July 13, 2010
In what may represent a sea change in Los Angeles politics, well-known bicycle and transit activist Stephen Box announced that he will run for Tom LaBonge’s seat on the Los Angeles City Council, in Council District 4. CD4 includes Griffith Park, much of Hollywood, all of Hancock Park, and all of our own Miracle Mile.
LA Needs a Jolt!
While incumbent Labonge often talks up bike issues, arranges constituent bike rides in CD4, and seems genuinely to love riding his own blue Miyata, he hasn’t really delivered on cycling issues such as lanes, parking, sharrows, and bicycle boulevards, beyond offering lip service–or so it seems to me.
Box,if he wins, would be the strongest voice for cycling and sustainability on the Council. But can he win? LaBonge has been on the Council as staffer or member since 1976 and is well-entrenched; he is also one of the best friends the old-school development community has ever had here in recent years.
That Box could bring a new style of development to LA–one that in the long run would result in a more efficient government and more prosperous communities–will not assuage the fears of those who have been living a continuous birthday party in LA at the city’s and its neighborhoods’ expense.
You can check out Box’s platform on his new website today: StephenBox.com.
It’s our big chance to own the future.
It’s somewhat fitting that just before the Fourth of July, LA dribbled out a few pennies of tax cash and installed sharrows on Fountain Avenue, only a short way from Orange 20.
I question some of the the “facts” in your post. While it is true that road funding in parts of this country, like my home state of Michigan, is woefully inadequate, the shortfall in road funding is NOT made up for from general taxes. Although many communities have passed local millages, in the vast majority of cases the shortfall in funding is not made up at all, and roads continue to deteriorate.
And regarding your statement that “those who don’t drive are being overtaxed to coddle those who do” I would ask, did those who “do not drive” WALK to the bike store to buy their bike, and have they walked or biked EVERYWHERE since? Or might they have had the need, once or twice to take a car OR A BUS somewhere? And do they eat? How do you think EVERYTHING you eat gets to you?? By bike? No, good roads, like good schools and good law enforecement, benefit society – and you – whether or not you own a car, whether you drive occasionally or NEVER drive. The beauty of the gas tax as a road funding source is that it is so fair. The less you drive the less you pay. And bikes pay nothing in gas tax.
Comment by Bob Slattery — July 8, 2010 @ 3:59 am
The study I referenced, from Texas, and others, such as mark E. Hanson’s seminal study in Wisconsin, “automobile Subsidies and Land Use,” are not anecdotal but based on actual expenditure figures and account for maintenance, deferred or otherwise. Property and sales taxes are in fact used to repair roads. Every pays them; renters too pay property taxes, through their landlords.
Many cyclists drive, but many do not. I myself have never driven to the bike store to buy a bike; I have walked or taken public transit (subsidized to about the same degree as driving, and of course motorheads crab about transit subsidies as well).
And I agree: good roads should be socialized, as a benefit to society; what I do not agree with is the general high level of drivers’ hypocrisy and self-righteousness in trying to deny cyclists a tiny share of road funds and infrastructure because of teh delusion that driving is fully self-supported by taxes on cars and fuel, which it decidedly is NOT.
Also, the enforced dependence on car-only transit–enforced by a distortion of urban design and a horribly skewed distribution of available tax funding–has had grave deleterious consequences ranging from the personal and public health costs of obesity, to the destruction of local community, to global warming threatening the entire ecosystem–yet when you try to do something that give people real freedom of choice in transit and could help better the environment, the economy, and teh communities we live in, drivers, who can think only of their own delusory entitlement, bleat out the tired old “cyclists don’t pay for the road argument,” which is entirely false in context, since drivers don’t pay for it as much as non-driving cyclists do.
We have too much expensive road surface already–burdens the earth, costs too much to build and maintain, and takes land off the property tax rolls, requiring other land to be overtaxed.
What I’m saying to drivers who yawp about bikes and taxes is simply, “Pay up–or shut up.”
The roads are everyone’s.
Comment by Richard Risemberg — July 8, 2010 @ 6:52 am
Nice straw man Bob, but I don’t think Rick is saying “paved roads are bad” like you are suggesting he is. He’s just shooting down one of the enduring myths about how cyclists somehow have no less rights to public roads because “they don’t pay for them.”
The point is that cyclists DO pay for them, since they pay into the general fund and to property taxes which pay for the majority of road maintenance.
Comment by John — July 8, 2010 @ 3:48 pm
It would be great if O20 got a political arm and flexed it by sending hordes of bikers to city council meetings demanding completion of the bike plan sooner than 2035. 2035? really? Make bicyclists a priority!
Comment by Nate — July 11, 2010 @ 9:39 am