Happy World Bicycle Day!
Or as it’s known in Los Angeles, Wednesday.
It’s also the day after Election Day. And if past is prologue, it could be a week or more before we know who actually won and lost, despite last night’s breathless news reports.
So take a breath, go for a bike ride, and pretend the past several weeks never happened for a few hours.
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Blake Ackerman’s ghost bike is back.
The memorial to Ackerman, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver while riding home from work at a downtown law firm last July, bizarrely disappeared without a trace from its location at Fountain and Gardner over the weekend.
However, WeHo Times reports it was returned after being discovered inside the garage of a nearby building, with no explanation of how it got there.
It’s possible that it was removed by someone who wanted to get rid of it. But it’s equally possible that it was taken in a misguided attempt to protect it, or by someone who didn’t understand its significance.
Meanwhile, 73-year old Douglas Morton Adams is still awaiting trial for fleeing the scene after killing Ackerman. He faces a maximum of just four years behind bars under California’s lenient hit-and-run laws
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Long Beach is number two.
As opposed to Los Angeles, which only feels like it these days.
According to a new study from Holland Bikes, the beachfront city is the tenth most bike-friendly city in the US, and the second in California, behind only San Francisco.
The City by the Bay also ranked number one nationally, followed by Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington DC, New York City, Portland, Denver, Philadelphia, Boston and Long Beach.
As nice as the recognition is, however, and deserved though it may be, it’s important to remember that we see rankings like this at least every other month, and they all come up with different results.
So take it with a grain of salt.
Or maybe a bag, since decidedly bike-unfriendly Los Angeles is ranked as a country’s 22nd most bike friendly city, just four notches behind San Diego; Bakersfield just barely made the list at number 50.
Meanwhile, my platinum-level bike-friendly Colorado hometown is nowhere to be seen, along with a number of other notably bike-friendly cities, like Boulder, Colorado and Davis, California.
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According to LA Weekly, what we have in Los Angeles isn’t a lack of safe bicycling infrastructure, but a lack of bicycling education, as more people continue to ride after the Covid bike boom.
Still, Andrea Aponte of CycleSafeLA believes the city has not fully caught up to this shift.
A League of American Bicyclists-certified cycling instructor, Aponte has spent more than a decade teaching riders how to safely navigate city streets. According to her, LA has embraced the conversation around bike infrastructure while overlooking the equally critical need for public education.
She points to Los Angeles’s Vision Zero initiative, launched in 2015 with a goal of eliminating traffic fatalities. Yet, she cites recent city data that shows roadway deaths continue to rise. With that context in mind, Aponte believes the conversation has become too heavily centered on physical infrastructure without enough attention placed on the human element of transportation safety.
She’s got a point.
Not that we shouldn’t focus on safer streets, but that we should also focus on surviving the streets we have. And too many people riding bikes today have no real concept of how to do that, simply because no one has taught them.
Although it can’t stop there.
Because every day, I read about experienced, if not expert, bicyclists who became the victims of people who apparently didn’t know how to share the road with them.
Or, perhaps, care.
Aponte also believes the responsibility for coexistence cannot rest entirely on cyclists themselves. “We need to start teaching drivers those same things,” she explains. “Sharing the road with micromobility users should be a much bigger part of driver education.” At the same time, she notes that pedestrians, wheelchair users, scooter riders, and anyone outside a vehicle occupy a vulnerable position within LA traffic systems. Keeping that in mind, Aponte argues that a safer transportation culture depends on recognizing those road users as active participants instead of hindrances.
“We are traffic, in fact, an active part of the traffic. A delay for a driver is an annoyance that can be simply fixed with a lane change, but for the cyclist, that can be a matter of survival,” she states, noting that this perspective often gets lost in public discourse surrounding cyclists. She believes misconceptions around riders tend to shape hostile attitudes on the road.
Aponte explains, “People think cyclists don’t belong there, but we absolutely do, based on the vehicle code. Many of us own cars too, we’re paying our taxes, we’re still contributing to the system, and we have our rights in it.”
It’s relatively easy to educate beginning drivers, since they’re required to take a test on their knowledge of traffic laws.
The problem is educating the great mass of motorists who took their tests long ago, and promptly forgot much of what they learned. And many whom learned the rules of the road when bikes were expected to stick to the gutter, if not the sidewalk.
The greater problem is how to educate bike riders, whose only barrier to using the streets is having a bike, and knowing how to pedal it without falling off.
We assume they know the rules of the road because they also learned to drive. Except roughly a third of Angelenos don’t drive, for whatever reason. And those that do may fall into the same problem we just discussed above.
I don’t have an easy answer to the problem. Or even a hard one, for that matter.
We’ve relied on educating bicyclists, in place of building safe bike infrastructure, since Forester wrote Effective Cycling back in the ’70s. And even before that, for those of us who remember the simplistic children’s bike safety books of the ’50s and ’60s.
All that got us was a small core of highly educated cyclists, and an ever-rising casualty rate.
Paris has shown us what can be done, virtually overnight, to turn a city from a series of traffic-choked car sewers to a bikeable, walkable 15-minute city.
But unless and until that happens here — which seems highly unlikely in the current environment — we’ve got to find another answer.
Because our lives literally depend on it.
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The next time someone insists roads were built for cars, point them to this piece from the History Channel.
The site explains that America’s first highways were built by The Good Roads Movement, a group of wealthy bicyclists on Penny-Farthings who were tired of riding in the mud.
And points back to our old friend Carlton Reid, who reminds us that the freedom promised by car ads was originally delivered by bicycles long before cars existed.
The first vehicle to deliver that sense of freedom was the bicycle, says Carlton Reid, a cycling journalist and historian whose book Roads Were Not Built for Cars traces the overlooked origins of America’s highway system. Before cars, before timetables-be-damned road trips, the bicycle was the first machine that let ordinary people go where they wanted, when they wanted, under their own power. No rail schedule, no horse to feed. Just themselves and the road. The winged logo of the League of American Wheelmen, the cycling organization that helped reshape American infrastructure in the 19th century, wasn’t decorative. It meant exactly what it looked like: flight.
When automobiles eventually promised this same unencumbered movement, much of the infrastructure they required already existed. Between 1880 and 1900, the Good Roads Movement, led by an unlikely coalition of urban cyclists and rural postal workers, overhauled the country’s abysmal dirt paths into a coordinated network of paved streets. By the time motorists claimed the movement as their own, cyclists had already established the Office of Road Inquiry and laid important legislative groundwork for the National Highway System we use today.
But as Reid notes, those highways carried the seeds of their own gridlock: “Cars are only useful when there’s a few of them. When there are millions and millions of them, their utility shrinks.” The open road, it turns out, was never meant for everyone.
Yet somehow, all those drivers never wrote to thank us for the roads they use every day.
Although as anyone who has ever ridden their bike past a long line of cars can tell you, that sense of freedom still exists. But only for those of us on two wheels.
No wonder they hate us.
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
Toronto police are claiming a man rode his bicycle through a stop sign at a high rate of speed and shouted a profanity at officers before they tackled him to the ground, after twice shouting at him to stop; however, a bike lawyer says it reflects excessive force and a deeper anti-cyclist bias.
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Local
The Venice Neighborhood Council’s Parking, Transportation & Infrastructure Committee heard options for improving safety on the west end of Washington Blvd, including survey results calling for protected bike lanes.
State
Over 150 bicyclists turned out to remember a 7th grade Grass Valley, California student who died weeks after he was struck by a driver last month, and to call for drivers to watch for bikes.
National
Cycling Weekly offers more information about the America Bikes Act, a bipartisan effort to expand bicycling in the US, while improving safety and re-shoring bicycle manufacturing. Although its chances in the current political climate compare somewhat unfavorably to a snowball in hell.
A 66-year old ultra-endurance cyclist is attempting to become the first person to ride the entire 2,448-mile length of US Route 66 without stopping; Joe Barr left from Santa Monica Tuesday morning in his attempt to set a new Guinness World Record.
Hats off to an 11-year old Washington State girl, who built a bicycle repair station on a local bike path for her Girl Scout service project.
A man in Kent, Washington got his purloined pooch back when an enterprising cop tracked down the man’s stolen adult tricycle, complete with dognapped dog ensconced in a carrier on the back.
Colorado opened a new $1 million bike park between the towns of frostbitten Fraser, which is often the coldest spot in the continental US, and the Winter Park ski area, where I learned to ski, badly.
Ebikes of all kinds are even invading Iowa.
Three men from Argentina completed their 10,500-mile bicycle trip through a 17 countries by arriving in Kansas City to see their home country represented in the World Cup.
Thirty-nine bicyclists from the University of Texas are two weeks into a 4,000-mile ride from Texas to Alaska to raise funds for cancer research; one of the two teams has made it to Mesquite, Nevada.
Sad news from Indiana, where a 68-year old retired pastor was killed by a driver while riding his bike last month.
Kim Kardashian and F1 star Lewis Hamilton are officially a thing, outing their relationship while riding bikes together in New York.
Tiny Punta Gorda, Florida represents a bike-friendly dot in the country’s deadliest state for people on bicycles.
International
If you were riding your bike in Cambridgeshire, England on January 24th with your butt crack showing, police want to talk with you about a murder.
Your money at work. A London borough is promising to move a digital ad screen from the middle of a bike lane, after admitting the city built the bike lane around the digital sign, which has been at that location for four years.
London’s edition of the World Naked Bike Ride expects to draw more than 1,000 nude and partially dressed riders to the city’s streets to promote bicycling safety, environmental awareness and body positivity. And yes, as an American, I reject the yoke of oppression represented by the Oxford comma.
Forget Kenny, they killed Santa Claus. A 77-year old British bicycling instructor, known for portraying Father Christmas for local kids, was killed by a driver while on 24-hour, 240-mile fundraising ride in support of Motor Neuron Disease.
A Malaysian man continues to ride his bike, despite losing the use of his right hand in a motorcycle crash a dozen years ago.
Competitive Cycling
Your favorite cycling team could look a lot different next year, and some pros could end up on the outside looking for a team to ride with, in pro cycling’s annual game of contract musical chairs.
Finally…
Evidently, if you carry a surfboard on an ebike, you’re one of “the kookiest people on earth.” Wind tunnel tests prove tying long hair into a bun is more aerodynamic than a ponytail.
And a pub can somehow survive two world wars, a flood and a pair of pandemics, but can’t make it with a new bike path.
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Be safe, and stay healthy. And get vaccinated, already.
Oh, and fuck Putin.
