To hear Angelenos talk, there’s not enough parking in the city–even though only 30% of our city remains unpaved. That’s right–70% of the land is given over to drivers, and the remnants have to accommodate homes, businesses, schools, parks, libraries, civic buildings, and all the rest.

Yet whenever we as cyclists ask for a shred of asphalt to be given over to us–be it for a bike lane, a cycle track, or a parking corral–space that they owe us!–we hear that “we can’t do that; it will slow down traffic,” or, “It will kill business.”

Yet oddly enough, when you look at places where space has been wrested from greedy drivers and given to cyclists and pedestrians, it seems that life actually gets better –and business gets better too.

New York’s Sadik-Khan closed Times Square to cars, and retail receipts went up 71% in the area. (Car traffic flows better through there too.)

In Groningen, Holland, to quote the Global ideas Bank, “Since 1977, when a six-lane motorway intersection in the city’s centre was replaced by greenery, pedestrianisation, cycleways and bus lanes, the city has staged a remarkable recovery. Rents are among the highest in the Netherlands, the outflow of population has been reversed and businesses, once in revolt against car restraint, are clamouring for more of it.”

In Toronto, a car-dependent city somewhat similar to LA, a study found that on Bloor Street, “…Pedestrians, cyclists and transit users account for the bulk of retail spending on Bloor Street West in the Annex neighbourhood. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that efforts to attract more pedestrians and cyclists will have a more positive economic impact on businesses than maintaining the existing parking on the street. On this section of Bloor Street, the existing parking demand can be accommodated by a reduced number of on-street parking spaces combined with the existing off-street parking spaces. It is clear that many merchants in the study area do not view on-street parking as key to their business.”

Even in LA: the Los Angeles Business Journal recently ran a poll and found that over 60% of respondents say that the building code requries too much parking, and that those requirements inhibit development. (See Josef Bray-Ali’s related article there for more details.)

But all Los Angeles can say is that putting in a bike corral (as we wish to do in Hel-Mel) will reduce the city’s income from that lone parking meter, and will make merchants nervous….

Well, historically merchants have almost always been wrong about bikes, cars, and parking, and have opposed every single project that “threatened” car parking–until it was put in, and they made money. Then they’ve wanted more. Happened at Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, too.

And you know what? When merchants make more money, they pay more in property and business taxes, and then the city makes more money. Because of the freakin’ bike parking, and the buses, and the pedestrians, and the fact that freakin’ cars aren’t crowding out all the life and commerce! That’s known as “value capture” in scientific (instead of boneheaded) planning circles.

Something LA apparently doesn’t know about. All they can think of is a few coins in parking meters–which they have to pay someone a decent wage to collect and then to count. And some merchant who, based on an unexamined assumption, decides that if you give up one parking space, his business will founder. (Which it won’t.)

We have spent billions over the years to plaster all of LA with macadam. But it’s a major trauma to put a bike corral in Hel-Mel. One guy on Melrose is whining, and the city “doesn’t have” the three or four grand it would take.

Of course, the CRA does have 50 million to give away to help multibillionaire Eli Broad pay for a parking garage downtown for his private museum.

But we can’t afford to put in a bike corral!
 

There’s an important meeting coming up this Thursday, June 2nd, that could possibly be a turning point for development in Los Angeles.

A fellow named David Alba will be presenting his GRID concept to the Sierra Club in Koreatown that evening. GRID is a revolutionary transport package that combines advanced harbor facilities with underground electric freight shuttle trains, a passenger Metro, river revitalization, long-distance bike paths, wholly-subterranean electric, water, and sewage pipelines, and carfree mixed-use Transit-Oriented Developments in a single-corridor system that could make freeways, and eventually our horrible sprawl, obsolete. And it does this using existing technologies and local skills, no pie-in-the-sky vaporware or job-killing offshoring.

We have a more complete announcement over on Bicycle Fixation; check it out.

And show up. Time to change the future!

Okay, this isn’t about Ultimate Fitness or Mad Skillz; it’s only about a sweet, slow ride I took on the Westside yesterday–an Art Ride, to be precise.

It was sponsored by the Santa Monica Museum of Art and facilitated (if you’ll permit me to use the gaseous jargon of the business world) by Santa Monica Spoke, that city’s excellent little advocacy group.

We met at Bergamot Station, the famous gallery ghetto located by one of the nastiest intersections in SM, where Spoke’s Cynthia and SMMOA’s Asuka greeted us all passed out free bells, and laid down the law: social ride, no one “left behind” (yes, Cynthia was riffing on the on the MIA rapture), we stop at red lights, etc. After a quick tour of the museum, we saddled up on a gratifying variety of bikes and wandered off into…some of the most charming neighborhoods I’ve ever encountered in that seaside city.

Turns out this wasn’t just an exigency of route wrangling; the neighborhoods themselves were part of the art. So it was fitting that our first stop was on a quiet back street, where a solar architecture specialist had built a two-story studio for himself and his artist wife, replete with passive solar and exposed beam ceilings. If that sort of thing thrills you (and it should), check out w3architects.com. Yes, they ride bikes!

The next leg of the trip took us through that erstwhile boho boulevard, Abbot Kinney, to Santa Monica’s Main Street and Edgemar, a Frank Gehry building filled with food, art, and significant volumes of light and space, where we got to talk with folks from SM’s Buy Local program and its bicycle program as well.

A lot of the folks were casual riders–and some hadn’t been on a bike in years.

They loved it! And I think they’ll be back on two wheels soon.
 

Today was a crisp, brilliant spring day, washed clean by last night’s rain and glowing a deep blue between occasional rafts of shining clouds. Of course I was out there on my bike, as were thousands of others, enjoying the whitecapped sea, the crowds of tourists, freaks, and vendors, the kite flyers, and the joy of being alive on such a day and in such a place.

As it happened, I rode along the Venice boardwalk from the north and then spun up West Washington to get to the Marina. As you know, the beach path runs along the street there, for about a mile from the Grand Canal to just before Abbot Kinney, where it turns into the Marina itself and becomes a separated path again. The south side of Washington is lined with restaurants, boutiques, and hotels, and it was lunchtime when I rode through there. And in that mile there were only six cars parked at this peak hour of weekend beach traffic. There wasn’t even a single car parked in the unmetered strip on the eastern end of that stretch.

Why? Because all those restaurants, boutiques, and hotels have such big parking lots among them that even those never fill up.

I ride through this area often, and there are never many cars parked on the south side of West Washington.

So let’s quite wasting space. The Marvin Braude bike path of which this stretch is a part is one of the most heavily used in California, and is world-famous.

Let’s get rid of the parking on that mile of West Washington and put a fully-separated two-way bike path (ie a “cycle track”) there instead. Great for tourists; great for residents; no loss to businesses, and possibly a gain as more hungry people ride the path. (A lot of casual riders are intimidated by riding on a wide street with fast traffic, which West Washington is.)

Keep the single bike lane on the north side, where there are a lot of houses and where the parking spaces are heavily used, for riders coming west from Lincoln Boulevard or Culver City. But dump the unused parking on the eastbound side and put in a cycle track to connect the marina and Venice portions of the Braude bike path. (And put in more bike racks too; the ones I saw along that stretch were overloaded.)

I know that would make sense, but let’s do it anyway.

Some months ago I stopped in at the shop to grab a replacement for my worn out Gatorskin. I was going to grab the same model but instead TJ pointed me to the new Gator Harsdshell tire. It was billed as the improved tougher version of the DuraSkin. Sharing the same bead-to-bead protection but wrapping further into the sidewall. An extra-wide Poly-X breaker covers the entire tread strip from shoulder-to-shoulder which addressed an issue I once had with a warped sidewall. The specs boast added material in the tread strip which according to Continental not only improves mileage, but lends yet another degree of puncture resistance.

After about 1000 miles of Los Angeles street I’m pleased to report that not only has the tire been holding up great, it feels good and recently it survived a pothole hit that was nasty enough to put a serious kink in my rim and did not pinch flat!

5 of 5 howls for this tire.

-roadblock
Wolfpack Hustle

I heard (from Biking in LA) that the Expo Line has begun striping bike lanes along the part of the route that doesn’t have room for an off-road bike path by the tracks. So I took a detour from my path to the sea this morning and took a picture of LA’s newest bike facility, with paint so fresh there’s nary a tire track on it yet:

Why is this important, considering there will be a nice, big, fast, comfy light rail train running the route?

Well, because if that train is to be fast and comfy, it can’t stop everywhere–it’s a Metro, not a streetcar–but folks will need to get to intermediate points along the route–or points well away from the route.

Long experience has shown planners that most folks won’t walk more than ten minutes to a metro station. In fact, most folks won’t bicycle more than ten minutes either. But, even the most out-of-shape shlub can go four times as far in those ten minutes on a bicycle than on foot.

What planners are discovering is that accommodating bicyclists is one of the best ways to make a metro rail system truly effective for the neighborhoods it serves–something LA’s Metro acknowledged when it lifted all rush-hour restrictions on bringing bikes aboard the LRVs of the Blue, Gold, and Green lines (and Expo, of course, once it’s running) just a week or so back.

All the better that this is happening in a traditionally under-served neighborhood–”underserved” in this case meaning subjected to decades of malign neglect as a result of both private and official racial redlining in a city that was once the most segregated in the US.

Expo will eventually run from downtown through University Park, West Adams, Leimert Park, and Culver City to Santa Monica, and–with its accompanying bike path–really open up transportation options to a big hunk of the city, including USC and several historically black neighborhoods.

Can’t wait to try it out!