Tag Archive for Vermont Ave

Los Angeles: Not safe, but our drivers don’t suck as much as San Bernardino; and demand HLA bike lanes on Vermont

October 8, 2024 / / No comments
Just 83 days left until Los Angeles fails to meet its Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. 

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A new WalletHub report ranks the 180 safest cities in America, based on 41 metrics, including traffic safety.

Not surprisingly, no Southern California city made the top ten, although Irvine checked in at number 11.

Yes, Irvine, followed by Chula Vista, Glendale and Santa Clarita in the top 30.

Needless to say, Los Angeles wasn’t. In fact, the City of Angels came in all the way down at — no, keep going — 162.

A whopping 18 from the very bottom, at the top of the lowly 10th percentile.

On a related note, another survey — this one from Consumer Affairs — concluded that Victorville has the second-worst drivers in the US, surpassed only by Memphis, Tennessee.

But San Bernardino wasn’t far behind, at 4th.

Neither of which should surprise anyone who’s familiar with this site, where both appear far too frequently.

Oddly, Los Angeles came in at exactly the same position as the safety study, at 162. But this time, that’s good news, because it means 161 other American cities have worse drivers than we do.

As hard as that may be to believe.

On the other hand, it also means over 130 other US cities have better drivers.

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In an update to yesterday’s lead item, Streetsblog says three meetings will be held over the next two days to discuss Metro’s proposal to add bus lanes — but no bike lanes or better sidewalks — to the Vermont Ave corridor.

Which means it’s your chance to put your foot down, and tell them to stop ducking their commitment to Measure HLA. And put in the damn bike lanes the mobility plan calls for, as they are now legally required to do.

Tuesday 10/8 and Wednesday 10/9 – Metro is hosting another round of community input meetings on its Vermont Transit Corridor project: long overdue improvements for a top ridership bus line. Streetsblog reviewed recent developments last week. Advocates are urging significant low-cost bus, walk, and bike upgrades for the entire ~12-mile project. Metro is looking at initially adding bus lanes for about half the corridor. Show up and let Metro know what you think. Three Vermont meetings this week:

It’s also a reminder that Streetsblog is usually your best source for the latest information on active transportation and transit meetings and activities every week.

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Which kind of leads us into this next item, as Streets For All urges you to show up for Wednesday’s LA City Council Public Works Committee meeting, where our select electeds will consider proposals to halt automatic street widening, and require better quality bollards.

But for buildings, not bicycles.

Although maybe we could talk them into protecting us humans someday, too.

There are two important items (#2 and #3) at Wednesday’s Public Works Committee meeting; Item 2 would stop automatic road dedications that make our roads more dangerous and drive up the cost of housing, and Item 3 would protect buildings with quality bollards (we want the same protection for bike lanes!) In-person public comment is the most effective:
Public Works Committee
1:30pm, Wednesday 10/9
City Hall, Room 401
200 N Spring St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

If you can’t make it in person, send in your comments prior to the meeting.

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The City of Los Angeles offers a reminder about this Sunday’s CicLAvia, which returns to the Heart of LA.

https://twitter.com/LACity/status/1843380939394625754

And yes, SAFE will be there.

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Peter Flax answers the eternal question of why bicyclists don’t use the damn bike lane.

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Had to look it up, but yes, he really said it.

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Famed cyclist Danny MacAskill took his stunt riding skills to Adidas HQ — no, not just riding at it, riding on it.

And, uh, off.

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It’s now 293 days since the California ebike incentive program’s latest failure to launch, which was promised no later than fall 2023. And an even 40 months since it was approved by the legislature and signed into law — and counting.

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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.

A local Indiana TV station somehow blames an 11-year old boy for running into the side of a moving car on his bicycle, without apparently considering the possibility that the driver cut off the kid or drove way too close to him.

Unbelievable. There’s a special place in hell for the hit-and-run driver who fled the scene with a bike-riding Avon, Connecticut high school student trapped on their car; the heartless driver stopped four miles away to push the badly injured teen off the roof the vehicle’s roof.

But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.

Police in Osaka, Japan are investigating how a drunk off-duty cop got ahold of the bicycle he threw at a moving taxi. And yes, why.

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Local  

The sister of fallen bicyclist Danny Oerlemans is asking anyone with information about the two heartless cowards who needlessly took his life in a pair of Northridge hit-and-runs last month to come forward so he doesn’t become just another statistic; he was just riding his bike to get cat food when they ran him down and over, leaving him to die alone in the street.

SoCal Cycling considers how bicycles are revolutionizing the coffee business.

Proposed new signage for the Venice boardwalk makes it clear that no electric vehicles — ebikes, hoverboards or electric skateboards — or bicycles are allowed.

 

State

Calbike recaps the bicycling wins and loses from this year’s legislative session.

San Diego’s KPBS explains the county’s Measure G, which would add a half cent to the local sales tax to fund transportations projects, with the bulk going to public train and bus lines and operations, while flushing a quarter of the funds down the induced-demand inducing toilet. And apparently, nothing for bike lanes.

Evidently, young tourists love bicycling in the California wine country. But actually drinking the stuff, not so much.

 

National

A new grant program from State Bicycle Co. will provide cash, gear and yes, bikes to independent filmmakers to bring unique bicycling stories to life.

Bicycling looks at the best October Prime Day deals on bicycling gear. This one doesn’t seem to be available anywhere else, so you’re on your own if the magazine blocks you — but they probably won’t, because they likely get a piece of any clickthrough sales.

Arkansas has opened a new network of bikepacking trails, which can be combined to form routes up to 260 miles.

There’s not a pit in hell deep enough for whoever stole the adaptive bicycle a North Carolina teenager with autism and Down syndrome relied on to get to school.

 

International

Momentum wants to school you on how to lock up your bicycle. And how not to.

Bike Radar looks at the best cheap road bikes retailing for less than £750 — a little less than $1,000.

How to buy a cheap ebike this year, from government-backed loans to finding a good deal. Although this advice is for the UK, so California’s notoriously moribund ebike rebate program won’t hold you back.

Seriously? The investigation into the death of a Irish woman has been delayed for six months, so investigators can go to the UK because the software they need to view dashcam video belonging to the truck driver that killed her isn’t available anywhere on the Emerald Isle.

An architecture site examines what lead the Netherlands to become a bicycling Utopia. Which is a very odd way to put it.

 

Competitive Cycling

Good question. Cyclinguptodate wants to know why there are no American races on the UCI WorldTour.

Bicycling says Slovenian cycling star Tadej Pogačar isn’t the GOAT yet, but the cannibal should be watching his back. Read it on AOL this time if the magazine blocks you. 

 

Finally…

That feeling when you offer to help the gravel-grinding new cycling GOAT, and he drops you like freshman English. If your Halloween costume doesn’t revolve around a bicycle, maybe you should rethink it.

And if history had gone a little differently, you might be riding something like this today.

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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

LA and Metro ignore HLA-mandated bike lanes on Vermont, and Gov. Newsom may not understand the risks of speeding

October 7, 2024 / / No comments
Just 84 days left until Los Angeles fails to meet its Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. 

Conceptual rendering of bike lane-free Vermont courtesy of Streetsblog LA.

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Sadly, no surprise here.

A large collection of Los Angeles advocacy groups, led by Streets For All and ACT-LA, are complaining that Metro’s plan for bus lanes on Vermont Ave don’t comply with the requirements of Measure HLA.

The ballot measure, initially sponsored by Streets For All, passed with overwhelming support in the March primary election, winning two-thirds of the vote in the City of Los Angeles.

It ordered the city to comply with a very simple requirement to build out the already approved Mobility Plan 2035 whenever streets in the plan get resurfaced.

Or maybe not so simple, since LA officials have apparently been busy dragging their feet and looking for loopholes ever since.

According to Streetsblog LA, Metro has been working on plans to add bus lanes to Vermont for over a decade, scaling back what had been 12 miles to just six.

And just bus lines.

Advocates see Vermont as a key opportunity. If you can’t go big, be thorough, and make transit and transit riders a top priority on one of Metro’s and the nation’s highest ridership corridors, where can you?

The Alliance for Community Transit (ACT-LA) is currently circulating a letter (sign on as an individual or organization) in support of improving Vermont for people on bus, bike, and on foot – from Sunset Boulevard to the Metro C (Green) Line Athens Station. ACT-LA and two dozen organizations are calling for following features all along the nearly 12-mile-long project:

  • uninterrupted bus lanes
  • protected bike lanes
  • pedestrian scrambles at high injury and bus transfer intersections
  • tree planting, non-hostile shelters, signage, wayfinding, trash bins, and a bus rider bill of rights at every stop
  • wait time displays and public water at all major intersections
  • electrification of buses along the corridor
  • preserving all street vending and expanding the sidewalk in areas with high vending concentrations

But Metro’s current scaled-back, penny-pinching plan includes “little for pedestrians, and nothing for cyclists.”

Metro somehow claims that’s consistent with the mobility plan, and “helps support” Measure HLA.

Streets For All disagrees. And they should know, since they wrote the damn thing.

This week, the advocacy group Streets for All, the main proponent of Measure HLA and one of the signatories of the ACT-LA letter, wrote to Mayor Karen Bass and Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins in support of Metro’s Vermont project proceeding in full compliance with Measure HLA. The letter states:

“As designed, the BRT project brings (welcome) improvements to Vermont Avenue… Those trigger the City’s obligation to install Mobility Plan enhancements. Therefore, were the City to issue permits for the project without assuring implementation of its Mobility Plan enhancements at the same time, the City would violate its ordinance, waste public funds, and allow Vermont’s dangerous conditions to remain despite the voters’ mandate.”

Streets for All notes that the project complies with the city’s plan for transit and pedestrian facilities, but not for bikeways.

It would be bad enough if this were a one-off. But Streetsblog includes a long list of current projects that don’t appear to comply with the mobility plan or HLA.

HLA gives Angelenos the right to sue to force implementation of the measure, and that could be where we’re heading.

Los Angeles seems to be daring these organizations to take them to court, either thinking they won’t do it, or in hopes of somehow getting the measure overturned.

Which seems unlikely, since it’s now part of the city charter.

We thought we had won when HLA passed. But clearly, this battle is just getting started.

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Streets Are For Everyone, aka SAFE, notes that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a wide range of traffic safety measures passed in the last legislative session.

These range from mandating that Caltrans follow its own Complete Streets policies, to bills extending the statute of limitations for hit-and-run if the driver flees the state.

But Newsom dropped the ball when it came to speeding drivers, vetoing a bill to increase the penalty for speeding more than 26 mph over a 55 mph limit, as well as a bill to mandate an audible warning when drivers exceed the posted speed limit by more than 10 mph.

You can read SAFE’s full article explaining both Newsom’s reasons for the vetoes, and why they think he was wrong.

But for now, let’s just say they raise serious questions over whether the governor truly grasps the dangers posed by speeding drivers to everyone around them, both on and off the roadway.

If he did, he would work with the legislature to fix the bills or to craft alternatives that he would favor, rather than just killing them with a stroke of the pen.

People both in and out of motor vehicles are injured and dying at ever increasing rates, many through no fault of their own.

And speeding is one of the leading causes of that.

If the governor doesn’t understand that, nothing will improve until he leaves office.

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A bike ride on Saturday, October 19th will explore the new bike lanes on Hollywood Blvd, which many people noted weren’t ready for prime time during the recent Hollywoods CicLAvia.

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It’s now 292 days since the California ebike incentive program’s latest failure to launch, which was promised no later than fall 2023. And an even 40 months since it was approved by the legislature and signed into law — and counting.

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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.

Call if a false alarm this time. It turns out the dangling wire a Milwaukee bike rider was nearly decapitated by when it wrapped around his neck as he rode past a light pole was part of an Eruv that had fallen, used by a Jewish community to allow them to move about celebrate the Sabbath more freely.

But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.

Seriously, if videos show bike riders avoiding a newly constructed Melbourne, Australia protected bike lane, there’s probably a reason for it.

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Local  

A travel writer visits Los Angeles, and finds it surprisingly bikeable — as long as you’re on a guided bike tour, and do much of your riding on bike paths.

 

State

About damn time. Caltrans is finally getting around to adding bike lanes on San Diego’s busy Friars Road. I wasn’t comfortable riding on Friars when I live down there, and that was nearly four decades ago.

 

National

A British travel writer rode his bike 4,000 miles through the heart of conservative small town America, relating what he learned about “guns, politics and Trump.”

Your next road bike could be 3D printed — and the most aero bike ever built  — while your next racing tires could inflate themselves, automatically adjusting for differences in terrain.

An Idaho reporter talks about the interesting and crazy people he bumped into riding his bike down the left coast.

He gets it. A Boston writer says bike lanes don’t just benefit people on bicycles, they help everyone — yes, even businesses — improving safety and accessibility, traffic flow, and environmental sustainability.

Cambridge, Massachusetts is making $1.5 million in safety improvements to a local street, weeks after a father was killed when a driver lost control and drove up onto the sidewalk he was riding his bike on. As usual, only making the improvements they knew they needed after it’s too late.

A New York woman is being called a hero after she stopped her car to save the life of a man who suffered a heart attack while he was riding, giving the experienced triathlete CPR on the side of the road until paramedics arrived.

New York City is encouraging safe and fun bicycling through their Biketober initiative, with events scheduled throughout the month in all five boroughs. Just let me know when to show up for Biketoberfest.

He gets it, too. An op-ed from a South Carolina writer says the problem isn’t dangerous bicyclists, but speeding drivers — and it’s time to slow them down.

 

International

Road.cc explains everything you need to know about bike cams but were afraid to ask.

A newspaper in Edinburgh, Scotland talks with local bike riders about what makes them feel unsafe on the road, including potholes, narrow roads and dangerous drivers.

A London man got his stolen ebike back by posing as a locksmith, knowing the thief — or the schmuck he sold it to — would need a new one to make it work.

A British bicycling instructor is using his bike cam to bring bad drivers to justice. Too bad that’s illegal here. 

Cycling Weekly explores why twice as many bicyclists are killed riding on rural roads in the UK compared to busy city streets, and what can be done to bike riders safe on country roads.

A government minister in the Netherlands wants to see a quarter of all bike riders wearing helmets within the next decade, in a country where only four percent currently do.

Hong Kong’s police chief calls for mandatory bike helmets, as bicycling deaths rise in the city; six of the eight bicyclist killed this year weren’t wearing one. Yet somehow, no one seems to be calling for banning large trucks and SUVS, or any of the other multitude of factors that could be causing the jump, besides what the victims did or didn’t have on their head.

An Aussie man decided to move to China permanently after touring the country by bicycle, personally witnessing the changes in the countryside in the two decades when he lived and worked in Guangdong.

 

Competitive Cycling

Mathieu van der Poel won this year’s Men’s Gravel World Championships riding an actual gravel bike this time, instead of riding his roadie.

Pro cyclist Lachlan Morton shattered the record for riding around Australia, completing the 8,800 mile journey in just 30 days, nine hours and 59 minutes, and beating the old record by nearly seven days — despite a close call with a kangaroo.

Good news, as Belgian cycling star Wout van Aert is back on his bike for the first time since a devastating crash in the Vuelta last month.

 

Finally…

Forget a tent on your next bike tour, and tow a trailer — unless your trailer is a bike, of course. Sometimes it takes a village to get your stolen ebike back.

And we may have to deal with predatory LA drivers, but at least we don’t usually have to worry about migrating great white sharks.

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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.

Oh, and fuck Putin

Category: Morning Links / Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Witnesses sought in Thursday evening hit-and-run on Vermont Ave

October 2, 2010 / / 2 comments

Witnesses are being in a hit-and-run collision that occurred around 6:45 to 7 pm Thursday on Vermont Ave near the Metro stop at LACC.

According to a report on the Midnight Ridazz forum, the driver of a PT Cruiser initially stayed at the scene after hitting a rider head-on while making a left turn; once the rider was transported by ambulance, she left before police arrived after giving a false name and number to some cyclists who stopped to help.

Hi everyone,
I am posting this for any help/advice on catching a hit and run driver that took out my buddy while he was riding home from work on Thursday, Sept. 30th between 6:45-7pm.

He was heading south on Vermont Avenue and right before LACC next to the Metro stop, a girl (18-20yrs) driving a PT Cruiser turned left quickly trying to beat oncoming traffic and hit him head on.

A couple of cyclists helped him out and blocked the girl from driving off. He’s pretty sure they called 911 but was too out of it to get anyone’s contact info. The ambulance took him to the hospital and by the time the police arrived the driver had left. It appears she gave a false name and number to the cyclist who were helping.

If you were one of the cyclists who made a 911 call or have advice on who to contact to help follow up on leads it would be greatly appreciated.

You can contact: 10speedracer@gmail.com

Thanks

LAPD Sgt. David Krumer asks that anyone with information contact him directly by email at 35128@lapd.lacity.org, or by calling his office number at 213-486-6070.

Category: General / Tags: , , ,
 
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