Make a Difference on Wilbur Avenue on Tuesday, March 15, 2011

If you’d like to really make a difference, and help do something physical and real (instead of throwing a vote in to the black hole of apathy as 5% of us did on election day last Tuesday), join Don Ward and his neighbors in a neighborhood walk from the corner of Prairie and Wilbur Avenue in Los Angeles to Nobel Jr. High (located at 9950 Tampa Avenue CA 91324). Meet at Prairie and Wilbur at 5:30pm. The walk will head towards a Neighborhood Council meeting at Nobel Jr. High is from 6pm-8:30pm on Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

Our friend, Don Ward, has been working very hard with his neighbors to preserve bike lanes recently installed on Wilbur Avenue in the Valley. A hostile group of neighbors has been working just as hard to see those lanes removed.

View WILBUR COMMUNITY WALK! in a larger map

This isn’t about bike access: Wilbur Avenue has been the location of many dangerous crashes (both reported and unreported) over the years as well as a lot of unnecessary speeding. All of this makes for depressed property values, unsafe streets for kids to walk along, and a hostile environment for anyone not blowing by in a car doing 45mph.

Don has put it this way on Safe Streets Northridge:

“Lets make this about COMMUNITY
No hard feelings, we just want to have a voice over the streets that run through our neighborhood.”

This bike lane is about reversing the long-standing Los Angeles policy of designing all city streets for car-only use. This is a man-made policy, and it has real effects on the lives of residents. Commute times for cars are important, but so is the ability for neighbors to safely cross their own streets, for people to ride their bikes, and for homeowners not to have their property values ruined.