Peloton Panic
The best place to nearly get killed on a bike in L.A. County
By Cole Coonce
"[The] Rose Bowl staff has received numerous complaints from patrons of Brookside Golf Course, as well as local residents. Staff has been in communication with the Pasadena Police Department regarding this issue, and the police department has provided suggestions on how to address this situation."
Thus sayeth Darryl Dunn, General Manager of the Rose Bowl Operating Company, in a letter to his employer, as an opening salvo meant to upend what has become an outrageous form of aerobic expression for bicyclists who have enough skill, leg power, and lung capacity to hang on with the fastest gathering of riders in the greater Los Angeles area: the Rose Bowl Peloton.
A tradition at the Bowl for nearly 30 years, the Peloton is a prosumer version of the stuff that made Lance Armstrong famous: a balls-to-the-wall bike ride on an esteemed, historic circuit.
Every Tuesday and Thursday during Daylight Savings Time, the peloton does 10 laps around the Bowl and its oval-shaped route exactly 3.14 miles in circumference (ironically, the same number as pi, the constant used to figure the area of a circle). Cyclists pedal in from all points of Los Angeles and the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys to converge near the Bowl's Parking Lot K. There is a bustling for position and then, at six o'clock, a nervous clattering of cleats locking into pedals, and the ride eases out of the easement, rolling out and making its way south on Rosemont for a pace lap. At this point, the peloton putt-putts at a feeble 15 miles an hour and maintains that speed as it veers west on Seco, climbing up a slight grade for a mile or so; as the group turns right and spins north on West Drive, the
riders in front begin to "stand on it." The mass of riders then turns east on Washington Boulevard and, assisted by gravity in a slight descent, begins to pedal like the hounds of hell are at its trail, as speeds reach more than 35 mph. It is transcendental: The riders and the machines synchronize with minimal entropy in the pedal-turning process as the peloton rips a hole in the air and creates an aerodynamic vacuum that sucks the riders together and facilitates more and more speed with less and less effort ... .
And round and round it goes: a gnarsome streamlined collection of as many as 100 riders heaving and breathing as one single-cell organism, pedaling furiously, spaced apart six inches to a foot. Any misstep or hesitation can mean a huge tangled mass of steel, aluminum, titanium, and carbon fiber, all of which would be bent and useless, good for nothing but recycling into a swing set.
In a letter to the Pasadena Star-News, concerned citizen Guido Meindl slathered on about the arrogance of Pelotonians toward anyone in their way. "Even when they are in the on-coming traffic lane, often heard are expletives of 'get the - out of the way.' The combination of Pelotonians and pedestrian ignorance could be a formula for disaster."
Any peloton is dangerous. The Rose Bowl iteration is no exception, and has to factor in the unpredictability of automobiles, oblivious joggers deaf to the world because of Massive Attack streaming into their iPod buds, and dual-income couples walking baby strollers with their backs to the banzai bicyclists.
It does no good to note that the cyclists have been doing this ride for years, and that its existence is under attack by concerned citizens and now the Pasadena City Council, which has tabled the Rose Bowl Operating Company's mandate to stop the Tuesday and Thursday rides.
But trying to police this phenomenon is like trying to stay in the draft itself: You are grabbing a tiger by the tail. And on some level, that is unpoliceable.
Positively Fourth Street
The best place not to get killed on a bike in L.A.
It was a sweet and sticky summer night, and the Highland Park "Bicycle Oven" on 42nd Street was certainly cookin'. A swap-and-shop co-op operated by Joseph, a semi-retired thirtysomething bike mechanic who has altruistically opened up his apartment garage's doors, the Oven on any given Wednesday night attracts a motley assortment of bicycle enthusiasts and advocates. On that night, some geeky white kids were trying to build up a stripped-down, surplus road bike frame and were mulling the differences and nuances of a pile of sundry salvaged derailleurs and gear clusters and whether to shit-can the concept of changing gears altogether and just turn the lonely frame into a single-speed "fixie." A Latino dude offered his two centavos about at least screwing on some brakes. An Asian gal on a PowerBook scammed on a neighbor's wi-fi signal and was perusing Craigslist and Google Maps. Joe fielded questions from customers and directed traffic as some donors pulled up in a Toyota pickup stuffed with sun-blasted frames with rusted handlebars.
He was careful to point the driver away from a pair of 6-by-4-foot butcher-paper stencils that were lying out by the curb. Carved into the paper were semiotic silhouettes of two directional arrows stacked congruently like a sergeant's stripes over the image of a bicycle. Hmmmm ... . Take the stencil and some spray paint, and voilà! An instant bike lane - albeit one that hasn't gone through the proper bureaucratic trails at CalTrans.
Joseph was explicit about the bike lane patterns: "Those aren't mine. They were dropped off. But somebody will use 'em somewhere."
In the garage, the conversation turned to where the stencils had been applied. Talk segued to the specificality of Fourth Street, between Vermont and La Brea, a road that's been tagged by some anonymous bike-friendly rogue civil engineers and dubbed "Bicycle Boulevard."
If you put in any miles on a wire donkey in this town, you don't need stenciled hieroglyphics to know Fourth Street is positively the best place to go cross-town without getting killed or maimed.
Cycling as recreation and transportation continues to gain in popularity in the Southland. Pedalers utilize - and are legally entitled to - the same streets as the overpriced buckets of bolts coughing up carbon gases into the ionosphere. But motorists seem pretty ignorant about the rights of cyclists to "take the lane" and are rather territorial about asserting their girth and making their vehicles as wide as Super-Sized thighs.
Legally, Sunset, Fountain, Santa Monica, Melrose, Beverly, Third, Sixth, Olympic, Pico, Wilshire, Venice, and Washington are all yours for the cycling, but they're often loaded with an armada of half-dead commuters and distracted, multitasking MILFs who are - often as not - racing through yellow lights while texting their kids' school administrators about why li'l Kim Jong is too fat to play soccer. That rolling two-ton obstacle course aside, on the aforementioned streets and boulevards the east-west bicyclist also has to ping-pong and ricochet around ubiquitous city buses that travel at the same speed as the guy on the bike, and spew more noxious gases than a tribe of Cub Scouts swimming in Tommy's chili.
Avoid all of that nuttiness and take Fourth Street, Floyd.
From the Eastside, you can grab it at Hoover. You may have to wait at the stoplights at Vermont, Normandie, and Western, but those are minor inconveniences, if not your biggest buzzkills - and nothing compared to, say, swapping paint with a bus on Venice Boulevard. One commuting cyclist I talked to - Ben, who rides from Frogtown to his job at the County Museum - complained of Fourth Street, "It's too slow - too many stop signs." But a stop sign every block or two is exactly what makes "Bicycle Boulevard" work. In trying to grab some advantage in traffic, motorists won't deal with this street - they'd rather grind it out in stop-and-go bottlenecks on Third and think they are getting ahead of the poor shlubs stuck on Beverly, who think they're sticking it to the simpletons choking on black particulates on Wilshire ... .
Fourth Street is cool. Literally. It is shaded from the fruits and ficus of rich people's labors. The asphalt is temperate. Bountiful shrubbery and oaks. A mere mittenful of cars. No buses. And when you are cruising along at 18 or 20 mph, take heed of the stop signs. But some might say to plot a wide trajectory when approaching the intersection and take the word "stop" as advisory.
Published: 09/13/2007
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