Disappeared Venice Blvd. bike lane just being held ransom. To be replaced soon.

By josef | January 5, 2012

Disappearing Venice Blvd. Bike Lane at San Vicente
This image, snapped on January 2, 2012, shows the portion of the Venice Blvd. bike lane that was kidnapped by the evil mastermind’s at CIM Group.

After breaking the news about a portion of the Venice Blvd. bike lane disappearing next to CIM Group’s Mid-town Crossing financial sinkhole, the bike advocacy community went to work with curt emails to numerous city hall insiders.

So, what is the story? From what I can tell this is a case of a bike lane being disappeared by mistake, on purpose, for a cool $33.9 million. Crazy, huh?

The Mid-town Crossing debacle project got approved way back in 2005, when it was okay for people like John Fisher at the LADOT to sign off on plans to obliterate one of LA’s major bike lanes without so much as a murmur of controversy from staff at any level in city government. In 2005 the LADOT approved of a road striping plan that included the removal of this portion of bike lane.

The City of LA, and the LA CRA, dumped tens of millions in “loans” into the project (some of which will be “paid back” through sales taxes generated at the site, i.e. with money that tenants would be paying anyway).

In between begging for public dollars and getting the project built, things at Mid-town Crossing got bogged down. First, the project is an ugly, and cheap looking, stucco and wood-frame eyesore that turns its back to the surrounding neighborhood and streets. The City did the project no favors by trying to give the developers special rights to light the place up like the Las Vegas strip with electric billboards. Then the 2008 market collapse happened.

All the public money CIM Group was able to squeeze out of LA ($33.9 million in total) helped the project inch to it’s current condition – and the 2005 road re-striping plan was finally put into place a short while ago.

Venice Boulevard bike lane returns thanks in part to LA’s patron saint of bicycling (artist’s rendering).
Venice Boulevard bike lane returns thanks in part to LA’s patron saint of bicycling (artist’s rendering).

Thanks to our little article and the large number, and well placed, complaints the LA complaint-ocracy submitted, bikes have won the day – securing emailed promises from city employees that the evil developer will be forced to fix their “mistake” of installing the road striping plan the city approved.

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Drop Before You Shop?

By Richard Risemberg | January 4, 2012

Here’s a photo I snapped today around noon, at the famous Third Street “Original” Farmers Market–the one whose coattails the Grove rode on to get started years ago.

Cars and bikes parking at the Farmers Market
The Farmers Market, unlike the Grove, invites lingering in its warren of communal alleys and microplazas, where tables and chairs are shared among the dozens of eateries; you can even walk right through stores to get across, and no one minds. It’s the closest thing to a Middle Eastern souk I’ve seen in LA, and the kind of place we can use more of.

And they’ve had a bike corral for years, installed to supplement the old-school “wheelbender” racks on the north side of the market.

As you can see in the photo, it’s far easier to get yourself to the Market on a bike than in a car–even though the parking lots consume over double the acreage of the Market itself (which was downsized a decade or two back to make room for…more parking).

And people do bike there. If there’s ever been a local example of “Build it, and they will come,” it’s this bike corral, which is always in use, even on cold rainy days, and nearly full on sweet sunny ones such as today.

I wonder whether the drivers slouching towards the distant dream of a parking space even notice the cyclists slipping past their lurching behemoths and locking up to the simple green racks, as Gina and I had done moments before I snapped the shutter. It’s pretty hard to notice anything from inside a car–which is one reason our automobile-dominated cities are allowed to become so ugly.

But more to the point, I wonder whether the merchants inside realize how many of their customers pedal their way to the cash register.

At the Market, cashiers always ask if you need a parking validation. We tell them, No, we rode our bikes today. But maybe we should make it a practice to do so even where there isn’t validated parking.

Maybe a non-aggressive way to do it would be to wear a T-shirt saying something like, “I rode my bike today, and I shop.”

What do you think? I could make them, Josef could stock them at the Pigeon. Would you buy one?

Let us know in the comments…about that, or anything else the photo brings to mind.

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You saw it at the Oven first: bicycle street sweeping

By josef | January 4, 2012

I can’t remember why I captured this moment on film. It is but one small example of how things happen at the Bike Oven. Two cameras were rolling to catch a guy pushing a broom while riding a bike. The guy is going on about the city. One of the cameramen talks about saving fossil fuel; a little girl runs screaming; a guy in a Mexico jersey say something about sweeping people’s yards.

“This doesn’t cost any money.”

“Do you work for the City?”

“Heck yeah.”

The Bike Oven is a community run bike repair collective located just two doors down from us at 3706 N. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA 90065.

Bike Oven

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Venice bike lane disappears near big box consumoplex at San Vicente

By josef | January 3, 2012

Disappearing Venice Blvd. Bike Lane at San Vicente

Now you see it!

This image is a screen capture of a Google Street View image. It shows the road striping for a Class 2 bike lane on the westbound side of Venice Boulevard at San Vicente.

Disappearing Venice Blvd. Bike Lane at San Vicente

Now you don’t!

This image was taken on January 2, 2012 looking east at the intersection of Venice Boulevard and San Vicente. A large, stucco, big-box, development is in the final stages of construction on the left side of the frame. This portion of road has a Class 2 bike lane on the other side of the road – the Venice Boulevard bike lane starts (or used to start) at Crenshaw and continues west to the beach.

The Venice Boulevard bike lane is a part of the City of LA’s “Backbone Bikeway Network” – a hard-fought concession in the 2010 bike plan to install bike facilities on major boulevards in Los Angeles.

The development has been dubbed “Mid-town Crossing”, and is outfitted with all the blank stucco walls, offensive car-first, people-last, architecture befitting a thoughtless late 20th century commercial dystopia of the sort we find ourselves unable to stop building. There have been attempts to give the developers special electric billboard rights that the rest of us don’t enjoy. This would make sense as the development itself has benefitted from an extension of credit that few of us enjoy: in 2010 the developers received a $19.3 million loan from the City of Los Angeles.

How much “investment” has the public put into this soon to be failed shopping center? According to Curbed LA’s post entitled “CIM Group Gets Its Mid City Money, But Reseda Wounds Surface” by Dakota Smith, published on May 28, 2010:

“Public investment covers 20 percent, a total of $33.95 million …”

The free market at work! One less bike lane, one more chain store occupying a parcel of prime real estate.

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Happy New Year from Flying Pigeon LA

By admin | December 31, 2011

Happy New Year! chalk drawing in front of Flying Pigeon LA bike shop

Happy New Year!

Get out there and ride your bikes today before the drunks in cars take over the streets tonight.

See you guys in 2012.

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Paint, planning, for bikes on the ground in South Pasadena

By josef | December 30, 2011

South Pasadena City Hall's crosswalk
A new zebra-stripe crosswalk in front of South Pasadena’s city hall.

In Los Angeles County it is easy to get distracted by the flash, and the piles of moving cash, in the City of Los Angeles. Yet the real action often happens in one of the 87 of other cities in the county – from scandals in the small cities in South East LA like Vernon and Bell to shining examples for what passes as bike -friendly planning in cities like Long Beach.

Add to that list of shining examples of bike planning the City of South Pasadena, which is right in the middle of a transition from a car-only to a people-first policy of mixed modes of transportation and traffic calming. This small city is leading the way with bike planning, a flush reserve account, and as solvent a government as any in Los Angeles County.
Read More »

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Marketplace’s Freakonomics Radio gets it wrong on “drunk walking” danger

By josef | December 29, 2011

This image, from Mikael Colleville-Andersen's Copenhagenize blog, encourages drivers not to kill or maim.

Cognitive dissonance seems to be the order of the day in America, or distraction. Or was it dissonance? What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, that horrible segment on Marketplace the other day, ”The Perils of Drunk Walking: A New Marketplace Podcast“. The piece was originally published on Freakonomics Radio’s site as “Friends don’t let friends walk drunk“.

This Freakonomics Radio segment, put together by Stephen Dubner, describes the perils of driving drunk and, in a brilliant display of “ignoring of the bull in society’s China Shop“, goes on to state that walking while drunk is so dangerous that one should consider other options on New Years to get home (or wherever your evening might take you).

What is left after you’ve taken away the cars and our own two feet? The trains and buses, if they run at all in America, stop before the midnight hour in most places. I know what the stats for drunk bike riding look like (not pretty). Good luck hiring a taxi. So where does that leave us? Hoverboards? Rollerblades?

Exploratorium After Dark: Again & Again
Doesn’t look so bad, really. From the_exploratorium on Flickr.

Let’s unpack the “danger” of walking home drunk. How do you get injured walking home drunk? Is it by falling and hurting yourself? Okay, I can see that. How much does this affect the death rate every year? How many emergency room calls are generated on New Years for drunks walking into light posts, or falling on stairs, versus any other holiday in the U.S. like the Superbowl or Black Friday?

Where does this “danger” come from?

The Freakonomics dudes, and the authors of several other articles, cite a report by the journal Injury Prevention  which found that January 1 is the deadliest day for pedestrians. What does the study track?

“To summarize fatal motor vehicle crash deaths in the United States by time of day, day of week, month, and season, and to determine why some days of the year tend to experience a relatively high number of deaths.”

These aren’t deaths from walking in to light posts, or fighting with your dumb neighbor and losing on New Years – these are people that get run over by cars.

The booze isn’t killing people walking – the cars are! The cars are killing people on New Years – drunk or sober. Sure, if they are drunk they may be a little more blind to the dangers of these death traps – but the cars are doing the killing. The whole report this awful story is based on is how cars run over more people at New Years.

So, where does this leave us? If the producers and writers of these reports on the dangers of drunk walking have their way, I suppose more of us will just stay at home and continue on in our lives of quiet desperation waiting for the next season of The Walking Dead to come on, thanking our lucky stars that we’re not out there drunk-walking into an early grave.

If you, instead, choose to stop ignoring the bull smashing up society’s china, it will lead you here: maybe it is time we had more street closures on New Years Eve and New Years Day. Perhaps it is time to close more streets for holidays in general? Maybe driving a car on New Years will be like trying to drive during Carmaggedon, CicLAvia, the LA Marathon (link withheld to spite Frank McCourt), or any number of community parades, festivals, and farmer’s markets?

The real danger from drunk walking is that one is walking in “Mandatory Driving Land”, which, now that I think about it, ought to be our nation’s new motto (“E Pluribus Unum” is so 1776).

So, whip out those rollerblades and hoverboards! Too drunk to drive, too dangerous to walk – let’s get ‘er done America!

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Road Diet à Deux

By Richard Risemberg | December 29, 2011

I hear there are plans afoot to put Rowena, on the back side of Silverlake, onto a road diet of sorts. Details are sketchy, but local council member Tom La Bonge is behind it for now.

It’s a good idea, as there’s plenty of speeding on Rowena, and speeding is of course dangereous to locals’ lives. Unfortunately, controlling speed is something the Motorhead-American community doesn’t feel is really “fair,” as, like the children in Lake Wobegon, “all drivers are above average”–in their own minds.

Nevertheless, fast traffic is also bad for business, as it makes it harder for people wishing to shop in local stores to pull out of the traffic stream to do so, or to cross the street from where they’ve parked, or not to drive at all and walk or bicycle to their destination.


Confusing, poorly-controlled intersection at Hyperion and Tracy

Walkers and cyclists, naturally, don’t need vast parking spaces–a few cheap racks serve for cyclists, as opposed to onstreet car slots, which cost tens of thousands to provide and maintain, or off-street parking lots or structures, which cost many times more–and which of course crowd out some of the very businesses they purport to serve. You can bring many more shoppers to an area if you encourage them to walk, bus, or bike over than if you effectively force them to drive those hulking, awkward cars.

So a road diet makes sense for residents, visitors, and businesses.

But why stop with Rowena?

Hyperion between East Hollywood and Rowena suffers much more speeding, at least to my eye–and I bicycle through there two to four times a week.

Road diets take a four lane road and reconfigure it with two traffic lanes, two bike lanes, and a two-way center left-turn channel. This stops left-turning drivers from blocking the fast lane, smoothing the traffic flow and eliminating the need to serve around cars waiting for opposing traffic to clear, while usually reducing transit times through an area for drivers.

This also gives cyclists a safe place to ride, encouraging more cyclists to ride there, which would mean more cyclists from bike-rich East Hollywood and Sunset Junction heading over to the shops and cafés clustered around the intersection of Hyperion and Rowena, and points south and east. And the reduced traffic speeds make ti easier to cross the stret and live to shop again.

So let’s start pestering La Bonge for a road diet on Hyperion, whose nastier traffic and importance as a local corridor for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians makes it even more important, I think, than Rowena.

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Flying Pigeon inventory on December 22, 2011

By admin | December 22, 2011

I figured since most people are off of work this week I would make this video extra long to help y’all kill some time. I tried to show just about everything we have in the shop right now, from a Linus Roadster Classic to a stunning new Pedersen, Yakkay, Nutcase, and Bern helmets, and Po Campo bags at 50% off retail.

It is a long video, and there are only a few days left before Christmas, so for everyone calling and wondering what we have at the shop – this is it!

Any questions? Email us at info at flyingpigeon-la.com

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The Silverlake-Atwater Express

By Richard Risemberg | December 21, 2011

LADOT just released a pretty good online map showing both present and proposed bikeways, so I looked up an area I ride through all the time, and which sorely needs some bike infrastructure. This is the stretch of LA between East Hollywood and Atwater, which includes the north side of Silverlake, and which I traverse at least once a week, on my way to South Pasadena for coffee with Vélo Rétro, or when I’m going to visit Flying Pigeon LA.


I was pleased to see that Hyperion, Rowena, Glendale, and Fletcher will all be graced with bike lanes, as there’s already a lot of velocipedal traffic in the area. It’s also populated largely with the sorts of stores that benefit a great deal from encouraging cycling, ie, smaller neighborhood establishments offering services, dining, or easily portable items that don’t require a bakfiets to bring home by human power. (If you do need to carry larger items, and don’t wish to condemn yourself to driving, you can of course obtain a fine bakfiets from Flying Pigeon LA! Christianas, Gazelles, and more….)

And Atwater, once a ‘hood that could have most charitably been described as “sleepy,” is turning into a happening place, with interesting stores, bistros and coffeehouses, and a slew of new LADOT bike racks that are seeing a good bit of use. It’s a short hop along the LA River’s new Elysian Valley bike path to or from Riverside & Figueroa, in the Pigeon’s neighborhood. You can also roll on to the city of Glendale or over to Fletcher and the east side of Highland Park. The new lanes will connect with existing bicycle facilities on Myra, Sunset, the Los Angeles River to Burbank, and west Fountain.

Proof Bakery in Atwater
Since the other end of Hyperion is firmly planted in Silverlake, with its hordes of cyclists, and then continues to become Fountain, which takes you within spitting distance of the Bicycle District at Hel-Mel, you can see that this is a route that will be carrying a lot of cyclists back and forth.

Bike lanes on Hyperion will help–especially if LA is smart enough to put a road diet there, as I hear is in the works for Rowena. Traffic moves too fast along Hyperion, and the lack of left turn bays makes for plenty of car-on-car violence, which I have witnessed on occasion myself.

But more than that, we need some careful thought on the north end of the Glendale-Hyperion bridge. There’s a nasty merge with cars coming off the 5 Freeway as the road drops into Atwater, leaving cyclists to work their way across two lanes of cars whose drivers’ minds are still in the fast lane. And on the southbound side cyclists again need to cross two lanes of drivers who are revving up to enter the freeway if they want to pedal over the bridge to Silverlake and Hollywood.

Daunting merge as Glendale-Hyperion bridge descends into Atwater
Some carefully thought-out transition markings may be needed here–or even (gasp!) a stop sign to put the brakes on freeway-frenzied motorists.

Good stuff happening soon–but we need to make sure we do it right!
 

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