A Rough Ride
Bicyclists complain that City Hall shoves them off the road
When I first e-mailed him, the reply came back from Too Tall Jahmal, and he signed his name as “Don,” but said his preferred nomenclature was actually Roadblock. When we met up at a Starbucks over on Vermont and Prospect, he gave the barista the name “Johnny.”
I immediately wondered if this self-professed cyclist and graphics designer was in fact a superhero.
Too Tall/Don/Roadblock/Johnny, or Roadblock for short, is one of the organizers for Midnight Ridazz, the Angeleno cyclists who meet once every couple of months for a mass ride, usually with a theme, some costumes and some inebriation. Since fun occasionally leads to rule breaking, Roadblock didn’t want to give CityBeat his real name, which even he says he gets confused about every once in a while.
It’s wild party animals and superheroes in disguise that make up the vibrant L.A. bike scene, people who bike for fun, for utility, community and maybe even a touch of civic duty.
It’s this same group that has to fight for the basic right to the road that California law guarantees them. They just hope Los Angeles is on their side.
It’s policy update season in L.A., this time focusing on the document that embodies the city’s promises to its biking population. Called the Bike Master Plan, it lays out the city’s intentions to create bike facilities and road designations.
If you were to ask the average citizen of Los Angeles how they felt about the city’s bicycle master plan, it’s more than likely they’d give you a rather blank-eyed stare and climb back into their car.
After all, it’s not exactly an often-sought-after piece of the city’s transportation element. In fact, if you open to the Bicycle Master Plan page of the city’s transportation code, all you’ll see is a page indicating where the plan would be, were it included in the book.
That very fact makes some bicyclists question if it really is there or just some nice dream they had once where they thought they lived in Portland.
But Los Angeles, the holy land of gas- guzzling, smog-belching (single passenger) SUVs in fact (and by law) wants to defy its reputation and make it something worthwhile and applicable. Bicyclists are skeptical that any meaningful changes will take place when the plan is submitted for approval in February 2009.
The Doubting Thomases of the L.A. bike scene saw the bike plan update process as flawed from the get-go.
Stephen Box and other bike activists’ biggest point of contention with the new document is that it exists purely to secure federal funding for the city. Indeed, the master plan is a required element of the transportation portion of the city’s general plan and is required for the city to receive transportation funds, and specifically access to the state’s Bicycle Transportation Account.
Over the past seven years, Los Angeles has received funding for two bikeway projects: the Fletcher Bridge widening and the L.A. River Bikeway project, totaling $1.75 million.
The Fletcher Bridge project, meant to widen the bridge and add a bike lane, came under attack by bike activists because the bike lane was on the right and next to the on-ramp to the 5 Freeway.
Since cyclists prefer not to argue with one-and-a-half-ton vehicles, the Fletcher Bridge “improvement” struck them as more of an invitation to get splattered on a windshield.
The city also sought Metro funds for the same bridge, totaling $7 million for a quarter-mile improvement, funded “on the backs of cyclists,” Box said.
All the while, the city is putting up new bike lanes to the tune of only five miles per year. “My wife knits socks faster than that,” Box said.
Another point of contention is the relatively minimal community outreach. There were four meetings over the course of two weeks.
“Included in there are the people who went two, three, four times like myself” Box said. “So I don’t think it’s an open and participatory process.”
Michelle Mowery, bicycle coordinator for Los Angeles’s Department of Transportation, is too used to this criticism to be fazed by it anymore: “The bottom line is budget. The consultant does not come cheap, and about 18 percent of the complete budget is about public input.”
Much of the public outreach funds went to the web site, she said, which has attracted over 600 comments and surveys that help with the update.
Those comments, which include suggestions as well as mapped-out bike routes, will be looked at by Alta Planning, said Jordann Turner of the Policy and Planning Department, but only to the tune of about 10 miles of suggested routes. “We expect there to be a lot of overlap between what the community suggests and what we’re already doing.”
According to the agreement between the policy department and Alta Planning, Alta needs only to look at 10 miles worth of suggestions – if none of those 10 miles is feasible, the community
input will be ignored.
This is one of the reasons that even if the Master Plan meetings had been flooded with cyclists, Box said, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the long run.
“It’s very easy for us to assemble a Master Plan, but without political will it has no soul, it has no mojo, no opportunity for enforcement,” Box said.
The updated plan will focus on
smaller roads that would allow bikes to bypass the more dangerous streets. “This came out of my own experience,” Mowery said. “I used to be a bicycle racer, and I’m comfortable on every street there is.”
The new bike plan will be entering Phase Two soon, and should be submitted by February 2009. Will it be included in the transportation element?
“That’s a little embarrassing,” Turner said. “I’m going to work to get it included.”
Published: 05/14/2008
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Comments
Past bike plans have called for the right kind of changes in L.A.'s infrastructure, but then left the measurements of a bike lane's success up to automobile traffic engineers. I hope Alta Planning is able to come up with something that will require the LADOT, Planning, and other agencies to properly measure the effects of bike planning. I also hope they pick a few projects deserving of funding that will best demonstrate the benefits of bike planning.
Take the focus off of bike lanes, and onto the positive impact planning for cycling can make in a community.
Bicycle friendly commercial corridors have slower car speeds. Slower car speeds mean more customers in local shops. Why is there no provision for the measurement of retail sales tax income vs. car speeds? This would allow pro-bike policies to become more visible.
Slower automobile speeds, and a lower volume of cars on a street, make it more likely that residents on a street will know one another, will feel safer, and will perceive their "home" to extend outside the walls of their dwelling. This can be measured using a social survey of residents along a street.
These two measures can objectively show how bicycle planning can benefit a community, and not just serve some sort of moral point about cycling.
why does Archibald spend the better part of two whole paragraphs talking about the guy with a million names? who cares what his name is, did he have anything to say as a cyclist in Los Angeles? if he's an orgnizer for Midnight Ridazz - one of the treasures of Los Angeles - you could have at least asked the guy something relevant to cycling but hey whats the obsession over the guy's name
Clarification: In addition to the four recent public meetings, we are currently analyzing over 1,000 surveys and over 600 unique public comments, including hundreds of route suggestions submitted in writing or though on-line mapping websites. We are also analyzing nearly 400 miles of major (arterial) streets and 1,000 miles of collector streets. The majority of the routes suggested by the public are already covered in this analysis, along with an additional 10 miles (ones that were not already being analyzed) coming out of the public process.
Happy Bike to Work Day!
Matt Benjamin
LA Project Manager and Bicycle Commuter
Alta Planning + Design