At least not if you join in and make sure that the things we need get done!

While cities such as San Francisco, Portland, and even Long Beach and Santa Monica forge ahead with bicycle infrastructure, LA lags. But a number of groups, such as the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, are lighting fires under the city and county bureaucracies’ collective ass, and if you’d like to strike a match of your own, join us this Thursday, November 4th, at 7pm at Halal Tandoori Restaurant (401 S. Vermont Ave) on the corner of 4th and Vermont. The food’s great too!

We’ve done a lot of prep and publicity work on the 4th Street Bicycle Boulevard project, and now is the time to move towards action.

A little farther west, the City of Beverly Hills is in dire need of sensible transport options, and Better Bike BH is on the job, but needs some bodies and voices to help make BH make sense. First on their list is getting bike lanes on the portion of Santa Monica Boulevard that passes through BH and joins the excellent lanes that continue on from Century City to Sepulveda.

Their meeting’s this Sunday, October 31st, 2pm, at Peet’s Coffee, 258 S. Beverly Drive, 90212.

Bicycle Fixation (me) will be at the LACBC meeting for sure, and probably at the Better Bike BH meet as well.

How about you?

I wish I could have written that about Los Angeles, but I can’t…at least not yet.

But I can write it about San Francisco, where I spent a few days last week, visiting Public Bikes and Box Dog, two great shops, and strolling around town (to the tune of up to ten miles a day) checking out one of my favorite cities on earth, and its bike scene.

Let me tell you, despite that lame-ass injunction that some manic motorhead judge imposed, stopping all bike infrastructure progress in SF on–get this!–environmental grounds, cycling has been taking off in that city, which topped 6% mode share back in 2008.

Now the injunction has been dumped, and the city has blasted ahead with bike lanes, bike racks, wayfinding, and other kinds of intelligent design (the real intelligent design) supporting the most efficient travel mode on the planet.

And San Francisco’s residents are responding.

Friends, there were bikes everywhere, locked up up in front of damn near every commercial establishment, being ridden on damn near every street in every part of town–even the cager’s playground that is SoMA.

For example, the riders in the accompanying picture aren’t riding together–they don’t know each other–they’re just traffic. Everywhere I walked–bikes in ones, twos, fours, dozens, just being traffic!

Bike racks were everywhere, and often full, and often more than full, with bikes locked to meters next to crowded racks. Market Street’s green-painted separated lane seems really to work–I saw no conflicts between bikes and cars despite heaps of both (and SF’s drivers being even more aggro than LA’s).

And best of all, there was a healthy mix of folks out riding. Not just roadies, punks, and bums, but working folks of all classes, outside together in the sun or the rain, riding bikes. Just getting around. Lots of women too.

There’s a motion before the city council that would commit SF to increasing the mode share of cycling in the transport mix to 20% by 2030–from its current 7%.

Portland’s no longer the target–San Fran is.

LA, we got some catching up to do! So let’s get to it!

Woke up to drizzle and sopping streets, so I thought to myself–what else?–what a beautiful day for a ride.

It was the kind of rain that keeps everything wet but isn’t really much of a bother on a bike. The breeze of passage and your own body heat will keep you pretty dry, at least if you’re wearing wool–and as a designer and manufacturer of woolly bike stuff of course that’s what I had on.

I didn’t see a lot of other cyclists at first–but then, I didn’t see many drivers either. The streets seemed oddly deserted. made my way down Jefferson to Playa del Rey and then to the bicycle bridge, and there the bike action was better. Roadies, of course, won’t give up their training runs, and were out in force, but there were plenty of others rolling by as well–just regular folks out on bikes in the rain. Still it wasn’t a lot.

When I went on to Venice, though, that was different! Main Street, where it runs through Venice and Santa Monica, looked like a mini-Portland! People riding everywhere–not just roadies and homeless, but everyone: dressy women on cruisers and flatbar road bikes, gathering sequins of rain in their blonde coifs; trim young men on fixies; old guys on MTBs; aging flowerchildren on basket bikes–all sorts of riders on all sorts of bikes, gliding serenely through the constant drizzle.

And lots of them women. It’s said that women are an “indicator species” for a city: the more of them you see on bikes, the better the city is for cycling in general. If so, then Venice and Santa Monica really are the Portlands of the south.

I stopped at Intelligentsia for coffee then rode on to downtown Santa Monica. There I turned inland, and by the time I’d gone three or four miles there were few bikes to be seen, though not really much fewer than on any weekeday.

I thought of all the riders I had seen back near the beach, and of the bikes parked in front of every coffeehouse and restaurant and most other stores, and about how many cyclists I see any day of the week in Venice and Santa Monica compared to most part of inland LA.

Well, it’s got to start somewhere. It may as well start there.

It’s was Race Day! And we’re tired…

See everyone tomorrow! We will be open 12 to 6!

One of the other community groups I’m involved with is the Miracle Mile Art Walk, coordinated by the Mid City West Community Council. Now, MCWCC has been really supportive of the LACBC’s 4th Street Bicycle Boulevard, and of urban cycling in general, and they are interested in getting more folks to show up at the Art Walk by bicycle rather than by car.

So here’s your chance to represent a bit, have a good time, and see some rockin’ art in every style from old school to punk. Ride your bike to the Mile, home of dozens of contemporary art galleries, and either wheel from show to show, or park it and take the free shuttle, or actually walk the Walk! This Saturday, October 16th, on the Miracle Mile. That’s Wilshire Boulevard between La Brea and Fairfax, with a lot more galleries on La Brea itself, Fairfax, and Beverly. Too far to walk to see them all, but perfect for cycling.

There will also be a dance performance by radical LA based troupe IN/EX, at the Berlin Wall installation in front of 5900 Wilshire.

And to make it easier, yours truly worked with LADOT to get a bunch more bike racks installed on the Mile.

Suggested bike routes to the Art Walk here.

Art Walk schedule of events here.

IN/EX dance preview here.

Download flyers to print out here.

If we get enough people riding to the Art Walk on their bikes, it may let us combine the Art Walks with mini-CicLAvias sometime soon! The Art Walk folks are all for it, so let’s give them a reason to forge ahead!

If you did not go, you cannot know how beautiful it was…CicLAvia, six hours of freedom of street for human beings moving under their own power, untrammeled by sheet metal and speed….

Cyclists of every sort, walkers, skaters, stroller pushers, wheelchair pushers, fast and slow, slim and stout, freak and straight, all colors and genders rolling peacefully and freely on streets for once not mean, not loud, not pressured by the usual motor mania.

The eastern terminus was at Hollenbeck Park, whose pretty lake is half-crushed by a freeway that you’d think had been designed to showcase the ills of obsessive automobility; the western end, after seven and a half miles of velocipedal bliss, was at Hel-Mel, right between the Bicycle Kitchen and the mighty Orange 20.

Websites and blogs will be filling up with photos over the next few days, but here’s a taste, freshly downloaded from my little camera, to show you what a sensible city’s street would look like all the time:

This was LA’s first ciclovía, but if we have any sense or soul at all, it will not be our last.