Bikeside LA

Best Saturday ever – ArtCycle at Madison & Santa Monica Bl, from 2pm till 10pm.

It’s always good to know what you’re up against.  This article in the LA Times Comments Blog, was an eye opener.  It summarizes comments on an article on the Backbone Bikeway Network.  The best?  Julie writes:
I am begging you – NO!!!!!! let bicyclists ride on paseos and around neighborhoods. Bikes are NOT viable [...]

“The car behind me was trying to make the light and accelerated, hitting me and running over my bike as I flew through the air.” – Brandon Chau. To stop LA’s epidemic of hit and runs, Bikeside visited Beverly Hills City Council to confront “the safest city in America.”

On Monday, Feb 22nd, KPCC ran it’s second round of bike discussions on the Pat Morrison show (the entire show is up now if you want to listen in). Due to more technical troubles, I was not able to get my thoughts in, and I feel like I need to put them out there. [...]

LAPD Sergeant David Krumer and Commander David Doan sorted through massive collision data for 2008, and found that in 2008, 23% of bike involved traffic collisions are Hit & Run – 3% were misdemeanor and 20% were felony.  This was just one statistic of many in a report on bike collisions in LA in 2008.  [...]

Jeremy Grant, one of the members of the Bike Working Group Steering Committee, just released the Valley Area map for the Backbone Network. I highly recommend going over there and reading his post, because he gives some good visuals of how we put the network together, and has some interesting comments on it.  Also, because [...]

There will be some new guest bloggers around the place in the coming weeks, but if some writer comes in and says “I this, I that” without stating who they are, you probably know it’s me, Alex.  For instance, they might say “I’m running for Community Director of Mar Vista Community Council.”

Bill Rosendahl and Paul Koretz sponsored a motion to spend $30 million dollars on 2 miles of bike path (report by the Chief Legislative Analyst – pdf), extending the beach bike path further north.  That’s FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS per mile.
Resolution (Rosendahl – Koretz) to include in the City’s 2009-2010 Federal Legislative Program SPONSORSHIP and/or SUPPORT [...]

If you open the draft of the proposed Bike Plan, and you flip to the maps, you’ll find a sixteen pages of confusing mess: dashed lines, dotted lines, infeasible lines, and tiny street names.  By contrast, when the Bike Working Group publishes its Best Bike Plan (a community effort to produce a ambitious bike plan [...]

[UPDATE: Sharon McNary apologized to Enci in the comments over at IlluminateLA]
There’s good publicity and there’s bad publicity.  For cycling in LA, it used to be that any publicity was good publicity, because we were so desperate for attention.  I think however, we’ve reached a point where we would benefit from a little less bad [...]