You don’t often associate warm-fuzzy feelings with actual armed and helmeted fuzz on the streets, but June 24th’s Critical Mass ride at Wilshire & Western was one of the best ever precisely because LAPD decided to ride along.

LA activist Stephen Box chats up the po-po

After May’s debacle in Hollywood, LA’s cyclists were wondering whether Chief Beck’s promises to work for better relations with us were just more of the hot air we’ve come to expect from the city’s Establishment, and in particular the LAPD, whose motto seemed to have become, “To Protect and to Serve…Our Corporate Masters.”

Now I’m almost giddy with the realization that not only Beck but a good many officers in the ranks are sincere in their desire to play fair with bike folk.

The issues have been many, of course, but interfering with freedom of assembly and of speech and ignoring bicyclists’ statutory right to use the roads are among them, and are not minor issues.

But last Friday was beautiful! Fifty or sixty bicycle cops came to the meetup, schmoozed with the crews, and behaved like regular guys and gals (albeit regular guys and gals with clubs and guns on their belts).

They mixed in with the thousand or so massers, corked intersections for us, and even admitted they were having fun!

The motorcycle escorts that joined in later were unnecessary, but the chance for us and the LAPD to meet on level ground–bicyclists all–was priceless.

For a few more posts on the ride, see Streetsblog Los Angeles, BikesideLA, and Bicycle Fixation…or any of your favorite LA bike blogs.

Yep…Orange 20 was there!

More images…HERE!

HERE!

One theme that regularly pops up in blogs and in comments on article about bicycle advocacy is faux-racist argument…you know, that cycling is either for skinny white hipsters or for rich white roadies, and that money spent on improving cycling somehow robs communities of color.

Maybe it’s true in Portland, since Portland is itself almost all white. But not here. This is a town where one of the oldest and largest roadie clubs, Major Motion, is almost all Black; where the original Bicycle Kitchen was co-founded by a native-born bilingual Latino; where Black, Latino, and Korean kids are jumping onto discount fixies with a gratifying enthusiasm. A town where any ride sees all colors (and LA’s numerous genders) mixing together pretty happily.

What brought this to my mind was a couple of fellows I saw on Venice Bouevard last Friday:

Two Latinos in their thirties, neither the profile of an “enthusiast”: one short and muscular, one chubby, both wearing K-Mart couture.

And riding not the sterotypical Magna MTB, but a sleek new fixie and a midrange road bike with clipless–and yes, clipless road shoes peeking out from under the sweatpants.

And they were hauling ass–while carrying on an animated conversation the whole while. Brown, proud, and cyclists by choice.

So enough with the little white lie. Cycling helps everyone–and it helps the poor most of all. Lack of cycling infrastructure–now that is racist….

A Race and a Scavenger Hunt with water and squirting water as the theme. This Sunday meet at Universal Studios Metro Red Line at 1:00 RACE STARTS 2:00.

Brought to you from the good people at Los Angeles Guerrilla Gardening. Race to water the plants in your community and then the after party is at La Cita Bar Downtown. With drink specials for the racers.

I came across the bike pile in the photo below while wandering the beach path a while ago. Must have been a high-school end-of-school ride, as the beach directly opposite this velocipedal agglomeration was swarming with tender-tough babyfaces who were whooping it up pretty good, under the gaze of a couple of teacherish looking older folk.

How come we never had such trips when I was a kid? I guess only football and baseball counted in those days…but still I rode. I started riding for transportation when I was thirteen or fourteen, pedaling a rattly Sears three-speed that had the unfortunate habit of slipping a gear when I stood up to pedal, thereby causing me to mash my nuts on the top tube and eventually switch to derailleurs. And back then I usually rode alone.

I’m not riding gears at all these days, sticking to fixies for my 500 miles a month. And it’s not so lonely on the roads anymore.

Wherever I go–to the 20, along Fourth Street, Downtown, Mulholland, the beach–I meet people I know, or come to know people I meet. The bike is a sociable machine, and everywhere it takes you, it creates neighborhoods. (The orange dot in the photo is my friend Bill, coming up by chance.)

Those beach kids will grow and scatter, but I hope the taste of cycling they’ve ben given will help keep them feeling at home in an often unfeeling world. They’re luckier than they know.