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?