Tag Archive for Week Without Driving

No Week Without Driving in car-centric LA, fight for safe & simple red light cams, and 16-year old kid killed in e-motorbike crash

Day 273 of LA’s Vision Zero failure to end traffic deaths by 2025. 

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This is day two of a Week Without Driving.

Or as it’s known here in Los Angeles, just another week.

Because officials in this city would never want to suggest to drivers that they might want to leave their car at home for even a week, no matter how good the cause.

And this is a very good cause.

According to the website,

If you can drive or afford a car, you may not understand what it’s like to rely on walking, rolling, transit and asking for rides. But for nearly a third of people living in the United States – people with disabilities, young people, seniors and people who can’t afford cars or gas – this is our every day.

We created the Week Without Driving experience so that those who have the option to drive can learn firsthand about the barriers and challenges that nondrivers face and work with nondrivers to create more accessible communities for all.

And one of those barriers, as I learned last week, is just how difficult it is to replace a lost ID here in California if you don’t drive a car.

Unlike drivers, who can request a new license online with just a few clicks and get it days later, non-drivers have to fill out a form, and schedule an appointment to appear in person at the DMV.

Since evidently, anyone who doesn’t drive is such a strange thing they have to ensure we actually exist.

Never mind that the next available appointment here in Los Angeles is mid-November.

Yes, November.

Then, and only then, according to the DMV’s website, you can expect a replacement ID to arrive in your hot little hands “just” three to four weeks later.

Which means it will be just a couple weeks before Christmas before I’ll once again have a little piece of plastic to tell anyone who the hell I am if I should get hit by a bus.

All because my wallet fell out of my pocket while riding one.

Yet when my wife realized she’d somehow become separated from her driver’s license when the paramedics took her to the hospital recently, she received a replacement little more than a week later.

So not only should drivers use this week without driving to walk in our shoes, officials in this state should try giving up their licenses to see how the DMV treats anyone crazy enough to live without a car in car-centric California.

Go on. I double-dog dare ’em.

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Streets Are For Everyone is urging, well, everyone to email or call California Governor Gavin Newsom to demand — okay, politely ask in a very firm manner — that he sign SB 720, the Safer Streets Program.

The bill is intended to modernize and simplify the regulations for red light cameras in California, to overcome the problems that have prevented their installation and, in too many cases, led to their removal.

And yes, I’m looking at you, Los Angeles.

This is how SAFE describes the problem, taken from a summary of their report.

California’s roads tell a grim story. SAFE reviewed the data. Since 2013, severe injuries and fatalities tied to intersection violations have surged 96.1%. In 2023 alone, red-light violations were linked to 195 deaths and more than 1,200 severe injuries. And these aren’t just drivers—the victims include cyclists and pedestrians, who made up nearly one in five of those killed or seriously injured.

Even seasoned drivers admit they hesitate after a light turns green, waiting to see if someone will barrel through the intersection. That hesitation isn’t paranoia—it’s survival.

Never mind the economic costs.

The human toll is incalculable, but the economic cost is staggering. Using the CDC’s WISQARS Cost of Injury calculator, SAFE estimated the financial burden of intersection crashes between 2021 and 2023:

  • $985 million in costs from severe injuries, nearly a third of it from medical expenses.
  • $6.96 billion in costs from fatalities.

Altogether, more than $7.9 billion was drained from California in just three years. That’s money that could have gone into schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and community programs—but instead was lost to preventable crashes.

SB 720 is designed to address the problem by improving red light enforcement.

There is a better way. Senate Bill 720—the Safer Streets Program—offers a critical chance to modernize California’s red-light enforcement. Modeled after the state’s successful speed safety camera bill (AB 645), SB 720 would:

  • Eliminate facial photography, capturing only license plates.
  • Treat violations like parking tickets, keeping enforcement simple and privacy intact.
  • Require revenue from citations to be reinvested into safety improvements—not city general funds.
  • Reduce the cost of citations to a flat $100 for the first citation and increase fines for those who repeatedly run red lights in proportion to the number of violations.

This approach has already proven effective in other states. Red light camera programs across major U.S. cities have reduced fatal crashes by 21% and saved an estimated 1,300 lives in a single year. When programs are dismantled, crashes and fatalities climb again.

It’s already passed both houses of the legislature, and is just waiting for Newsom’s signature, which is anything but a sure thing.

And that’s where you come in.

Once again, here’s how SAFE sums it up.

The data is clear. The solutions exist. And yet, lives continue to be lost every day California delays reform. SB 720 is now in the Governor’s hands, representing a chance to save lives and reclaim billions of dollars for our communities.

The question is not whether red-light running is preventable—it is. The question is whether California will finally choose to act.

Because every number in these statistics is more than a data point, it’s a life, a family, and a future stolen. And the cost of inaction is simply too high.

You’ll find a sample letter here, along with links to email, tweet or call.

I’m also told that anyone who gets at least ten people to sign will get a super cute photo of this super cute corgi.

And if that doesn’t seal the deal, I don’t know what will.

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A 16-year old boy died in an Orange County hospital on Friday, three days after he was injured in a Newport Beach ebike crash last Tuesday.

Although he was reportedly riding an electric motorcycle, rather than a ped-assist bicycle.

Which does not make it any less tragic.

The crash occurred about 5:55 pm September 23rd, near Superior Ave and Nice Lane. There’s no word on whether this was a solo crash, or if there was a driver involved.

Anyone with any information is urged to call the Newport Beach Police Department at 949/644-3747 or email alaverty@nbpd.org.

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

A London law firm has claims pending from a dozen clients who say they were injured by faulty Lime Bikes; meanwhile, a London columnist says “Good,” because maybe it will reduce the number of dangerous bicyclists. Yeah, that’s worked really well to get dangerous drivers off the road, hasn’t it.

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

A Secaucus, New York Uber Eats deliverista faces charges for fleeing from police following a dispute with a customer, then whacking a cop over the head with a bike lock and vase trying to get away.

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Local 

No news is good news, right?

 

State

Calbike calls for codifying language for self-driving cars to include a high standard for safety around bicycles and other vulnerable road users.

Berkeley has reimagined three interconnecting streets in the neighborhood below the UC campus to improve safety for bike riders, walkers and transit users through the use of bus boarding islands, concrete curbs and parking protected bike lanes.

San Francisco Streetsblog’s Roger Rudick says let’s all thank Oakland for building a bike cut-through they previously said was impossible.

It was a bad weekend in Northern California, where a 63-year old man was killed when he was struck by two drivers while riding a bike in Oakland after reportedly failing to stop for a stop sign, a bike rider was struck by a driver, and possibly killed, in Stanislaus County, and someone apparently stole a Carmichael hit-and-run victim’s ebike while leaving him to die in the street rather than calling 911.

 

National

A surprising new study shows that road bicycling is actually more dangerous than mountain biking, especially for older riders. So, go out and shred to your heart’s content. But be careful biking to the corner market, let alone riding your next century.

A French pastry chef opened a popup patisserie in a Seattle bicycle store, in other words, a bake shop in a bike shop.

Indianapolis has set a new record for bicyclists hit and killed on the streets this year, just three-quarters into the year.

Bike counters showed an average of 486 cyclists per hour on New York’s Vanderbilt Ave when it was closed to car traffic, demonstrating a high demand for safe infrastructure, despite dithering from the city’s lame duck mayor.

The New York Times visits Brooklyn’s massive and still-growing Bike Flea Market; meanwhile, the New York borough is getting a “game-changing” Dutch-style bike hub.

Tragic news from New Jersey, where two kids were killed when a driver broadsided the ebike they were riding.

Dozens of people rode their bikes through Opelousas, Louisiana to raise awareness and support for families living with the devastating effects of sickle cell disease.

Forty-five-year old Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen is one of us, going for a casual Miami bike ride with her jiu-jitsu trainer boyfriend.

 

International

A British woman says once she hit 60, she rented out her apartment and set out on her bike with just a tent; seven years and 24,000 miles later, she has no plans to stop.

Spanish motorcyclist Aleix Espargaro is one of us, even if it means he’s out of this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix after crashing his bicycle.

A man rode his bike 1,250 miles from London to Prishtina, Kosovo to raise funds in honor of his father, after the older man died of pancreatic cancer. Which is the same damn disease that killed my mother 25 year ago.

A New Zealand woman known as the Helmet Lady has died, 31 years after her successful campaign to make bike helmets compulsory for all bicyclists in the country, following the bicycling crash that left her 12-year old son paralyzed from the neck down.

 

Competitive Cycling

Twenty-year old British cyclist Max Hereward is trying to raise the equivalent of  over $15,000 to join a European development team, saying he’s gone as far as he can in his home country. Which is a pretty good indictment of what’s wrong with the sport these days. 

 

Finally…

Nothing goes together like bespoke bikes and craft beer. Your next e-cargo bike could be solar powered.

And nothing like making ICE an internet laughing stock when they can’t catch a single taunting guy on a bike.

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

Oh, and fuck Putin. 

Get ready for Clean Air pontificating today, and written test waived for elderly California drivers – for better or worse

Just 89 days left until Los Angeles fails to meet its Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. 

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Happy California Clean Air Day.

That joyful day when all the elected officials and bureaucrats who blocked active street and transit projects and approved highway expansions will bend over backwards to tell us all just how important clean air is.

Then again, those of us who have been biking, walking and using transit have actually been doing something about it all along.

Today you can do something about it for free on virtually any SoCal transit system, Metro included.

And yes, bicycling and walking are still free. At least for now.

https://twitter.com/metrolosangeles/status/1840891052364087321

Meanwhile, it’s also National Week Without Driving, and SoCal Transit Week.

And Metro Bike will wrap things up with a Clean Air Day Joy Ride through DTLA on Saturday, which isn’t Clean Air Day.

But close enough, I guess.

Top image from Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.

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Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez celebrates that California drivers over 70 will no longer have to deal with “irritating technical glitches, confusing options and maddeningly irrelevant test questions” by having to take a written test to renew their driver’s licenses.

I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

It’s not like traffic laws have changed in the 50 or 60 years since they first started to drive.

Or last year, even.

I understand the inconvenience, and the fear of losing the driver’s license someone has depended on for so many years in our car-dependent society.

But I also understand the risk posed by people who don’t have a working knowledge of current traffic laws. Like understanding that bike riders are allowed to take the lane on most right lanes in the state, for instance.

Or that some older people shouldn’t be driving at all anymore.

Myself, included.

Meanwhile, in a totally unrelated story, a British woman has become the oldest person convicted of causing death by dangerous driving in that country, at the tender age of 96.

Because we all know drivers, like fine wine, just get better as they age.

Right?

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A new Calbike report is calling out Caltrans for its repeated failure to build Complete Streets, in violation of their own policies.

Here’s what the organization says about the report, titled Incomplete Streets: Aligning Policy with Practice at Caltrans.

The report details where Caltrans has succeeded in adding elements for people biking, walking, and taking transit when it repairs state roadways that serve as local streets. But the findings also detail, for the first time, evidence of where Caltrans falls short, using data to show pattern and practice at the agency and case studies to illustrate how district staffers downgrade and leave out infrastructure people biking and walking on Caltrans projects.

It should make for a good light read for these long autumn nights.

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Streetsblog’s Joe Linton takes an up-close look at the new modular curbs on the Main Street protected bike lane in DTLA, expressing hope they can quickly be expanded throughout the city.

Close-up photo of the modular curbs on Main Street at Spring by Streetsblog’s Joe Linton

While they aren’t bulky enough to keep all drivers out of the bike lane, as Linton notes, they could be enough to discourage more people from parking and driving in them.

And they beat the hell out of the usual plastic car-tickler bendy-posts LADOT seems so enamored with.

Let’s hope they try them out on other bike lanes, as well.

Because they could prove to be a fast and relatively inexpensive solution to LA’s painful lack of curb-protected lanes, in a city that doesn’t seem to know the meaning of quick-build.

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This is who we share the road with.

A Greenfield, California man will spend the next 30 years to life behind bars for intentionally killing a random pedestrian, after leading police on a chase through Monterey County in a stolen car.

Twenty-seven-year old Paulo Cesar Alcaraz Ortiz tried and failed to run down several other people on the street, in the mistaken belief that it would cause the police to stop chasing him.

That is, until he successfully ran down and ran over Guadalupe Garcia with the hot car on his second attempt, after chasing Garcia through a field.

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A New York photographer captures what Streetsblog calls “the unexpected beauty of the Williamsburg Bridge’s less-than-perfect design.

I just call it a damn good shot.

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It’s now 287 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.

No bias here. A transportation policy analyst from the libertarian Reason Foundation calls out the failure of Complete Streets in California and Vision Zero Los Angeles, years after their passage, while failing to note that neither one has been adequately funded or implemented — as evidenced by a new law requiring Caltrans to implement their own damn Complete Streets policy.

Bedford, England has banned bicyclists from riding through the city centre, uh, center, in response to bike riders “flying through” and endangering pedestrians — but they’re also fining people for getting off and walking their bikes.

Two British men have been sentenced to a well-deserved 14-and-a-half years each after police arrested them for deliberately running down a pedestrian — and discovered video on one’s phone showing them intentionally running down someone on a bicycle days earlier.

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Local  

Streetsblog visits the new bike lanes on hilly Avenue 51 and Townsend Ave in Eagle Rock and Highland Park, calling them a “worthwhile modest step toward safer, more multimodal streets.” Although they only have sharrows on the downhill side. 

Call it a win for the Department of DIY, as Los Angeles makes the guerrilla crosswalks at Council and Westmoreland in Koreatown permanent, a year after they were surreptitiously striped by Crosswalks LA.

West Hollywood is hosting a mobility expo in Plummer Park this Saturday.

Um, okay. An Indian American entrepreneur, as opposed to an American Indian entrepreneur, has launched the “revolutionary” CaliBike ebike brand in Corona, bizarrely positioning it as the perfect last-mile complement to the coming Brightline West high speed rail line between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga. Because it’s just too revolutionary for regular trains, I guess.

 

State

Don’t plan on driving — or riding — all the way on California’s iconic coastline Highway 1 until next year at the earliest.

Orange County will invest $55 million in improved street lighting to improve safety for pedestrians and bicyclists.

The California State Universities Board of Trustees has signed off on a proposal for a new bridge on Fenton Ave over the San Diego River, providing car, bike and pedestrian access to Snapdragon Stadium in Mission Valley.

A Fresno man in his ’60s was hospitalized with major injuries when he was hit by a car, which apparently didn’t have a driver, after “riding his bike into traffic.” Which could mean almost anything, or absolutely nothing. 

Sacramento safety advocates are calling for armadillo traffic dividers to be installed in intersections to stop automotive sideshows.

 

National

Streetsblog says maybe it’s time to stop calling bike lanes “bike lanes,” arguing that a rebrand is in order since they “can slow dangerous car traffic, give walkers more space to move, and save lives across all modes by getting would-be drivers into the saddle instead.”

Bicycling looks forward to sales on some of their favorite bike products ahead of next week’s Amazon Prime Days. Which probably isn’t paywalled because they likely get a piece of any clickthrough sales, but you can read it on AOL, anyway. 

The NTSB finally got around to issuing its report on the Goodyear, Arizona mass casualty crash that killed two bicyclists and injured 14 others, blaming driver Pedro Quintana-Lujan’s “diminished state of alertness, likely due to fatigue;” he faces just 11 misdemeanor charges, despite having a “small amount” of THC in his system at the time of the crash.

Bighearted staffers at a Sioux Falls, South Dakota coffeeshop pitched in to give a new ebike to dishwasher at the restaurant, after the bicycle he rode to and from work every day broke down — again.

They get it. Chicago Streetsblog tells a local website that merchants claiming a new bike lane could put them out of business is not a legitimate news story worthy of investigation, any more  than the news item “Merchants say Bigfoot exists.”

Next City asks if low-cost, self-charging ebike libraries can bring newfound mobility to low-income communities in Massachusetts.

Rochester, New York’s Larry the Bike Man donated hundreds of refurbished bicycles to local kids, as the local paper says “everyday heroes don’t always wear capes.” Indeed.

The New York Times wraps up their short-lived Street Wars newsletter by noting the constant state of change on the city’s streets, observing that new battles over traffic and radical solutions mean they won’t always be like this, for better or worse.

Talk about bad luck. A North Carolina bike shop owner got hammered by Hurricane Helene, 19 years after she was chased out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

 

International

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan has installed green bike boxes at an intersection where a killed in a right hook by the driver of a cement truck last year. Proving once again that commonsense safety improvements usually only come after it’s too late. 

Scottish bicyclists have proclaimed a local zig-zagging bike lane the world’s worst. We should invite them to ride with us here in SoCal sometime.

A columnist for The Guardian considers the lesson’s learned falling off a Lime Bike on the streets of London, conceding her initial impression was correct, that “they are a young hoodlum’s game, not an old hoodlum’s game.”

Men’s Health talks with Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa, founder of London’s Black Unity Bike Ride, who says people “hear and feel our joy coming through” before they even see them. Which pretty much sums up what bicycling is all about. 

Another UK bicycle company has gone belly-up, after the major distributor behind the Orro Bikes brand filed the equivalent of bankruptcy, and sent workers home without last month’s pay.

 

Competitive Cycling

No one seems to have seen the crash that killed 18-year-old Swiss cyclist Muriel Furrer during the junior women’s road world championships last week, and no cameras captured her riding off the rain-slicked roadway; in fact, her body wasn’t found for over an hour after she crashed, once people finally realized she never crossed the finish line.

The greatest cyclist of all time says Tadej Pogačar is the real goat, arguing that Pogačar has now topped anything Eddy Merckx did himself.

 

Finally…

Your Everesting record is now obsolete. We may have to deal with aggressive LA drivers, but at least we don’t have to worry about rampaging escaped rhinos — even if the victim was on a motorcycle, but still.

And the late, great Kris Kristofferson was one of us, too.

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

Oh, and fuck Putin