Sounds like fun.
Seven Orange County cities will team up to reimagine Beach Blvd with a massive 21-mile open streets event on November 17th, featuring a number of festivals along the route.
Correction: Well, it would have been nice. But a comment from Mike Wilkinson clarifies what this event is, and isn’t.
And it isn’t what I thought from the article above.
A 21 mile open streets event along Beach Boulevard in Orange County would be impressive and fun. Unfortunately, the event planned for November is definitely NOT an open streets event, and it’s definitely not 21 miles long.
The Meet on Beach event will feature “..live performances, food, giveaways and much more…” according to the MeetOnBeach.com website. That will give families fun reasons to enjoy the outdoors, and that’s a good thing, but it’s not an open streets event.
Beach Boulevard runs about 4.4 miles through the City of Buena Park. The city will close about 0.8 miles of the boulevard, which is less than one-fifth of the total, but just in one direction. Traffic on the busiest street in Orange County will still be rushing past in the other direction. Anaheim has about 1.4 miles of Beach Boulevard and will close about one-third of it (0.5 miles), again in just one direction. So far as I know, the other participating cities aren’t planning to close their parts of Beach Boulevard at all!
Joel Rosen, Buena Park’s Director of Community Development say’s it right. “… we hope to promote economic development and healthy communities along the historic 21-mile stretch…”. That sounds like a good thing to me, but it’s not an open streets event, where people can walk, run, skate, scoot or ride on empty streets and imagine what it would be like to be car free, even for just a day.
Photo courtesy of Daria Shevtsova from Pexels.
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Insider listed the 20 most dangerous US cities for bike riders.
New York was named the nation’s worst place to ride a bike, while San Jose and San Francisco tied for fourth.
So is it good news that Los Angeles only placed ninth?
In a word, no.
Meanwhile, the Bob Vila website ranks the nation’s top 20 cities for bicycling.
Santa Barbara was the highest rated California city at number 11, while Santa Monica checked in at 15.
Somehow New York managed to make both lists, coming in fourth this time, while my hometown was second to neighboring Boulder CO.
And needless to say, Los Angeles didn’t make this list at all.
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RuPaul gets it.
https://twitter.com/RuPaul/status/1148592721994498048
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Now that’s a bottle cap challenge.
Hi everyone, I have seen loads of people doing the #bottlecapchallange so I thought I would give it a go for Roller Trick Tuesday….. stay awesome everyone….. Ruby X pic.twitter.com/5BdLc8ubyc
— Ruby Isaac (@RubyWIsaac) July 9, 2019
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There are a couple of ebike recalls in today’s news.
Trek is recalling some of their Super Commuter+ 8S ebikes due to a manufacturing error that could cause the front fender to fall into the wheel.
Santa Cruz-based Faraday is recalling 4,450 of their distinctive-looking ebikes due to the risk of a broken seat post.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes goes on.
When an Ottawa, Canada bike rider complained to a driver about a too-close pass, the road raging driver responded with a punishment pass that clipped the mirror on his handlebars.
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Local
Streetsblog’s Joe Linton takes LADOT, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and several members of the city council to task for the city’s “dismal” trend of bikeway implementation, saying installing or upgrading just 13 miles of on-street bike lanes is nothing to celebrate.
Curbed says the North Atwater Bridge is slowly taking shape, and should connect bike riders and pedestrians with Atwater Village and Griffith Park over the LA River by the end of this year.
LA County approved a half-million dollar grant for Pasadena’s One Arroyo Seco Trail Project.
State
A proposed bill in the state legislature would triple the current $2,500 rebate for buying an electric car or SUV. The problem is, an electric car is still a car; the state should make the rebate apply to ebikes and transit passes, as well, to help get more cars off the streets.
A popular DIY bike track in San Diego’s Point Loma neighborhood could become a victim of the need for affordable housing.
Santa Barbara officials have identified the victim in last week’s fatal bicycling crash as a 54-year old homeless man who lived in the area; he was riding in the middle of the night without lights or reflectors.
Menlo Park proposes trading 165 parking spaces for bike lanes to help get people out of their cars.
There’s a special place in hell for whoever stole a Bay Area Alzheimer’s patient’s custom ebike that was his only form of transportation.
National
A law professor writes that Americans shouldn’t have to drive, but the country’s legal system virtually forces them into their cars by squeezing out the alternatives.
A Harvard professor says less driving, more thriving in a call to reduce the number of cars in urban areas and increase the number of pedestrians.
Writing for Outside, longtime Bicycling writer Joe Lindsey says not only are bike riders not freeloaders on the streets, the bike lanes so many drivers insist we should pay for actually improve safety for everyone — not just the people on two wheels.
A new ebike currently raising funds on Kickstarter promises virtually unlimited range by recharging automatically as you pedal or coast downhill.
A Portland bike dance team is hanging up their BMX bikes after 15 years.
A pair of Good Samaritans are pushing the need for CPR training after saving the life of a 57-year old Texas man who suffered a massive heart attack while taking part in a 64-mile sportive ride.
A Minneapolis TV station asks whether an ebike can really replace your car. Short answer — for many people, yes.
Now the trees are out to get us. A Columbus, Ohio man suffered nearly a dozen fractures and a collapsed lung when a massive tree fell on him during a downpour as he was riding home from work.
Now that’s a good kid. When a young Maine boy won a new bike in a school drawing, he gave it away so another kid could “experience the joy a bike brings.”
An op-ed in the New York Daily News says the time to build more bike lanes is before someone gets killed, not after.
Hundreds of New York bike riders turn out for a die-in to protest the 15 people killed riding their bikes already this year — five more than were killed in the city all of last year. That’s the difference between New York and LA, where we’ve also seen 15 people killed riding bikes in the county, but hardly anyone seems to notice, and far fewer seem to care.
New York’s police commissioner says it’s perfectly okay for one of his cops to use deadly force to stop a bike rider for running multiple red lights. Maybe next time the NYPD will just shoot scofflaw bicyclists instead of using a car.
Great idea. Arlington County VA will conduct a Natural Disaster Trial to see how residents can survive and take care of their families by using bicycles after a disaster wipes out the region’s crucial infrastructure.
International
London’s Independent celebrates the joys of slow travel.
Britain’s eleven-time world track cycling champ Sir Chris Hoy gave a video shoutout to a nine-year old boy after he suffered a concussion hitting a pothole on a charity bike ride.
A British ex-cop’s alibi for killing a highly visible bike rider in a crash is that he was too stoned on meth to have any idea what the hell he was doing. No, seriously.
It took an Irish woman eight long years to get justice, as a court awarded her the equivalent of $280,000 after her postman husband was killed in a crash while delivering mail by bike.
Serena Williams is sort of one of us, relaxing between matches at Wimbledon by riding a bike with her young son in her arms. Except her bike doesn’t move.
An Indian bicyclist remembers four extraordinary locations he saw on a 400-day solo bike tour from the Arctic to the Andes.
Roll a stop sign in one United Arab Emirates city, and you could see your bike permanently confiscated. Same goes for not wearing a helmet, or a fluorescent jacket after dark.
Um, no. A 20-year old Australian man wants to become a cop — despite killing a 28-year old woman riding a bike while driving at twice the legal speed limit on the wrong side of the road, hitting her head-on.
Competitive Cycling
Forget those guys riding their bikes around France. A comment from Mellisa informs us that you can catch a free one-hour recap of the Giro Rosa women’s stage race every day, courtesy of Trek.
No change at the top of the Tour de France leaderboard after yesterday’s stage four.
Drink your way through the Tour de France.
Canadian pro Michael Woods says he still runs, despite competing in his first Tour de France, because doing nothing but pedaling for 3 weeks makes you “a better bike racer but a worse human” physically.
A writer for Bicycling tries to stare into the soul of the great Eddy Merckx, and finds an abyss staring back. And no, I don’t know what that means, either.
A vegan Aussie endurance cyclist set a new record for the cross-country Trans Am Bike Race on a diet of hash browns.
A Kenyan website talks with the mother of professional cyclist James Mwaura, aka The Lion of Africa; Mwaura was shot four times as a child in an assassination that killed his father.
Finally…
Sharrows do not a Complete Street make. It’s hard to keep a bike shop going these days; harder still if you don’t pay your back taxes.
And if you’re going to roll a red light, try not to crash into the lampposts.
