Dare we hope? As I’ve mentioned, I wrote up a petition to Council member Garcetti’s office to have a bike corral put in at Hel-Mel here. (A bike corral takes away one car parking space and replaces it with racks for ten to fourteen bicycles.) Orange 20, Scoops, Cafecito Organico, Pure Luck, Bicycle Kitchen, and Vlad the Retailer all signed on right away. I sent the petition in to Garcetti’s office and copied Michelle Mowery at LADOT and some folks at the Planning Department and LACBC.

A few days go by, and I get a call from Marcel Porras at Garcetti’s office. (He bought his bike at Orange 20, by the way!) Turns out a business near the intended corral has to agree to keep it clean and “free of graffiti.”

This struck me as a bit odd. Why don’t businesses have to keep car parking spaces in front of their stores clean? Another example of the continuing pandering to cars over all other modes of transportation. (You can read more about this in an earlier post of mine, the Gas Tax Fallacy.) Instead, I have often seen business owners actually sweeping trash from their stores and sidewalks into the street for the city to pick up. And hey, your taxes and mine are paying for their laziness!

But that’s another battle.

So, I received the maintenance agreement forms–and they’d sent me the ones for Cafe de Leche’s bike corral up in Highland Park! So I rewrote them myself and flogged them around Hel-Mel. Orange 20 and Bicycle Kitchen have both signed on.

But…that’s not enough. Now LADOT has to send someone to talk with all the signers of all the documents in person, apparently to make sure I’m not some nasty lying forger.

Who’d have thought it would be so hard to lock a bike up so you could go to a store?

So there you have it. I’ll keep you posted on any progress.

Geez, all I want to do is ride my bike and spend a little money on our local merchants. Why make it so hard?

Sean Martin did a Sponsor Highlight on us for the race tomorrow! Head over to TOLA to see what he had to say.

Check out the rest on Mikey Wally’s Flickr!

You’ll remember that I’ve written here several times about Chinatown and the lack of bike parking there–despite the provision of eleven lots or garages for drivers, there was nothing for us.

And you know I nagged at LADOT about it.

And guess what? They got right on it, and there are bike racks in Chinatown now! Not as many as I’d like–but an infinite percentage more than the zero that had been there before.

I see a lot of riders passing through Chinatown when I’m there myself (with my fixie locked to a gaspipe by a restaurant wall); maybe now a lot of them will ride to Chinatown as well. If they’re anything like me, it’ll mean good business for the restaurants!

 

More parking news: you also know that I’ve bemoaned the fact that Highland Park got a bike corral before Hel-Mel. So, I wrote up a petition, took it around to most of the businesses on the corner, and sent it in to councilmember Garcetti’s office. They called back last Friday, and things are in progress. Since this is all new to the city, I don’t know how long it will take, but there’s a good chance of a bike corral at Hel-Mel soon!

Orange 20, Pure Luck, Bicycle Kitchen, Scoops, and Vlad the Retailer were all happy to sign. The tattoo parlor’s hanging back–they’re afraid of losing a parking spot. Somebody go in and remind them that young LA cyclists are mad for tattoos, and the corral might just increase their business!

* * * * *

I was pretty damn pleased yesterday, as I rode around Hollywood and the Miracle Mile and saw that nearly every bike rack I passed was in use…those at Shaky Alibi, Village Idiot, and the El Rey Theater, and a number of others. Doubly pleasing because, like those in Chinatown, these were all racks that I had requested of LADOT.

Now, I just read in the LADOT Bike Blog that they have ordered in 350 more sidewalk racks that they need to place, so make sure you go to the Bike Rack Request Form and ask for one or two in front of your own favorite destination, be it restaurant, bar, club, shop, or office. Just note that when they ask for a contact name and email, they want yours, not the one from the business for which you’re recommending a rack. It takes them a month or two, but they do get to it, if there’s room enough on the sidewalk.
 

The City of Los Angeles, as you probably have heard, recently adopted a new bike plan, and the County of Los Angeles has released a draft of its own prospective bike plan. Various smaller local burgs, from Temple City in the east to Culver City and Santa Monica in the west, are preparing their own bike plans.

Since “on-street facilities” are a major part of all these plans, I figure it’s good to give a quick rundown of what the various terms for bike lanes, paths, tracks, et al mean, so you can see what’s in store for you if much of this ever actually gets put on the ground.

There are other aspects to bike plans, such as providing bike parking, but lanes and other street treatments will get the lion’s share of the attention in coming years, so we’ll concentrate on them for now.

California recognizes three levels of bicycle facilities: Class I, Class I, and Class III. There are a couple of others now in the mix, but let’s start with what will comprise the majority of projects for now.

Class I bike paths are fully-separate paths built only for cyclists. (Some of them, known as MUPs, for “Multi-Use-Paths,” allow pedestrians.) They are limited-access grade-separated bicycle freeways, in effect, with on/off ramps connecting them to crossing streets that they often go over or under.

Or at least the ones built along local rivers do–examples being the various segments of the Los Angeles River Bikeway, and bikeways along the Rio Hondo, the San Gabriel River, and Ballona Creek (pictured). Others, such as the Orange Line Bikeway in the Valley, cross streets at grade, and can suffer from confusing intersections.

These are expensive and do not provide a wealth of local access but are great for getting across town really fast. Some, like the beachside bike path (the “Marvin Braude Bike Path”) are mostly recreational paths, though a few commuters do use them.

Class II bike lanes are the familiar striped lanes on streets. Some, like the one on Santa Monica Boulevard between Sepulveda and Century City (pictured), are excellent; some, like the half-missing lane on Sunset Boulevard through Silverlake and Echo park, are lousy and tend to put you solidly in the Door Zone.

They often accompany “road diets”, where car lanes are narrowed, or where one car lane is actually eliminated, to make room for the bike lane; typically a four-lane road will go down to one car lane in each direction, a two-way center turn lane, and two bike lanes.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, this treatment often results in better traffic flow for cars, and fewer accidents for cars, bikes, and pedestrians, as well as lower car speeds. Residents tend to love them.

Some Class II lanes, such as those on Venice Boulevard, vary wildly over the length of the street.

A Class III treatment is a “Bike Route,” such as 4th Street (pictured) at present–just an ordinary neighborhood street, usually chosen for low motor traffic counts and few hills, that is marked with “Bike Route” signs and not much else. Lately a few of these have gotten sharrows as part of a pilot program by LADOT, but generally there is no treatment other than the signs. These tend to parallel busier, less-pleasant streets such as Third or Wilshire.

There is another treatment popular in Europe, San Francisco, and New York, but still unknown to Los Angeles, called (usually) a “cycle track.” This is a bike lane that is placed between the streetside car parking and the curb, so that the parked cars protect it from traffic. There is usually a painted median to make room for passengers leaving parked cars, and sometimes a concrete curb or even planted median.

There are also, in LA’s plan, “greenways,” which are simply bike paths in or around parks, and there are five levels of definition for what LADOT calls “bicycle friendly streets,” of which Level Five pretty much constitutes a “Bicycle Boulevard.”

A Bicycle Boulevard is a neighborhood street that has been smoothed and signed for bicycle travel, and includes diverters, roundabouts, and other structures that slow or shunt aside car traffic, but have narrow cuts for bikes. Residents can still drive in, but “cutting through” in a car is made difficult or impossible. This benefits people who live there as much as it does cyclists, and is what we hope to get for 4th Street.

These are the basic elements in play in the new Los Angeles City and County bike plans, and many others. (Locally, the City of Long Beach has made the most progress in getting progressive bicycle facilities on the ground; read a bit about it here.)

The City’s new plan promises (eventually) some 1,600 miles of bike paths, lanes, routes, and boulevards.

If you want to help make sure they happen, read up on the plan a bit, then start coming to the Bike Plan Implementation Team meetings–where you can decide how to redesign LA into a bicycle paradise.