Bikeside LA

Almost 6 months after the passage of LA’s 2010 Bike Plan (passed in 2011), City Planning will report to City Council on progress thus far.  Specifically, tomorrow, they will report to the Transportation Committee (and for some reason, DOT Bikeways will not report.) What Council will hear will be a lot of rah rah cheerleading [...]

Two months ago, the Bike Plan Implementation Team met at City Hall and walked away with an informal top ten list of cycling infrastructure projects.  Since then, Planning and DOT have refused to put their time and energy toward any proposals that are not on the list.  When advocates complain to the authorities, they are [...]

Bikeside went to the Bike Plan Implementation Team meeting on Tuesday.  Here’s what we learned and what we think: 7th Street lane:  the project from Catalina to Figueroa is in the outreach phase and city staff are meeting with community stakeholders before finalizing the design. 7th Street continued:  as part of the Wilshire Grand, the [...]

Los Angeles’ Department of City Planning is set to hold the monthly meeting of the Bike Plan Implementation Team (BPIT) a week from today.  That’s one week for us, the cycling public, to prepare our case for bike projects that will advance LA toward its destiny as premier city for cyclists.  Here at Bikeside, we’re [...]

Last Thursday, the Cyclist LAPD Task Force met once again (agenda, pdf) to discuss law enforcement and biking in Los Angeles. The Cyclist LAPD Task Force was created last January by Chief Beck and bike activists as a way to begin collaborating, after years of boisterous and acrimonious conflict. So far the Task Force has [...]

Every two years, Metro issues a Call for Projects to provide funding for local transportation improvements. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation applies for funding across a range of projects, one of which is Bikeways. This year, Bikeways applied for funding for two outreach programs and six infrastructure projects. Four of the six infrastructure projects [...]

My main gripe with the latest release of Los Angeles’ 2010 Bicycle Plan is that it uses the word “bicycle” and it refers to “bicyclists.” Nerdy!  Cycling cyclists, bikers biking and riders riding are so much more sexy than bicyclists bicycling . . . the plan sets back bikers’ sexual prospects decades. On the other [...]

Just like their bold subtitle states, Beverly Hills is in desperate need of actual bike planning.  Mark Elliott and the Better Bike BH folks have some striking visuals of what clearly needs improvement in their city.  Also, they dream of what is possible.

This is a shitty city.I’m sorry for not being able to come up with a more academic way of explaining it.  If you want nice clean historical reasons why Los Angeles is so sub-par for pretty much everyone but those living up in the hills, read a Mike Davis book.  If you live in a [...]

LA already has a Backbone . . . from 1977.  City Planner Claire Bowin discovered and scanned this map from the 1977 LA Bike Masterplan.  It’s a map of the planned bikeways from that plan, and it plans for two systems – a Backbone system and a broader (but one assumes, lower priority) Citywide system.  [...]