If you have ever been hesitant to become a cyclist in Los Angeles? Well our friends over at LACBC have compiled a book chok filled with tips and tricks to help you aclimate to a cycling based lifestyle here in LA. There are sections on how to chose the right bike for you, basic bike maintenence and how to properly lock up a bike. And if you are an avid cyclist already, this would be a great stockin stuffer or a coffee table book. One of the things i liked about it the most is seeing a bunch of famliar faces in there.

Pick up your copy here at the shop for a mear $10 bucks.

This morning I saddled up early (by hipster standards) and pedaled off along the rainsoaked streets for a glorious Sunday ride under clearing skies.

The skies had not been quite clearing when I left, so I threw the rain cape into my pannier, but knowing how erratic LA weather can be, I also laid on a thin coat of sunblock. The sunblock got a workout, but I could have left the rain cape at home. By the time I stopped for coffee in Brentwood, the sky was brilliant and clear, though the streets were still streaming water in most places. The Planet Bike fenders took care of that.

I decided to see how many SoCal sunbirds had braved the (relative) chill and blustery winds to ride their bikes to the Santa Monica farmers market, which offers a bike valet for shoppers. To my most pleased surprise, it was quite a few!

Even more pleasing–and, sad to say, more surprising–was this battered and very permanent sign reserving that stretch of curb for bikes only every Sunday! Not for “special events,” but every Sunday–and not run by an NGO or volunteers, but provided by the City of Santa Monica and attended by pros!

I mean, I’m getting jealous! Sharrows and bike valet in Santa Monica, sharrows in Hermosa Beach, bike lanes, bike boulevards, and sharrows in Long Beach–every town around LA, it seems, is throwing down bike love…and us? The 800-pound gorilla? We…we have meetings. Over and over again.

There’s no excuse. Size doesn’t matter: New York and Chicago, the cities that bracket us in size, are going great guns on bike infrastructure, and they also have the issues of budget constraints, poverty, diversity, and a multiplicity of languages and culture that LA officials have used to excuse our slow crawl towards a Bicycle Millennium

Don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot of great work being done for cycling in LA. I wrote it up last year. But most of it’s being done by NGOs such as the LACBC, CICLE, and so forth. LA’s government seems to be in a reactive mode. And that isn’t the way to get things done very quickly.

Still, it’s what we have. This means that making Los Angeles a true bicycling city is up to us for now.

Yeah, that means you too. Look up those organizations linked to in the previous sentence and lend a hand. The more of us are involved, the louder will be our voices (and our votes). Eventually they’ll have to listen.

Frame/Fork: 183rd
Drive Train: Brewtal Fluted Cranks/Chain Ring, All City Cog, Shimano Dura-ace Lockring/Panasonic Pasela Tires
Wheels:Mavic Cxp22/Formula Hubs
Cock Pit:Origin Stem, Civia Promenade Style Bars

Build By
: Ommy/Gen

Looks as though our Indian summer may linger into winter, and who knows?, even beyond. Such are the mysterious ways of global warming, with the weather cattywampus, summer in winter, winter in summer, rain where it’s usually dry, drought in the wet places, and general climatic confusion all around. Here’s a photo of the 20 on a lazy Sunday morning, long before opening time, deep into November:

It’s only superficially nice to have a warm November…till sometime down the line when nothing comes out when you turn the faucet handle, and next month’s meals turn brown in the fields of Oxnard. But winter will come, so here’s a checklist for your rainy-day rides, a more comprehensive one than that which I scribbled right after our last, short rainy spell.

• Good sticky tires
  Skinny or fat, tread or not, makes little difference, but you ought to be able to leave a mark in the rubber with your fingernail. My faves are the Schwalbe Marathons. They come in widths from 25mm to a mighty 47mm, in rim sizes from 16″ to the majestic 635s you find on Pashleys and a lot of Dutch bikes. Nothing else counts as much as tires in keeping you safe. (Except your brain, if you use one.)
  
• Fenders
  Rain is clean, street water is filthy, and even in dry weather, there’s a lot of streams to cross on LA roads, and not all of them are water. Metal ones are pretty stylish, plastic ones are pretty cheap, and they all work. You can take them off in spring if you want to.
  
• Lights
  Should be a no-brainer, since all year round you ride at night, don’t you? You want the cagers to see you, don’t you? You want to see the glass and the potholes, don’t you? LED lights are pretty good and dirt cheap for basic city lights. Get ‘em.
  
• Raincoat
  Or equivalent. I favor rain capes, but a good rain jacket will do if you get some pants or chaps to go with them. I like capes because they don’t overheat me and I don’t have to wear rain pants with them, and I don’t mind looking British-geeky. You wear the stuff only part of the year, so it lasts a long long time
  
• Cozy clothes
  Wool is best, as it keeps you warm even if it does get wet, and it doesn’t show the wetness much when you’re off the bike. Pricey, though. Synthetics are less flexible and need washing after every use, but they’re cheap. Lotta folks now make non-bikey-looking clothes for cyclists in wool and synthetics–Bicycle Fixation (that’s me), Swrve, Rapha, others. The 20 carries lots of this stuff. Ask for some!
  
• Good brake pads
  Unless you’re riding fixed–which is great in the rain–you’ll have to make sure you’ve got good brake pads. Stock brake pads often aren’t too effective in the rain. Your mechanic can help you choose. Ask at the 20 if you’re a LA rider reading this!

That’s all it takes. After all, you’re not the Wicked Witch of the West, in danger of melting in wetness. What this stuff gives you is more than comfort or safety–it gives you freedom.

So if you’re a local, stop by the 20 and ask them to help you winterize your bike. Unless it’s an absolute monsoon (and I’ve ridden through many), rain riding is exhilarating…and effective. The traffic jams get even worse on rainy days. But you’ll be free.

(PS: Snow country riders reading this, see icebike.com.)

What with the midterm elections (good for California, grim elsewhere) and the contentious review of the city’s draft bike plan (it’s not omigod perfect), it was a good time to take an all-too-brief break from politics, and the whining, bluster, and despair it engenders on all sides and go for a long, pleasant bike ride in the company of strong, passionate, and friendly fellow riders.

For the last three years I have rarely missed Velo-Retro’s monthly Rose Bowl ride. It’s a twenty-five mile loop that starts and ends at the Rose bowl and meanders through South Pasadena, San Marino, Temple City, Arcadia, and Sierra Madre, with a stop at the Beantown coffee house for coffee, pastries, and plenty of BS at the outdoor tables.

I usually ride there and back from the Miracle Mile, making it a 65 mile day for me, which is pretty good for blowing off the mental cobwebs. (When my wife comes along we take the train part way.) My little Bottecchia fixie could probably make the ride by herself at this point.

The crowd ranges in age from teens to ancients–surprisingly strong ancients, including a couple of retired racers–and the only theme of the ride is classic steel…though you can ride anything with pedals if you want.

Lot of the lads and ladies are collectors, so aside from easygoing, intelligent fellowship, you get to see some fine bikes. Colnagos and Masis are commonplace, Olmos show up all the time, Singers show up now and then, and if you see a Raleigh rest assured it was made by the original craftsmen back in Jolly Olde.

Last Sunday saw (among others) the two rare gems below: an immaculate Ephgrave, and a weary but still lovely Hobbs of Barbican tandem.

And two local framebuilders–Greg Townsend and J. P. Valiensi–showed up on their own Keeper of the Flame rides.

We rolled off promptly at eleven, chatting the whole way till the final mile before the coffee stop, the one real hill of the ride. Though no one will admit it, a few of us always sprint for Beantown in hopes of being first in line for java. Get me to caffeine on time!

It was a great way to spend a Sunday: classic bikes, classy friends, beautiful weather, tranquil streets.

First Sunday of every month. It’s kind of like the classic Cycle Touring Club rides in England back in the glory days of British cycling. Give it a try!

With a passel of Republicans slinking back into power, there’s a good chance that lawmaking bodies may begin to show a bit of institutional resistance to implementing bicycle infrastructure. A lot of the talk will center on its supposed “excessive cost” in “these trying economic times,” blah blah blah–though with dingdong projects like the 710 freeway tunnel high on the motorhead agenda it’s obvious that no amount of money wasted on asphalt for cagers can ever be considered “too much.”

Of course, since utility cycling is associated with liberal politics in what passes for the greater public’s mind, there’s an barely-hidden impulse to subvert anything favorable to bikes endemic in the political right.

Yet cycling has a lot to offer real philosophical conservatives, especially fiscal conservatives, so here are a few bullet points you can use among your less liberal friends, colleagues, and family, or when commenting on news articles and blog posts:

• Driving is socialism! Yes, in the US and Canada car fees and taxes pay only 16% to 40% of the cost of maintaining local roads and highways and public parking. In fact, cyclists who don’t drive, or who rarely drive, overpay in general taxes to subsidize drivers–as do transit users and stay-at-homes.
• Bicyclists support local commerce better than do drivers. it’s easier to get customers to stores when you facilitate their arriving by bike. Cyclists move slower and can stop at whim, and are therefore excellent at window-shopping. Cyclists also need only very narrow lanes–a cycling city would have much more space per acre that could be devoted to productive uses such as stores, offices, and services, instead of being flattened under the vast expanses of asphalt needed to get cars around. Studies (SF, Toronto) have shown that cars are actually very inefficient at bringing in customers.
• Parking requirements retard development. Look at LA’s own Grove shopping mall–though it’s made to resemble a European shopping street, its footprint reveals that the parking structure is actually larger than the mall it serves. This makes the mall, and therefore its rents, and therefore its stores’ prices, much higher than they need to be, imposing a private tax on all its users. When you can park twelve bikes in the space usurped by a single car, you can simply “do more with less,” which is a conservative mantra, after all.
• Bicycling is fiscally efficient, then: cyclists need far less in the way of tax expenditures than do drivers, while supporting commerce better–all the while imposing none of the externalities that represent the hidden costs of driving. Air pollution, global warming, watershed destruction, the extended utility infrastructure requirements of sprawl, are almost all rooted in driving, but not accounted for in setting car and gas taxes, and so are paid for out of other funds that could be used for schools, parks, libraries, police and fire services, etc.

In other words, spending public money to make urban and suburban bicycling easier and more prevalent will actually save public money in the long run, improve business, and as an extra added bonus reduce public health costs.

What conservative in his right mind could object to that?