A quick heads-up before we get started.
A number of coastal areas remain flooded and/or damaged after the simultaneous effects of a kelvin wave and Hurricane Rachel over the weekend.
So maybe stay inland for a few days. Or if you ride near the coast, at least check your route for flood conditions and damage before you go, and turn back at the first sign of standing water. You don’t know what may or may not be hidden by the water, and salt water can be very harmful to your bike.
And to you, if a stray wave catches you.
Today’s photo depicts the most recent deadly crash on Forest Lawn, reportedly due to speeding.
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I’ll try to get into this more tomorrow, but Mayor Karen Bass released her new plan to add protected bike lanes to deadly Forest Lawn by — wait for it — widening the roadway rather than reducing lanes.
Even though her own staff says it won’t do much to reduce speeding and improve safety. But it will keep her backers at Forest Lawn and Mount Sinai cemeteries happy, as they strive to keep the street dangerous and drive up business.
Yay, us.
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Life can be hard. Especially when sudden fame brings promises that no one keeps.
NPR discovered that when they checked in with India’s Jyoti Kumari, who gained international acclaim at the height of the pandemic when she bought a hot pink bicycle for twenty bucks, and rode over 700 miles to carry her injured father back home.
Despite never having ridden a bike before, and only 15 years old, she made the trip in just seven days in the middle of the lockdown, often riding on an empty stomach.
But sadly, her father died of a heart attack just a few months later.
Here’s how she explained the rest of the story to NPR, and what happened after the acclaim died out.
That was in 2020. “Now — life is hard,” Kumari told NPR.
What happened to all the promises made — for financial support, especially to support cycling as a competitive sport?
Many promises were not kept, she says.
“The politicians who made promises, saying they would give money for my sports or education — nobody actually gave anything,” she says. “Whatever reward money we collected back then [from individuals who extended help and a government award that came with a cash prize], we put it all into our house, rebuilding it. We had a brick house before, but it only had bare walls. Now we have completed it, added a toilet, a bathroom, and a running water connection. By doing all that, the house has finally become livable,” she says…
At the moment, her mother works as a cook. Her meager income supports Kumari and her three siblings at home (an older sister has married and moved out).
“There are days when we go to sleep hungry,” she says. “Our brother-in-law used to help us earlier, but now he also has a child, a wife and his father to take care of. He works a small job in the city — how much can he really do? So now he isn’t able to help us much.”
It’s worth taking a few minutes to read or listen to the story.
If nothing else, it’s a remind that as hard as life may seem at times, we’ve got it pretty good over here.
And that heroes and remarkable achievements are too often quickly forgotten.
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Over the weekend, I ran into Stephen Post, a candidate for the West Hollywood City Council, at Plummer Park.
And no, I didn’t hurt him. And yes, I should be more careful.
We didn’t really have time to chat, since my wife was anxious to leave, and the corgi had squirrel treed a few feet away, and was being very aggressive in her attempts to either a) climb the tree to get it, or b) bark it into submission.
However, I did discover Post is a multi-modal bike commuter who lives just a couple blocks from where Blake Ackerman was killed, and he’s a big supporter of the planned safety improvements on Fountain Ave, including protected bike lanes.
I’ll leave it to you to find out more about his positions on other issues. But we agreed it’s long past time for a new generation of leadership. And he seems like someone ready to take that next step into local governance.
So if you live in WeHo, check him out. And if you don’t, check him out anyway.
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The father and son team of Scott and Ethan Pesch are nearly finished with their 10,000-mile ride to visit every Major League ballpark in the US, with a goal of raising $100,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Meanwhile, another father and son duo completed a 4,300-mile ride across the US, raising $240,000 to fight Type 1 diabetes.
And to think I had a hard time just talking our dad into riding around the block with us. Then again, the racing bike he kept hanging on the garage wall was over 40 years old by then, and it was hard to get parts for a 1920s vintage road bike even back then.
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Local
No news is good news, right?
State
Cal Matters examines what California’s three new ebike laws actually do.
Calbike recaps the wins and losses in the just concluded legislative session, counting the halting of three bad ebike bills among the former.
National
No surprise here, at least not if you’ve been paying attention, as a new study from Johns Hopkins reconfirmed that narrowing traffic lanes does not result in more crashes, and makes streets safer for bike riders and pedestrians.
Someone who owns both explains why mountain bikes and road bikes don’t get along, at least when it comes to riding together.
Hats off to Irish ultra-endurance cyclist Joe Barr, who is now the official Guinness World Record holder for biking the entire 2,448-mile length of Route 66 in 10 days, 6 hours and 27 minutes.
A new Honolulu bike commuter looks to New York for hope and inspiration. As do we all, my friends. As do we all.
He gets it. A letter writer with the Akron, Ohio Vision Zero program says ebikes aren’t the problem, cars are. Or maybe ebikes are a small problem compared to the big, dangerous machines and the people in them.
Seriously, it takes a major schmuck to steal an ebike from an 86-year old Ohio man.
Um, okay. A 66-year old Connecticut priest says he felt like Moses in the desert on just the first day of a 350-mile ride through the Alps to raise funds for a Catholic school. Even though Moses spent 40 years wandering through that desert, and never did get where he was going.
New York is embarking on a ten-year safety review of the city’s streets, with an emphasis on improving condition for bicyclists and pedestrians. The difference between New York and Los Angeles is that when they conduct a safety study, they actually do something about it.
A couple of New Jersey cops helped resuscitate a 76-year old man after he suffered a heart attack, the second life they had saved in just three weeks.
International
Wired examines how a tiny Vancouver-based startup studied head-banging woodpeckers to discover a new approach to skull protection, leading to the world’s safest bike helmet.
A 27-year old London woman was sentenced to almost 11 years behind bars for killing a music student, also 27, as he was riding his bike; she was high on laughing gas and doing two-and-a-half times the speed limit when she slammed into him.
A Scottish counselor warns that wet leaves can be dangerous on bike paths. Which is a good reminder if you’re riding anywhere in SoCal for the next few days.
In response to a question from the Irish parliament, the country’s Minister for Justice says 1,368 bicyclists and 253 e-scooter riders were fined for running red lights since 2024 — and no, they didn’t note the number of drivers ticketed for the same offense, though a previous study showed drivers run more red lights than bike riders do. Maybe it’s just me, but that number actually seems pretty low for a country of five-and-a-half million people.
Thousand of people rode everything from modern recumbents to vintage penny-farthings as Sydney, Australia shut down the city’s iconic Harbour Bridge for the 40th annual bike ride to benefit a mental health foundation.
Competitive Cycling
World champ Brandon McNulty, European champ Remco Evenepoel, and other national champions led a five-minute protest before the start of Il Lombardia demanding safer conditions for pro cyclists after recent deaths and serious injuries; following the protest, 20-year old French wunderkind Paul Seixas broke away with 19km — roughly 12 miles — to go to become the youngest winner of a Monument race since 1944.
Twenty-three-year old Norwegian cyclist Per Strand Hagenes won the one-day Paris–Tours race after breaking away from the lead group with one kilometer — a little less than two-thirds of a mile — to go.
Sad news from North Carolina, where 19-year old collegiate cyclist and rising cyclocross star Tofik Beshir remained unconscious in the ICU after he was struck head-on by a driver during a training ride near Lees-McRae College on Thursday; a crowdfunding campaign to help pay his medical expenses has raised over half of the $200,000 goal.
Speaking of collegiate cycling, congratulations to Colorado Mesa University back in my home state on winning their seventh consecutive national mountain bike title.
Finally…
That feeling when a major bike event turns into a “bike-pushing festival” in “the international capital of embarrassing fails.”
Or when your job requires making Amazon deliveries by ebike during a heatwave.
@iamautoboy
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin.
