Letter to a Young USC Reporter Regarding the Bike Plan

This message was written in response to an email a young reporter-in-training sent to me from the USC Annenberg School of Journalism regarding the LA Bike Plan.

His question was as follows: "Do you see any positives in the proposed plan? If so, what are the advantages? Why does this plan and the procedures that have surrounded its revision caused anger to boil in your stomach? What action by what groups would like to see be taken after the public comment period ends? Are you planning to attend any of the bike plan workshops? Feel free to provide any other thoughts which you feel are important."

Here is my response:

Positives of the plan: Several employees at the City of L.A. and Alta Planning have been paid to work on the plan, increasing the flow of cash in our communities by .0000001%. The plan also contains the words "bike", "bicycle", and "bike lane".

The original city council motion authorizing the LADOT to prepare the bike plan (and contracting out Alta Planning's services), authorizing $450,000 for this purpose - the original council motion stated that the intent of this plan was to allow the city to apply for state Bicycle Transportation Account (or BTA) funds. The state sets aside $7.5 million annually for bike projects, state-wide. In the past, L.A. has gotten a small fraction of that. For fiscal years 2003-2004 to the present, the City of L.A. has been awarded $1.75 million from the state BTA - with the largest chunk set aside for a bridge widening on Fletcher Drive that will cost well more than the $1.25 million set aside for it. With this plan we've spent $500,000 to get a document that will let the same staff who have been unable to score big money from the State's BTA fund, averaging (over the past five fiscal years a dismal $250,000/year). It doesn't make any sense. The plan was pre-formed and presented to the bicycling public before taking in our input. The "outreach" meetings were Alta Planning people telling us what the plan would be before we had a chance to make our own recommendations.

The whole process left everyone adrift and thinking, "Wha?!"

In order to make cycling safer, and to increase the mode split of bicycles on the street, the city will necessarily have to remove access and mobility from private automobiles on LA's surface streets. There is simply no way around this. The cheapest way to implement cycling facilities is to take a car lane away - this is also the most effective as well as beneficial to local commercial districts and the overall air quality and livability of the city.

To take away car travel lanes requires an Environmental Impact Report. The bike plan, to truly be effective, needs to be put through this process (a $1 million to $2 million, two year process).

An example of how dysfunctional our city is regarding bicycles: we don't even get counted! The three measures the city plans for in the roadway (to give the street a rating) are all based on private automobile speed and throughput. These measures are "Level Of Service", "Average Daily Trips", Vehicle Miles Travelled" - and they don't really measure these in any case. The engineers at the DOT get away with "modelling" traffic, rarely spending the time to actually observe and measure it for more than 15 minutes at a time.

Another problem: there is a map of homicides, there is a map of assaults, but there is NO MAP OF TRAFFIC CRASHES AND FATALITIES. When people in this town talk about "safety" and bicycling, they literally have no facts to go on - only inane anecdotal evidence. A 2001 report, "Bicycling Collisions in Los Angeles", done by the LADOT's Michelle Mowery identified the city's most dangerous intersections for cyclists - a report which was filed in the dustbin of history. A report which was never replicated. How can we plan for bicycles (are anything, really) in our roadways, when we don't even know how safe they are? The data is collected by various agencies, but nobody compiles it - so all those deaths and injuries go unnoticed by our politicians and lay-people alike.

The LA Bike Plan makes no provisions to remedy this situation, and many others. Further, it has been taken apart by Joe Linton on LA Streetsblog for misleading maps and inaccurate bike lane lists. The document is as flawed as the process which led to it's creation.

I plan on attending an upcoming meeting scheduled in North East LA on November 4th at Ramona Hall. I've written a lot about this stuff, and the technical adjustments I think the plan ought to include. I've read through the City Budget and identified pots of money to request EIR funds from. I've learned that LA has 6 to 8 full-time bikeways staff people - more than in any city I've ever read or heard about, yet we get next to nothing out of these people.

I've read that LA's bike coordinator (a "citywide" position) is an underling to multiple underlings in the LADOT (aka The Car Dept), and not in a high level position in the mayor's office or the Planning Department (where other cities place their bicycle coordinator) - she lacks the de jure authority to make anyone in LA do anything.

Good luck with your article, and perhaps you should interview one of the firms that was hired to create USC's master plan (Fehr and Peers) and ask the Public Affairs/External Affairs team at USC how all their city hall connections and lobbying efforts have maintained such an unsafe environment for USC's many cyclists around the campus - with campus cops handing out ridiculous tickets for riding their bikes in the crosswalks while failing to provide safe cycling amenities and training for their student body.

Note to "Cheer Mom": Open You Mother&$%# Eyes

These days, I am a busy person. I don't have a lot of time to fart around when I'm always running late to my next appointment with my obligations and duties as a daddy and a bike shop owner guy.

I ride a regular route to and from my home and my shop. Sometimes I run down a quiet side street, Manitou - but mostly (when I have no baby in my cargo bike) I haul ass on Lincoln Heights' main commercial drag: North Broadway.

This Thursday, I had a special bundle of bike stuff in my bakfiets: four wicker baskets and a bike in a box (straddling the bakfiets). I do stuff like this all the time, it's not a big deal for me any more and my ride to "the office" coincides with light mid-day traffic of the unemployed, the lazy, the stay-at-home, or the government/service worker. It is a totally uneventful ride that allows the stresses of home life to be overtaken with the stresses of work life, sometimes with one set of stress overlapping the other when someone from either world calls me (or people from both worlds call me simultaneously on both of the phones I have now) during my commute.

Wednesday was rainy. Thursday was hot. I was pissed off, tired, and running late. A bike was straddling my cargo bike so I had to take the full lane on Broadway.

I was hauling ass, keeping up with the cars and trying to keep my cool when some jerk accelerated around me, cut back in front of me and then hit her brakes at the stop light in front of us. "Cheer Mom" her rear window says in it's lower right hand corner. Right, spreading cheer the whole world over. This type of thing happens all the time. People just can't stand to be behind a bicycle, even when you're both going the damn speed limit.

Two intersections down Broadway and we're both stopped at the light at Griffin Avenue. The right hand lane is painted red (for right turns and slow vehicles), and the downhill portion of my ride is officially over. I pull my bike into the right hand lane, alongside "CheerMom". I don't care about what she did earlier - it is a natural human instinct to overtake those you perceive to be "slower" than you. Whatever. This isn't Copenhagen. This isn't even the Westside. Strictly working class, and my bike is a big question mark to everyone who sees it regardless of social class, so I'm the one not fitting in. Cut me off, it's cool, we're in Hard Driving Car Landia. Whatever.

I ride this street every day, and I think I know what is coming next. Cheer Mom will feel a tension when she sees me at the right hand side of her window. She will be afraid I'm crazy, or that I was offended, or simply that I will pull in front of her again.

I just want her to do what 99% of dumbasses like her do, and zoom away as fast as they can so I can resume taking up an empty right hand lane (moving at a slower pace) to my turn two blocks down the road.

The light turns green. She gets off to a slow start. I put my pedals in motion. We cross the intersection side by side.

My mind starts to tingle, "What the f*&^ is this idiot doing now?"

As we near the gas station on the opposite corner her car shimmies. No brake lights. no turn signals - the goddamn car is moving in my direction.

SHIT! My bike, if it gets broken, is not replaceable. I can't go to the local bike shop (i.e. my own) and slap some generic, out-of-the-catalogue parts on it. This bike is a freaky Dutch-made cargo bike - it is my everything. I ride my baby in it. I shop with it. I cannot afford, quite frankly, for it to be out of service for a single day - I will go broke without it. This idiot is going to trash my livelihood and my salvation.

I immediately start applying the brakes, but I'm under load with baskets and a bike straddling my bike and about 60 lbs. of assorted baby crap, blankets, crumbs and toys. There isn't enough room with the bike box on top - I'm almost as wide as a car.

"Hey! Hey! HEY! HEY!! HEY!!! HEY!! HEY!!!!", I yelled.

Whump shhhhfffbbbmmmmm.

Bitch hit the bike I was carrying. I was able to steer my bike out of the way and onto the curb cut the gas station has been provided with. The bike I was carrying (boxed up, thank god) got knocked to the ground. It stamps it's corner with with grit and slides to a stop. I am able to lunge off to one side while keeping my bakfiets mostly upright.

"What the f$%& are you motherf&%*$ trying to f*&$#@* do you pinche pendeja?! Open your f***** eyes puta!"

The passenger rolls the window down and extends his middle finger, "Fuck you!"

Note to Cheer Mom: open you mother&$%# eyes.

--

Hat tip to Ted Rogers, Alex Thompson, Will Campbell, Gary Kavanaugh and others who've shared their ride reports and their reactions. Some day, my hard-riding brothas and sistas, these same jackasses who have spent fractions of their lives putting ours at risk will be toting their kids around in cargo bikes like mine and voting for politicians who bring home the bike lanes. Some day soon.

SoapBoxLA on Substandard Bike Parking at LAPD's New HQ

After Tuesday night's Los Angeles Bicycle Advisory Committee hearing, I got a tour of the substandard bicycle facilities at the new LAPD headquarters in Downtown LA.

You can read more about the LABAC meeting, quite a firecracker meeting, over on LA Streetsblog (thanks to Ted Rogers of Biking In LA!) in an article entitled, "Unanimous BAC Votes for More Time to Review Draft Bike Plan".

Using the LACBC's Data to Make the Case for Active Transportation

The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition is out counting cyclists, doing the work that our local government should be doing, and I'd like to offer up a suggestion as to how to use the data they collect.

The street in front of Flying Pigeon LA bike shop and the Bike Oven, North Figueroa Street, is classified as a "Major Highway". There are two classes of Major Highways in L.A., a "Primary" (or Class I) and a "Secondary" (or Class II).

A Class I Highway is "zoned" for 50,000 average daily car trips.

A Class II Highway is "zoned" for 30,000 to 50,000 average daily car trips.

North Figueroa Street handles a lot of automobile trips during a typical work day even though (or, rather, because) it runs parallel to the 110 Freeway (aka the Arroyo Parkway).

But does North Figueroa have 50,000, or even 30,000, average daily car trips? If N. Fig. is moving less cars than it is zoned for, then we have grounds to fight to remove excess road capacity from cars in order to move more people using other modes, like bicycling, taking the bus, and walking. Using the LACBC's data, we can show that we can move just as many, or more, people using a mix of cars, buses, bikes, and walking while also reducing noise, pollution, car speeds, and crashes - we will have a pretty solid case to take away a car lane from N. Fig. and to replace it with road space for those other modes.

If North Figueroa is pulling in its "zoned" amount of car trips (or more), we can use our data to ask, "Is this really the best way to move people in this area?". The cyclists using the roads make, relative to automobiles, no impact on our pavement. By riding a bike, they are making themselves less prone to long term diseases that plague our neighborhood. Further, they are more likely to spend their money locally at locally owned businesses - sending more sales tax dollars into LA's coffers. Finally, cyclists take up a fraction of the space of automobiles, making bicycles a more efficient use of the limited roadway space (more people can use the road and not be delayed by others doing the same if they ride bicycles). This type of argument (backed up with actual cycling data, and not "best guesses" from City staff) is what bowls over engineers and peovides talking points for the politicians and locals we must lobby to see bike friendly changes made.

Finally, the LACBC's data can be used to say "With no bicycle amenities we're moving X thousands of cars per day and X number of bicycles per day. Knowing what we do about the local benefits of more people cycling, let's try and alter the design of the roadway to increase its bicycle and transit capacity wile reducing it automobile capacity and measure the results."

As an addendum, here are a few other avenues to explore with data collection to make a legal and scientific case for more bicycle and transit capacity on LA's surface streets:

The LACBC would do itself a favor and contact Assemblyman Kevin de Leon's office (currently the chair of the Appropriations Committee in the CA State Assembly) and ask him to get the California Board of Equalization to provide the Bradley-Burns Sales Tax income (that the state collects, and the City gets a cut of), block by block, for the corridors that the LACBC is studying.

There is a fine literature on the negative effects of loud sound on human beings, I would suggest measuring the noise generated on the corridors being studied (next time around) and using that data to make the case for a road designed better for non-automobile based transportation.

The LACBC, in coordination with perhaps a university (Occidental Colleges' UEPI?), would also do itself a favor by surveying residents in their study areas to find out how in favor they are to various types of traffic calming. The City of LA's Planning Commission can force a private developer to pay for traffic calming measures, and can make an "Neighborhood Protection Plan" a condition of approving the developer's permits. An NPP and traffic calming is a pre-written format for a non-governmental agency to use in the City of LA to measure the effects of the City's policies as regard the right of way. Perhaps a call to the Planning Commission would unearth a template for the traffic calming criteria the city uses and a few versions of the types of surveys the City uses to judge the effectiveness of traffic calming.

There are more addenda I'd like to add, but I'll call it quits here. I'v got to get to the shop, drop a bike off at the Fedex shipping center using my bakfiets, and get the shop ready for a few days without me (I'm going to pinche Las Vegas for Interbike).

Unbaised Transportation Terminology

StreetsblogLA is running a story about a citizen-made improvement to a street running past the LA Eco-Village, "Eco-Village Reclaims Bimini Pl. with Street Party and Road Painting".

The story is more personally covered over on Homergrown Evolution in a blog post entitled "City Repair LA".

To keep the spirit of this improvement alive, I'll offer up this web-page, written by Michael Wright and Dom Nozzi for the City of West Palm Beach, Florida, "Sustainable, Unbiased Transportation Terminology" (hat tip to "How We Drive"):

"Much of the current transportation language was developed in the 1950's and 1960's. This was the golden age of automobiles and accommodating them was a major priority in society. Times have changed, especially in urban areas where creating a balanced, equitable, and sustainable transportation system is the new priority. The transportation language has not evolved at the same pace as the changing priorities; much of it still carries a pro-automobile bias. Continued use of biased language is not in keeping with the goal of addressing transportation issues in an objective way in the City."

What sort of biased language is no longer used in West Palm Beach (but still alive and well in even the LA Bike Plan)?:

"Biased --

The following street improvements are recommended.

The intersection improvement will cost $5,000.00.

The motor vehicle capacity will be improved.

Objective--

The following street modifications are recommended.

The right turn channel will cost $5,000,00.

The motor vehicle capacity will be changed."

So, even the word "improved" needs to be worked on here in L.A.! Let's hope that along with the streets, we're able to re-take our language as well.

An Angle Into the Mayor's Office

Getting livable streets built in L.A. will require some heavy lifting from our mayor, who has so far spent more time advertising how "green" his initiatives are than he has in doing some actual greening of the City of L.A.


The mayor's office has a lot of legal power to command the resources and staff of the city's various departments. Does the mayor sit at a control deck during the day, pushing buttons and sending missives through pneumatic tubes to his underlings in other departments? No. not quite. He's likely got a staff in charge of making sure his vague campaign promises are somehow met.


The Performance Management Unit, which is run by Greg Spotts, is in charge o executing the mayor's will.

So far, the mayor's sole focus in transportation has been to increase the speed of private automobile travel. His city measures speed, and his DOT has been working hard to make sure that the safety and convenience of cyclists, pedestrians, and transit users takes a back seat to a private motorists prerogative to blast through our neighborhoods.

Our point of entry with the mayor's office should be with his Performance Management Unit. The maor's current transportation plan belies a 20th century mindset about transportation, with a political burden to somehow support public transportation with massive earthworks like the subway to the sea (eta 30+ years). The reality is that in great cities around the world, budget neutral initiatives can vastly improve the quality of life, safety, air quality, and convenience of citizens by getting them out of cars and onto a bus, a bike or walking.

If anyone can save us, perhaps it is the facts-first crew in the PMU.

Greater Cypress Park Neighborhood Council Endorses Cyclists' Bill of Rights!

There would have been more to add to this if I'd remembered to take pictures, but the Great Cypress Park Neighborhood Council voted unanimously to endorse the Cyclists' Bill of Rights tonight, Tuesday, August 18, 2009! Yay!

I made a mistake (as you'll note in my earlier post), and I went to the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council meeting - a meeting which did not have Rourke Reagan, and a meeting with no mention of cycling or the Cyclists' Bill of Rigths on the agenda.

I was in a rush to get out the door in time for the 7 p.m. start, and I didn't catch my mistake until the Glassell Park meeting got under way. I dashed out to Glassell Park at full speed on my bakfiets, and I'd even convinced my wife to bring along our daughter for the evening.

What a surprise to see that I wasn't on the agenda when I could have sworn that I'd been emailed about it. Fortunately, an autistic man named Raymond got up to go to the bathroom and I asked him if there was another neighborhood council meeting tonight. Raymond is a neighborhood council nut - he is obsessed with attending and memorizing eery detail about the councils and their actions.

"Yes, the Greater Cypress Park Neighborhood Council is meeting right now! They have already started their meeting! Excuse me I have to go to the bathroom now," said Raymond, in his full voiced monotone. Great, I thought, I'm at the GPNC, when I needed to be at the GCPNC - both of which hold meetings that are only one mile apart on the same night at the same time.

So, we strapped baby into my bakfiets, I gave my wife a quick lift on the back of my bike to her car and off we dashed to the new state park in Cypress Park for the GCPNC (not he GPNC) meeting.

We arrived in time to catch the first two hours of the meeting before I got called up to speak. Mommy took baby to play in the park. By the way, the GCPNC has, perhaps, one of the best family-friendly meeting locations I have ever used. The community room at the park is located ... well ... it's got doors on both sides of the room that are sound proof, but your kid can literally play right alongside the building while you're inside complaining about DONE, the mayor, or a lousy neighbor. The food was awesome, and free, and the new park though totally over run with families is a blast and almost too much fun with all the wild boys and girls running around jumping and playing, parkour training older guys, basketball, soccer, baseball, bike riding, etc. etc. going on.

I gave a spiel, answered (poorly) some very pointed questions from the council, and in a few minutes time the GCPNC had unanimously voted to endorse the Cyclists Bill of Rights! An older guy at the meeting told me he worked with Joe Linton in the lawsuit to allow the park to be constructed, and had learned what bike advocates are all about in that fight. Way to go Joe!

Thanks to everyone on the GCPNC, especially Rourke Reagan (who encouraged me to come on behalf of the Bike Writer's Collective and got this on the agenda), and thanks also to my neighbors for agreeing with cyclists when they ask to respected, protected and given fair and safe access to the right of way!

Glassell Park Neighborhood Council to Consider Cyclists' Bill of Rights Tonight

I'm on my way over to the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council meeting to ask that the GPNC endorses the Cyclists' Bill of Rights.

As is typical for me these days, I'm going to be riding my bike with my daughter to the meeting without having done all the research and outreach to the cycling community in the area I was hoping to do prior to talking to the GPNC.

Big thanks to R. Reagan for getting this issue on the agenda, and to the Bike Writer's Collective for drafting this document and encouraging me to win more endorsements for the Cyclists' Bill of Rights.

New 7-Eleven Opens in Lincoln Heights

I snapped this photo to commemorate my 2nd official day of seeing a new 7-eleven on the corner of Eastlake and Broadway in Lincoln Heights. I've already bought 6 bags of 7-eleven cookies, 4 hot dogs, 1 bag of 7-eleven chips, and a brownie since I've noticed they opened their doors. This came as a surprise to me yesterday afternoon, as I ride my bicycle by this corner nearly every day of my life (these days).

The Indo (or Pakistani?) dudes behind the counter have super thick accents, and they report that business has been very slow since they opened. They attribute how easily missed their store is to the lack of opening day sales.

Some guys from the neighborhood said, "They're going to get robbed."

What made this a great moment is seeing a small row of ... gasp! ... UNLOCKED CONDOMS! Victory for Lincoln Heights! For more information, see my post on locked-up condoms at a nearby CVS pharmacy.