Stripped Down for Racing

You can’t help but notice that the Flying Pigeon LA website looks a bit more spare these days: and it is. The shop is closed for at least the duration of the campaign—not the national campaign that winds down in a week (we hope, though these days you never know), but the local campaign to put the Flying Pigeon’s own Joe Bray-Ali in the city council, representing District 1.

Accordingly, this blog will focus more on campaign issues as they relate to bicycling, discussing the candidates’ positions on cycling, transit, street safety, planning, and more, and reminding you of events that combine urban cycling and city policy in ways big and small. (See last week’s post for an example.)

Meanwhile, let me remind to read Steve Lopez’s summary of how just one developer manipulated the city council through what you might call a “distributed denial of ethics rules” attack, using proxy donors to “convince” the council that City Planning, the Planning Commission, and the site’s heavy industrial should be ignored so he could build his project.

Sure, you’d think LA was already too friendly to mega-developers, but apparently the developers don’t think so…. CD1’s Cedillo figures in only a minor way in this particular scandal. but we know that his contributors are almost entirely from outside the district, and heavily larded with real-estate interests, so…..

So it’s time for some honest faces in the council chamber. You’ll be hearing more about one of them right here, week after week.