iggy-cortes:

We’re having a Halloween Block Party and Alley-Cat on Sunday 30 October ·  19:00 -  23:30 @ the Bicycle District (melorose and heliotrobe). Come and party with us Halloween style! Bands, DJ’s, games, food, costume contest and more!!!!!

Alley-Cat  @5:30

Invite Yo Friends

Last week, a group of Dutch engineers and planners visited Los Angeles to obtain an overview of cycling in our city . They worked with teams of advocates, city planners, LADOT engineers, and community organizers to review three upcoming bike infrastructure projects and give suggestions for making them better. The event was called ThinkBike; it is sponsored by the Dutch government (and indeed Dutch Consul General Bart van Bolhuis actively participated), and it makes regular tours of cities around the world to help with bike planning. The planning team had just come down from San Francisco, and I was among the folks who met them fresh off the plane at the bicycle bridge over Ballona Creek in Playa del Rey. LADOT supplied some bikes, and off we went, cruising up the serene isolation of the Ballona Creek bike path, then plunging the poor Dutch into the traffic chaos of Venice Bouelvard on what must have been a really bad hair day on the westside.

The endured what we endure every day: rushing cars, roaring trucks, drivers swearing and honking, buses and trailers parked in the bike lane, and of course LA’s patented rough pavement, which would barely pass muster in a warehouse district back alley in Bombay! And of course our sprawl: you could cross Amsterdam three times in the distance we pedaled that day.

After shaking them up thusly for a few miles, we veered north into Hancock Park and the one-of-these-days-Alice bicycle-boulevard-to-be, followed by the fine new bike lanes on 7th, and ending with a ramble through downtown (which they loved!) and beer on a rooftop terrace at their hotel.

The next day was the official ThinkBike opening session, which I could not attend, and the next two half days saw the Dutch team and our local folks (including a number of hapless and not-quite-in-shape LADOT engineers) riding around Pacoima, downtown’s Spring and Main streets, and Vermont Avenue by USC, reviewing upcoming LA bike projects through a Dutch prism.

Friday afternoon they worked up quick-and-dirty presentations, and then they strutted their stuff at the closing sessions, which I did attend.

Let me just say that Hillie Talens and her crew obviously inspired the locals to think outside the stucco box, and go beyond the usual half-baked treatments we are all too often given here.

Around USC, the team envisioned, besides the obvious bike lanes on Vermont, a two-way bike lane on one side of Jefferson where students have for years been riding against traffic to get from campus housing to the school itself. In other words, formalizing a natural flow of traffic and making it safe! And they designed a bicycle boulevard for 36th St. to make the connection to Vermont and Jefferson (which would receive standard bike lanes as well); this would facilitate bicycle travel for the neighborhood’s permanent residents among their home blocks and the retail and employment centers on the two arterials, as well as the upcoming Expo Line station.

In Pacoima, the team presented three possible treatments of northern Van Nuys boulevard, ranging from slightly improved standard bike lanes to a radical reshaping of the street into an esplanade prioritizing bus rapid transit and bikes, with only two car lanes and no curbside parking. (There is an abundance of off-street parking in the area, vastly underutilized.) They also discovered a parallel street that could become a bicycle boulevard with almost no changes.

And Main and Spring streets also inspired three levels of treatment, with the finest one being nearly as radical as the van Nuys plan, resulting in an extended bicycle/pedestrian/transit plaza with a level of street life that would make any merchant or restauranteur swoon–or any lover of city life, for that matter.

I snapped a couple of shots of their PowerPoint slides (at an unfortunate angle) and tweaked them in Photoshop to make them readable; take a look below:

Main Street road diet:

Spring Street digital maquette:

And velo-citizens arriving for the Friday closing session (bike valet courtesy of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition):

New Road Runner bags in stock.

New London Edition Chrome bags in Stock!!

Check out our Super Sale Box! We got all kinds of good stuff starting at $5!