on the hook financially for every death and injury that occurs in the area, after removing the safety improvements designed to prevent them.
It’s a liability lawyer’s dream.
Worse, though, is the potentially fatal damage it’s done to Vision Zero in Los Angeles, as few, if any, councilmembers will be willing to subject themselves to the hate and vitriol Bonin and his staff have faced.
It’s a surprise they held out as long as they did.
Chances are, road diets are now off the table in this city. Perhaps permanently.
The same with installing the bike plan, which is no longer worth the silicon it’s printed on. Or any other substantive street changes that inconvenience motorists in any way, or makes NIMBY home and business owners sharpen their pitchforks and light the Tiki torches.
Even if they’re the ones who’ll benefit from it.
And even though Vision Zero was never about crosswalks or enforcement — or cutsie football videos — but about redesigning the roadways so that when people act like people do, their mistakes won’t be fatal. To them or anyone else.
Which is what these road diets were supposed to do.
But we’ll never know if they would have succeeded or not, because they were never given the chance.
I’ve long questioned whether LA’s leaders had the courage and conviction to make the tough choices Vision Zero would require, and withstand the inevitable criticism that would be directed their way.
They’ve answered with a resounding no.
The odd thing, though, is that Garcetti somehow got his name attached to the plan to restore traffic lanes — and got top billing, no less.
Even though he didn’t do a damn thing to implement or support the road diets. Or any of the other traffic safety improvements that have gone down to defeat under his tenure, from bike lanes on Westwood Blvd to sidewalks on the Hyperion-Glendale bridge.
He hasn’t shown up for a single public safety meeting since announcing Vision Zero to great fanfare two years ago. Or made a single public statement in support of Mike Bonin and the desperately needed safety changes in Playa or Mar Vista.
And yet, he gets full credit — if that’s the word you want to use — for restoring the Playa del Rey streets to their original dangerous condition, and thrusting a dagger through the heart of his own signature safety policy.
However, traffic truthers refuse to accept the results; the leader of the Bonin recall effort tried to claim the street was actually more dangerous, because injuries went up on a per capita basis since there was a drop in traffic.
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Today’s common theme, kindhearted people — mostly in blue.
And SoCalCross offers a video recap of the year’s first cyclocross race at Irvine Lake.
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Local
The city council’s Public Works and Gang Prevention Committee approved a motion to paint LA’s bike lanes a dull, non-reflective green, prioritizing the convenience of the film industry over the safety of bike riders. After all, it’s just so damn hard for film crews to cover-up a bike lane with some sort of mat, let alone fix it in post.
LADOT has installed what appears to be a very problematic bus loading platform in the bike lane on First Street in DTLA, which forces riders up a sharp ramp while creating a crowded conflict point when people board or get off; as passengers adjust to it, they will likely start to wait on the platform, blocking the bike lane.
Rails-to-Trails recommends some haunted pathways for your pre-Halloween riding pleasure, including one with a ghost bike. No, literally.
No surprise here, as the Washington jerk bicyclist who injured a pedestrian after yelling “hot pizza,” expecting her to jump out of the way, is now facing a lawsuit; he uses the same excuse drivers do, saying 3 mph pedestrians shouldn’t mix with cyclists doing 15 mph.
A new documentary takes a look at MAMILs, following four men from the US, the UK and Australia. Which should be required viewing for anyone who makes fun of middle-aged people on bikes, spandexed or otherwise.
And outs the person behind it as a Playa del Rey music video and documentary director Justin Purser, who lives steps from the initial Vista del Mar road diet.
Purser admits to being the person who started the account, although he bizarrely contends that he handed it off to a group of people he refuses to name after it was mentioned on this site, following his equally bizarre claim to have co-founded BikinginLA.
You can probably count the number of people who actually believe that on a closed fist, however.
Flax digs into the account, which continues its misleading, false-flag form of fake advocacy.
All the while, the barrage of strange tweets from the Westside Walkers account continues, a maddening mélange of dubious facts and falsely earnest advocacy, leveraging a completely faked identity to convince unsuspecting readers that measures meant to save lives are not working. It’s a total cesspool of bullshit distracting people from an actual life-and-death issue.
Meanwhile, someone from Playa del Rey forwarded screenshots in the upper left corner and below, showing comment by Purser from around the time the Westside Walkers account was started.
His point seems to be that the real goal of people who supported the road diets was to make the streets more dangerous, not less.
If that’s supposed to be a joke, it’s in very poor taste.
And says a lot more about the person who made it than it does anyone else.
Let’s hope his attitude really has changed, as Flax’s article suggests.
AIDS/LifeCycle is holding a pair of Kickoff AIDS/LifeCycle 2018 rides beginning at Balboa Park this Saturday to start training for next year’s 545-mile ride down the California Coast.
Also on the 21st, CD4 Councilmember David Ryu is hosting an open house to discuss much needed safety improvements to 6th Street between Fairfax and La Brea.
Bicycling offers five GoPro hacks to make your videos worth watching. Most important: Install some editing software and learn how to use it. No one wants sit through five minutes of video to get to the 30 seconds where something actually happens.
A New York man says getting run over by a dump truck while riding his bike was the last straw, and he’s officially done with the city. Getting run over by anything can have that effect on you.
Baltimore’s bikeshare returns with a reduced fleet of bikes, now equipped with GPS, after it was shut down due to excessive thefts and maintenance backups.
A 77-year old Australian man needed over a dozen stiches after he was the victim of a random attack by a man who stepped out from behind a tree, and beat the vicim’s face with a bottle as he was riding with his wife.
Streetsblog’s Joe Linton reports the reconfigured street is now a “desolate, 4-lane highway,” with nothing to keep drivers from exceeding the already too high 40 mph speed limit.
And exceed it, they will. And already are.
Which means it’s just a matter of time until the next death on a roadway that has already seen far too many.
Except this time, the inevitable lawsuit will settle for far more than the $9.5 million paid out by the city recently in the death of a 16-year old girl. Because they had a chance to fix the problem and not only didn’t do it, but undid the fix they made.
A cost that will be born, not by the South Bay drivers who use the roadway as their personal speedway, but by the people of Los Angeles.
Or the South Bay cities that believe in calming traffic, but only inside their own city limits, for that matter.
It’s too early to give up on Vision Zero.
But this is exactly the wrong thing to do. And for exactly the wrong reasons.
Photo of deconfigured Vista del Mar by Streetsblog’s Joe Linton.
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Once again, the specter of an indignorant, self-pious cyclist raises its ugly head.
This time in the form of a San Luis Obispo columnist who says he obeys the law when he rides, but accuses the city council of appeasing those damn scofflaw bike zealots with a cycle track he insists no one else wants anyway.
Maybe someone should tell him that many law abiding bike riders desperately want safer places to ride their bikes, and better bikeways have been shown to reduce illegal bike behavior.
And no, drivers don’t pay all the taxes and fees for the construction and maintenance of our roads.
West Hollywood’s WeHo Pedals celebrates its first anniversary tomorrow at Sal Guarriello Park at Santa Monica Blvd and Holloway from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm. In case you’re wondering, the traditional gift for a one-year anniversary is paper; do with that what you will.
Santa Clarita sheriff’s deputies will be conducting a bike and pedestrian safety enforcement program tomorrow, ticketing people for behavior that can jeopardize the safety of either, regardless of who commits it. Which means ride to the letter of the law until you’re out of their jurisdiction, which extends beyond the city limits.
He named a panel of 20 people to the Playa del Rey Safer Streets Task Force, charged with determining if the lane reductions should stay in place. And what other changes, if any, should be made to improve safety in the beachfront community.
The panel is made up of local residents and business people, including those for and against the recent changes.
Although it’s notable that only Peter Flax is identified by his means of transportation; evidently, it’s just assumed that everyone else drives.
You know, like normal people.
Meanwhile, the Easy Reader News offers one of the most in-depth examinations of the controversy to date, as South Bay residents continue to expect everyone else to pay the price for their unsustainable single-occupant commutes.
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A “longtime Long Beach resident” appears to have taken the wrong lesson from the Vista del Mar fiasco, saying LA’s portside neighbor should learn from LA and cancel the planned Broadway bike lanes.
Long Beach really wants to be Amsterdam, where bicycles rule. But we live in Southern California, where distances between home and work are often great, good public transportation is essentially non-existent, and temperatures are often in the 80s and 90s (and it’s getting hotter every year).
Apparently, our council imagines if we destroy our main traffic arteries, those streets will just go “poof,” cars will disappear and lanes will magically fill up with air-conditioned, long-distance commuter bicycles.
Yes, because those moderate temperatures are just too hot for humans to endure. Especially with those cool sea breezes and coastal clouds to cool things off.
And never mind that most car trips in the LA area are three miles or less. Which hardly requires a long-distance commuter bicycle.
Or bicyclist, for that matter.
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Last week we showed you a trailer for Décryptø, the experimental short film from Scott Nichols looking at the custom hand-made carbon fiber bikes from SoCal’s Cryptic Cycles.
Now you can see the whole six-minute film, which dropped yesterday.
A Tour of Norway breakaway was reeled back in when a bridge unexpectedly opened, stopping the lead riders dead in their tracks until the rest of the field caught up.
The legislator who authored California’s handheld cellphone ban says the reason it’s almost universally ignored by drivers is that the penalty is too low. He tried twice to increase the penalty slightly, but both times it was vetoed by a clueless Governor Brown.
A Sacramento mother says the hit-and-run driver who killed her 15-year old son as he rode his bike back home with a friend has changed her family’s lives forever.
The Chico Velo bicycle advocacy group is looking for a new executive director, as the woman who has run the group in the Gold-level bike-friendly city since 2012 is looking to retire.
Now that’s more like it. A Lake Tahoe man gets four years and eight months behind bars for running a stop sign and hitting a bicyclist while driving at three times the legal alcohol limit, then attempting to run down a witness that followed him; he’s also banned from driving for five years after his release. Make that a lifetime driving ban, and we’ve got a deal.
A mystery was solved after a British couple discovered a pool of blood and a backpack on their porch after hearing a knock on their door, and police conducted an unsuccessful search using dogs. It turned out to be a man who had fallen off his bike and suffered a head injury; his friends had taken him to a hotel for help after they found him knocking on the door of the house for help.
The battle for dominance in China’s crowded bikeshare market claimed another victim as Nanking’s Ding Ding went out of business without returning customer’s deposits.
The motion was approved after removing Pershing Drive from the resolution, which presumably means they want to keep that one.
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Local
KPCC looks at plans to revamp the area in front of Union Station to make it more inviting for people walking and biking. Even if that means eliminating some parking and reducing traffic lanes on nearby streets.
San Diego authorities thought they caught a break when police detained a couple for the hit-and-run that left a bike-riding woman in a medically induced coma, but it turned out to be the wrong car. Thanks to Frank Lehnerz for the heads-up.
After dominating California high school mountain biking, recent Ramona High School graduate Gwendalyn Gibson will represent the US at the world championships in Australia next month.
No bias here. A San Luis Obispo paper says local residents aren’t happy about plans to create a bicycle boulevard. Except they’ve dropped plans for the bike boulevard, and are actually proposing a pair of protected bike lanes. And only “several” of the 60 speakers complained about the proposal.
A New York driver parked in a bike lane — then chased after a woman and called her a fucking bitch after she had the audacity to ride her bike around him. Apparently, she was supposed to sit there and wait until he moved his car. Or maybe she said something as she rode past.
Life is cheap in Singapore, where a truck driver got a whopping four weeks for killing an ebike rider when he pulled out from an intersection without looking. But at least he was banned from driving for five years, which will likely force him to find another line of work.
The Daily Pilot reported yesterday that a Laguna Beach driver had attempted to crash his car into a bicyclist who tried to stop him after he’d hit another rider.
But what they failed to mention was that the first crash was intentional, as well.
The Laguna Beach Police Department reported on their Facebook page that the driver fled after intentionally crashing into a man riding his bicycle, then trying to run over the second rider as he attempted to confront him.
Thankfully, he missed.
Fifty-three-year old Laguna Beach resident Kevin O’Neill was arrested on Saturday, after witnesses and victims picked his photo out of a lineup following the twin attacks Thursday morning at Bluebird Canyon Road and South Coast Highway.
No word on the condition of his victim.
Fortunately, this took place in Orange County, where the DA takes traffic crime seriously. We should expect a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, at the very least.
But let this serve as yet another reminder that it’s not worth your life to confront an angry driver.
Gather whatever information you can, from the make, model, color and license of the vehicle to a description of the driver, as well as any photos or video, if possible.
Then get hell out of the way and let the police deal with it.
One of our members had his bike stolen recently in Ventura California, his name is Marc Thomas. His bike should be easy to spot as it’s a 66cm custom made Landshark bicycle YES Marc IS TALL!!! Marc is one of the great members we have in LaGrange as he is constantly teaching new and old cyclists in his world famous “ Drills for Skills” clinics. Along with being a key member of the club he was one of the many people instrumental in making the Brentwood Grand Prix happen for so many years.
Attached is a picture of the stolen bike. The bike should stand out as only NBA basketball players are tall enough to ride it.
I’ve asked for additional information on exactly when and where the bike was stolen, but haven’t heard back yet.
And Mina Moskol of the LACBC’s Santa Clarita Chapter forwards a flyer for a bicycle stolen from one of the competitors in the World Police and Fire Games staying at a Palmdale hotel last week.
Bike Snob says “on your left!” needs to die already, even though there’s no way to pass anyone on a trail without scaring the crap out of them. I’ve found that simply adding the word passing, as in “passing on your left,” in a polite, conversational tone solves the problem almost every time. But what the hell do I know?
Treehugger says cars really should wear hi-viz, their drivers should wear helmets, and car radios should be banned. The latter would have the added benefit of keeping radio shock jocks from fueling drivers’ anger and contributing to road rage.
Delaware state police blame a rider for wearing dark clothes in low light conditions and taking the lane after he’s rear-ended by a driver. Correction: I originally criticized the police for bending over backwards to blame the rider after noting that the crash occurred two hours before sunset. However, as Andy S pointed out, the crash actually took place before sunrise, not sunset. I apologize for the confusion.
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