Everyone agrees – the draft bike plan needs fixing!

The cycling community is unified on the draft bike plan – send it back, and we must be at the table for the next round.  The universal sentiment is: this draft has big problems that we ought to fix – give us our opportunity to fix it.

This morning LACBC blogged that the draft needs work, and Joe Linton simultaneously made his stance known on LA Streetsblog.  They join Bikeside, Stephen Box, Damien Newton, and Josef Bray-Ali, among others, in publicly voicing their unhappiness with the draft.

We’ve got to keep voicing our opinions on this draft, and the best opportunity to do that is tomorrow – Thursday, Nov 4th, at City Hall (City Council Chambers), at 8:30 am in the Planning Commission hearing. It’s item 10 on the agenda, so you can play the “come a bit late” game, but I wouldn’t chance it too much.  However, it is possible the item will come up significantly after 9:30.

The question is, will the Planning Commission hear the message – that this bike plan doesn’t cut it – and take the unified cycling community’s advice?  We can get a good plan out there, relatively painlessly, but it requires some fortitude on Planning’s part.

Each new voice has brought a simple, clear and direct revision to the table, so let’s review some of them:

Josef Bray-Ali – simple tweaks for good policy:

Trolling the plan, Josef Bray-Ali has come up with some small tweaks that are game changers.  He points out that allowing developers to swap out of parking for bike parking can be a win-win.  Development costs are reduced and street space becomes available, and most importantly, cyclist have something better than a dying sapling to lock to.

He also points out that while the plan gives limited voice to discussing data collection, it does not commit or even discuss the frequency for reporting this data.  We can have all the data in the world, but if it’s collecting dust in Michelle Mowery’s filing cabinet, it won’t do us any good.

Joe Linton – how we got here, and poison pills:

In his Streetsblog post, Joe runs the plan through a historical lens.  How did we get here?  How, after spending $450,000 hiring one of the best consultants money can buy, and nearly 3 years of work, did we end up with a bike plan that is universally considered unacceptable?

In 2009, the city spends about half a year dismantling their consultants’ recommendations, and then publishes their initial bike plan draft to near-universal dismay. The plan introduces a new category of “speculative” bike lanes (about 400 miles) - initially labelled “infeasible” later called “potential” later called ”further study.”

This kind of semantic manipulation ends up with the bike plan being littered with poison pills which deflate the bike plan’s stated goals.  The fixes that Rach, Joe and I developed hit on a few of these:

A worthwhile bike plan will commit the city to making L.A.’s streets safer for bicycling.  The current (1996) approved plan in effect today designates 190 additional future miles of bike lane. The 2010 draft commits to ~56 miles of additional future bike lanes.

…

3.1.1 The bike plan should include more bike lane mileage than the current plan already in effect.

3.1.2 The bike plan should commit to robust bike-friendly street treatments. While it’s not feasible to detail every location, the plan should at least target implementation beyond the minimum. As currently specified in the draft, all the bike-friendly street facilities could be considered complete if the city installs a couple hundred signs.

….

3.1.3 All technical standards should support bike facility implementation. Minimum car-lane width should preferably be 9 feet, and certainly not worse than today’s 10-foot standard.

The gist of this is that firstly, the any adopted bike plan must be honest about the commitment the plan makes to facilities.  The poison pills are deceptive in that they leave people thinking they have been promised something, when in the hundreds of pages of fine print it is made clear that they are not.

The second point is that those honest commitments to facilities must be substantial.  Otherwise we can kiss our future as a city goodbye – we’ll just remain mired in an antiquated and soul sucking way of doing things, and personally, if we don’t get out of that mode, I’m outta here.

LACBC – a real commitment to Bike Boulevards:

From the outset of the bike plan update process, city employees have sought to include bike boulevard language, but under the euphemism “Bicycle Friendly Streets” (abbreviated BFS.)  The euphemism is a problem, and I promise it will be more of one down the line.

LACBC identifies a greater problem (as just one recommendation of three.)  In the current plan, signage and sharrows, or even lesser pavement markings, can be enough to designate a street as BFS.  That’s barely an upgrade from the much reviled bike route standard.  LACBC specifies a simple solution:

As was mentioned in our previous post, Planning did incorporate some changes but did not do enough to distinguish a Bicycle Friendly Street from a bike route. We are asking that Planning stipulate that every Bicycle Friendly Street will incorporate signage, on-street pavement markings, and traffic calming features; a minimum of 3 treatments. For a Bicyle Friendly street to actually prioritize bicycle travel it must always incorporate traffic calming features in addition to signage and on-street markings, thus differentiating it from a bike route.

Stephen Box – Planning for Incomplete Streets:

Stephen sussed out an important detail from the staff report on the bike plan.  On January 1st AB 1358, the Complete Streets Act of California, goes into effect. The act requires that any major revision to City’s General Plan which affects roadways will plan for all modes.  This is a big deal for cyclists because it means that in the future the City’s General Plan will have to plan for us, and pedestrians, and transit users – not just motorists.

But the staff report (pdf, pg 18) asserts that the draft bike plan doesn’t have to comply with Complete Streets:

… the development of the 2010 Bicycle Plan, as a single chapter, does not represent a substantial revision of the Transportation Element …

In other words, from city staff’s perspective, the bike plan is not a significant aspect of the Transportation Element, and therefore changing it is not a significant revision to the General Plan.  That means they don’t think it must comply with Complete Streets.

You gotta ask, why, in a draft BIKE PLAN, are we planning for Incomplete Streets?  Stephen:

It’s only in the small print of the staff report that City Planning reveals its claim of an exemption from the Complete Streets Act. Is there something wrong with the Complete Streets Act? Does City Planning find fault with the complete Streets Act?

Complete Streets should be at the center of any adopted bike plan.

Damien Newton – Improvement does not denote success:

I’m a pretty strong cyclist, but I could get 10% faster and I still wouldn’t be world class.  In the same fashion, even if this draft is better than the currently adopted bike plan, and I don’t agree that it is, improvement is not synonymous with success.  The current bike plan is so deficient, and the draft bike plan presented last September was so bad, that you can start from either, improve them substantially, and still have a plan that doesn’t cut it.  Damien:

True, the most recent draft of the plan is a huge improvement from earlier drafts.  However, earlier drafts were so bad that pretty much anything would have been an improvement.  Whether the current draft is better than the Plan of Unfulfilled Promise (aka the 1996 Bike Plan) isn’t even clear.  What is clear is that the Draft Bike Plan, even if fully implemented, isn’t going to make Los Angeles a world class city for bicycling.

As Damien said, if we just want to muddle through and see painfully slow incremental improvements, this plan might work.  But if we aspire to be a cycling city, to be a world class city – which entails world class transportation – then this ain’t the plan.

Bikeside – Include the Backbone Bikeway Network:

The Backbone Bikeway Network was developed by the cycling community, in community meetings.  It wasn’t a “take input, disregard the input in the drafting” process, which is the paradigm the city chooses to operate under.  We actually picked the Backbone streets using three colors of highlighter and a big huge black magic marker.  The other aspects of the Backbone network evolved as community members selected them over time.  The Backbone has a mandate, and it’s an approach with transformative power, in that it positions cyclists as leaders in reclaiming our boulevards for street life – it’s not just about cycling.  As Stephen puts it, the interpretation of the Backbone by city staff was reductive:

Rather than embrace this theme and use it to connect the City Family in the delivery of City Services, Planning Staff dilutes the Backbone and fails to support cyclists as they commute on the streets to the same destinations as pedestrians, mass transit passengers, and motorists. Instead, it proposes bike tunnels, bike trails, and other last-resort solutions that divide communities rather than connect them.

The full Backbone concept, as an approach to connecting city departments, as a complete streets approach to rehabilitating our boulevards, as a holistic approach to improving street life, and as a commitment to work with other modes in the process – that’s what Bikeside would like included in the plan.  We’ve got the chapter half written, all we need is the opportunity to collaborate.

Big Picture:

This update process, twice now, has been produced a draft via the Design & Defend methodology.  The designers take input.  They then design the plan, in an intensive collaborative process between City Planning, DOT, and (perhaps) other departments.  During this design phase the cycling community is hardly contacted at all, and given no degree of control.  Bigger picture still, non-cyclists are not engaged as well.

Ultimately, this produces a draft that citizens, cycling and non-cycling, will not be happy with.  Being familiar with this process, city staff design the plan defensively.  There are big claims which provide cover for tepid commitments.  There are devilish details which take the wind out of the draft’s sails.

The ultimate result is politically engineered conflict.  Left out of the process, the only opportunity for citizens to weigh in effectively is left to commissions and committees.  Citizens can avoid criticism and be run over, or we can criticize, and risk being disqualified as negative.  Facing a draft that looks more like a fortress full of booby traps than an honest policy document, the engagement is necessarily acrimonious.

It’s time to move away from Design & Defend.  It’s time for cyclists, and bigger picture still, citizens, to be at the table at every stage of the process.  It’s time for that process to be wholly public.  Only in that way can we have an honest conversation about what we need for LA to be cycling friendly and citizen friendly.