First Person Alley Cat Race – VCR Thanksgiving from Vernon Shaw on Vimeo.

hernian:

I love GoPro Alley Cat videos, specially if it’s from a race I organized. Check out the video from the VCR Thanksgiving race 4!

Thanks Vernon!

ALL DAY TODAY.. CUMBIA TUESDAY Orange 20 Bikes Come dance a cumbias with Cecilio, Brian, Alie,  Hernan Ezequiel Montenegro and the rest of the staff. Nuthing but Celso Pina and Sonora Dinamita all day!!!

Get ready to shred!

This is a message that the race promoter sent on Facebook.

“this is the waiver that will be needed along with your entry money and helmet to race .. if you dont have a waiver or a helmet NO RACE!!!

print it out sign it and have it with you when you check in to race

waiver”

One inevitably hears groaning from the motorhead-American community whenever local governments propose taking back a tiny sliver of that valuable public land they hog with their big ol’ cars to make it available to others. Especially if the others are cyclists.

You know from other posts of ours here that drivers don’t in fact pay for the road and parking acreage they use, and that non-drivers are overtaxed to subsidize the driving hobby…but perhaps what you don’t know is that a lot of these same drivers want traffic-calmed, bike-friendly streets in their own neighborhoods! They just don’t want them in your neighborhood, which they prefer to hurry through (usually at illegal speeds) on their way to Very Important Business at the cosmetics counter or the steakhouse.

I was thinking of this today, since on Black Friday, Gina and I had to go to the local mall, which for us is The Grove. Her iPhone had drowned and she had a big conference call coming up tout de suite

Please note: this mall, with its parking structure that is far bigger than the mall itself, is designed to look like a carfree street from some generic European city, complete with tram tracks and an operating tram! It’s like Disenyland: people will drive for miles to be someplace where they can walk around without cars bothering them. Ditto Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade: walk out of the parking strtucture, and suddenly you’re in one of those effete, socialistic European carfree streets, surrounded by pedestrians, fountains, bike racks, street musicians…and stores.

So anyway, we head off to The Grove and decide to cut through Park La Brea, a gated community (originally not gated, by the way) that seems to have been built along the lines of Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” concept, which foresaw clusters of high-density housing in park-like settings designed to be accessed by automobile.

But this version, built right here in LA, is full of traffic-calming measures: speed humps, speed bumps, narrow lanes, landscaped medians, roundabouts…and bike lanes!

Yep, once at home, the motorheads want for themselves all those road goodies they don’t want you to have in your own neighborhoods, where they would slow them down too much on their way to the fake Dutch street at the mall.

And you know what? I think this is cause for hope as well as indignation.

It means they’re really on our side, but just can’t admit it to themselves.

Yet.
 

Orange 20 coozies in stock! come by the shop and buy one! Rep the 20 every time you take a chug!