Do bike lanes make drivers friendlier?
May 19, 2018 § 14 Comments
You can’t help notice the change when you start getting closer to Santa Monica. The overt hostility that is a fact of life here in the South Bay seems to weaken, then disappear altogether.
Take this morning.
We were pedaling harmlessly down Catalina in Redondo Beach, when a scruffy, overweight guy in a tiny, beat-up Subaru who was double parked shouted through his open window, “Quit running stop signs!”
There were no moving cars in sight at 6:30 AM, and his engine wasn’t even on. Rather than chomp down on the bait, I flung it back in his stinking face with a smile and a wave. “Have a nice day!”
This infuriated him. He fired up the ‘Roo and raced up alongside us. “Quit running stop signs!” he shrieked.
“Thanks,” I said. “Have a great day!”
“Fuck off!” he roared.
“Jesus loves you!” I added with a beatific smile.
Into the peace zone
By the time we got to Santa Monica there were cars everywhere. It was morning rush hour and everyone was in a panic to get extra coffee extra quick while texting and driving and emailing “Traffic!” to their bosses as they frantically looked for a parking slot near their fave kaffeehaus.
We were crammed into the narrow little green stripe with traffic passing inches from us. No one wanted to know why we ran stop signs. No one honked except for a dude who gave us a friendly beep and shouted “Have a good ride!” as he passed.
As we drank our cup of coffee on the sidewalk we marveled at the constant stream of bikers, pedestrians, and people riding those little electric Bird thingies. People were everywhere, and didn’t appear to be following any noticeable rules of the road except for the rule of “The shortest distance between me and there is a straight line and I’m taking it.”
Has it changed or am I older or both or neither?
I remember when there was plenty of conflict riding through Santa Monica and Venice, or at least I think I do, back when Abbott-Kinney was an early morning ground zero for epic Walks of Shame, bedraggled waifs hoofing it barefoot with their high heels in one hand and their handbag in the other, long before Uber.
After the bike lanes went in, and it did take a few years, it seemed like bike riding in Santa Monica exploded, and along with it people’s expectations that lawless, unpredictable, stoned or soon-to-be-stoned bikers/skaters/e-bikers/walkers/Segway-ers were lurking on every corner ready to trash their clear coat. And incredibly, people slowed down, or at least they sure seemed to.
In a similar vein, the horrible Bikeway o’ Death on Hermosa Ave. in the South Bay seems to have resulted in completely non-hostile drivers for that short one-mile stretch, combined as it is with BMUFL stickers in the roadway that parallels the cycle track, which gives cyclists a choice to either ride in the Deathway or on the road. No one honks at me any more there.
Is it possible that badly engineered, inherently dangerous, congested and confusing bike infrastructure can actually slow down motorists, make them more patient, and give cyclists a safer riding environment?
Nowadays when I drive downtown I hold the wheel in a lizard grip because of all the cyclists, none of whom is predictable, and all of whom seem to zoom randomly in and out of the numerous bike lanes. It’s almost as if repeated, nonstop chaos keeps the cagers on their toes.
Or at least, it keeps us off their hoods.
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Bike path crazy pants
November 15, 2017 Comments Off on Bike path crazy pants
Given the spleen that has been vented lately in L.A. regarding bike lanes, I paid close attention to how an integrated, multi-modal transportation network functioned while I was in Vienna. The city is quite small, about 1.5 million people, and it offers easy transport by walking, cars, buses, streetcars, subways, trains, and bikes.
The city’s bike paths are extensive and very well-planned. There is a bike path ring around the inner city, which is actually more like a “D” than a ring, with the straight side being the Donau river. The city’s bike paths follow many of the major streets, are fairly well marked and maintained, and will take you to any part of the city you want to go. In addition to these transportation-oriented bike paths, there are major touring and recreational paths that provide extensive access to large parks and that crisscross the entire country.
Numerous bike shops exist to support recreational and transportation cycling. The city of Vienna offers free City Bikes for trips that last less than an hour, and there are more than 120 pick-up/drop-off bike areas.
Bike paths play a major role in transportation planning. There is a major bridge crossing the Donau that is for bikes only, a completely separate structure that runs parallel to the one for cars. It is pretty boss to ride across that thing and look over at the cagers and think, “Yo, I got a bridge, too!”
After spending ten days riding in the city and its environs, it became abundantly clear that if the goal of this type of bike infrastructure is to provide an integrated, safe, usable, easily understood cycling network, it is, for the most part, a colossal failure. And if this type of bike infrastructure fails so miserably in a small city that has been committed to including bikes in the transportation grid for decades, then I can only conclude that attempts to do this kind of planning in Los Angeles will also fail, only on a larger and more catastrophic and more expensive scale.
As a backdrop to this anecdotal, off-the-pedal critique, I’d like to note that the only time in Vienna and the surrounding countryside I was able to safely and predictably and comfortably get around was when I rode in the lane and behaved the same way that motor vehicles behave. It was necessary to do this because the bike infrastructure always seemed to run out just when you needed it most. This is of course the same experience that anyone on a bike is familiar with in L.A.
Here is what a mature, open-minded, integrated bike path network looks like in one of the most advanced cities in the world:
- Haphazard AF. The paths start and stop with no warning. Despite being pretty savvy about the routes after nine days of riding, my wife and I got immediately off-path simply riding from the Waehringer Guertel to downtown the one day we tried the City Bikes, getting lost on about as easy and well-trodden a path as there is.
- Massive bike-ped conflict. Although some of the paths were well blocked off from vehicles, they were often side-by-side with pedestrian walkways. In a city that has huge pedestrian traffic, especially the inner city, and where large numbers of those walkers are tourists who have no idea how the bike/ped paths work, there was constant friction between walkers who were on the bike path, and bikers who wound up on the ped path.
- Car cut-throughs. The downtown ring is continually bisected by travel lanes for cars to cut through. Each one of these intersections is a potential collision. It also requires much more attentiveness to navigate the constant cross-traffic than it does to simply ride in the traffic lane with the cars.
- Inadequate signage. When you construct a completely alternate transportation system of bike paths, you apparently run out of money to sign it properly. Hence I found myself having to stop and look and think often, something that drivers never have to do–and that you wouldn’t have to do if you were biking on the street.
- Suburban breakdown. As soon as you got very far out of the main city, the bike paths became few and far between. Out of town they vanished completely. Since ultimately you have to learn how to ride in the street anyway, why bother with having to also learn all of the extra bike path skills and techniques and hazard-avoidance and wayfinding?
- Motorist acceptance. The times I rode along Waehringer Guertel and Linke/Rechte Zeile, hugely busy thoroughfares, I had zero problems with car traffic. The lanes are so much narrower than L.A. that there is no option for cars to squeeze by. They have to change lanes. I could tell they didn’t like it, but I only got honked at a couple of times, and had zero punishment passes or close calls. It was much hairier on the inner city bike path ring, as I was constantly afraid of hitting pedestrians.
- Extreme gutter bunny. Many of the bike paths are nothing but striped lanes up against an endless row of parked cars, with treacherous streetcar rails on the left, for example. It requires inordinate skill to thread these hazards and would be much easier to simply ride out in the lane. Many of these bike paths are only a couple of feet wide, with high curbs and traffic islands for the streetcars.
- False security. The green painted bike paths initially feel safer, but you quickly realize that ped traffic and constant vehicular cross-traffic are omnipresent and lethal. It’s more mentally exhausting to ride the paths than to ride in traffic.
- Inefficiency. You have to go much, much slower than you would in the traffic lane. The easy speed of 20-24 mph that you can hold on the guertels would get you or a pedestrian badly hurt on the painted bikeways in the city.
- Salmoning. Because the bike lane/bike paths create a separate travel maze, it is often faster to salmon for short distances, and I saw lots of people doing it. It drives the cagers crazy and doesn’t look terribly safe; in any event it encourages lawbreaking.
Of all the bike infrastructure I saw, the only ones that really did anything for me were the bike paths along the river and inside the parks, where there were no cars at all. It was pretty cool to zoom along a wide, well maintained, well paved bike path for mile after mile and to see only other cyclists. But as far as using bike paths as an efficient way to get around, it seems to me that by far the easiest, safest, most easily understood, and best way is simply to use the existing roadways and follow the same rules that the cagers do.
Auf wiedersehen.
END
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Big City, Bright Lights
October 21, 2017 § 18 Comments
Where you sit in the roadway or the shoulder while pedaling your bike is up to you. I simply hope you’re doing it with a lot of lights.
After the recent smashback here in L.A. from cager trolls and the pitchfork peasants who were enraged that a safer, cleaner, cheaper, sexier, healthier, happier mode of transportation might slow them down fifteen seconds on their one-hour commute, it has become even more evident that cyclists themselves are riven. Lane control advocates shrug at the loss of bike infrastructure; they never wanted it to begin with, beyond sharrows and BMUFL signage. Infrastructure lovers are heartbroken and trying to rally themselves for the next big beating, like kids shuffling into dad’s bedroom knowing he already has the belt off.
I’m happy to report that there’s a solution. We lane control advocates should stop poking a thumb in the eye of the infrastructure lovers. We should stop sharpening our rhetorical sticks, hardening them with fire, and jabbing them into the tender fallacies of those who want more things built in roads to protect bicycles. We should let them go about their business.
In fact, I’m happy to give infrastructure advocates all the rope they want. They can take it out to Playa del Rey, Manhattan Beach and Palso Verdes, do their advocacy, show up at meetings and present factual data, but when they do, here’s a pro tip: Don’t do it near any trees with sturdy, low hanging, horizontal limbs. Because when the pitchfork peasants see your bike infrastructure rope, and understand that it’s a threat to the hegemony of their cages, they will know what to do with it.
Rather than poking holes in the infrastructure lovers’ arguments, we should make common cause with them in this way: Tell them, without judging, that while we’re waiting for the amazing infrastructure that will protect us from cagers (for example, the Santa Monica bike path where no one ever gets hurt by other bicycles and where no bicycle has ever run over and seriously injured a pedestrian), we will all take the fuggin’ lane while lit up like Christmas trees. This includes the infrastructure lovers.
And then, after my cremated ashes have been dispersed by the winds of time, been blown to Jupiter and are circling its outer moon, eventually, I say, when the great infrastructure project is completed such that it has constructed those supremely segregated, superbly striped, sexily signed, perfectly protected, and beautifully barrier-ized bike path/lane/road/highways to cover every alley, every back road, every country lane, every cul-de-sac, every county road, every byway, every dirt road, every highway, every city street, every parking area, and every other possible place where cars and bikes might possibly be at the same place at the same time, then we will be able to have another discussion about whether bike infrastructure is better, safer, preferable, cheaper, more efficient, cheaper to maintain, more popular, and more conducive to expanding cycling than following existing traffic laws and exercising lane control in a lawful manner.
‘Til that happy day when The Infrastructure Saints Go Marchin’ In, however, let’s all take a deep a breath, swallow our ideologies, and take the fuggin’ lane. Lit up like Christmas trees, of course. Mirrors optional.
END
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The sting of defeat
October 19, 2017 § 35 Comments
I winced when I saw a couple of recent tweets by Peter Flax and Ted Rogers acknowledging that their support for the road diets in Playa del Rey and other parts of Los Angeles have been beaten back by the entitled cager class. Peter has written a great article about the fake democracy, fake news, and relentless trolling that has played an outsized role in perverting government on the local level into what it mostly is on the national level: Everything for me, nothing for you, with “me” being the wealthy and “you” being everyone else.
Flax, Rogers, and a whole host of advocates are feeling the pain that South Bay cyclists felt last year when the PV Estates City Council, fueled by the trolling of Garrett Unno and his horrible wife Zoe, the unprincipled rage of bad people like Cynthia Zaragoza, and the anonymous, pseudonymous trolling by Robert Lewis Chapman, Jr., voted to shelve any proactive steps that would make PV safer for vulnerable road users. Flax and Rogers have come to grips with two nasty realities:
- The trolls oppose policies that can prevent killing or maiming vulnerable road users.
- The trolls see such bloodshed as a reasonable price for their convenience.
- The trolling powerfully affects the levers of governmental power.
When the realization hits, it’s devastating. Voting, canvassing, public debate, even modest funding by advocacy groups … all of these things lose to the power of the trolls. The power of a few moderately wealthy, angry trolls who have lots of time on their hands and limitless spleen to vent can galvanize entire voting blocs and can steamroll the needs of the many for the selfish wants of the few. Facts, data, logic, and republican ideals of protecting the weakest in society are laughable concepts that mean nothing when it comes to making transportation decisions regarding bicyclists and pedestrians.
With regard to making LA’s streets safer for vulnerable road users, though, the defeat is largely a function of advocates’ failure use existing law. Road diets, road striping, segregated cycle tracks, and bike lanes are the byproduct of a cyclist-inferiority pathology that has been vigorously promoted by cagers and motordom. Thanks to relentless fearmongering, many cyclists now believe that the only way they can safely use the roadways is by being segregated from it, and their overwhelming fear is of being hit from the rear, even though statistics show that such collisions are a minority of all car-bike collisions.
The bitter truth is this: Whether or not cyclists think that lane control works, road diets and bike infrastructure won’t work in Los Angeles’s angry, white urban areas. White and affluent cagers have shown that they are more than happy to subsidize the perception of speed and efficiency with more pedestrian/cycling deaths. It’s no different from the blase attitude towards the Las Vegas Massacre and Terrorist Attack. Such deaths are the well known, well accepted, and perfectly irrational price that America is more than happy to pay for the unrestricted right to have and use guns. Why should additional dead and maimed vulnerable road users be any different?
Hint: They aren’t.
Unlike the road diets that are never going to happen and the citywide carving out of bike lanes from normal traffic lanes that will never come to pass, lane control uses existing law to empower cyclists and make their activities safer. But empowerment isn’t something that comes and knocks at your door. You have to take it.
This means knowing the circumstances under which you are entitled to take up the full travel lane, when you have to ride as far to the right as practicable, and when you have to pull over to let faster traffic through. Learning these things and pounding them into the heads of cyclists is a task that few advocacy groups want to do because they are so committed to the infrastructure policies that angry cager Angelenos have proven they will never accept. I challenge anyone in LA County Bike Coalition to come to PV Estates or Rancho PV, two of the best cycling destinations in America, and make any headway at all against the evil mayor and her callus henchwankers. To add to the impossibility of positive policies, monstrous and slothful bike hater Zoe Unno now sits on the traffic safety committee. It’s like putting the wolf in charge of the henhouse and giving her a carving knife and gas range to boot.
If bike advocates haven’t gotten the message, they need to listen again: Los Angeles isn’t going to cede an inch of roadway for your exclusive use. So admit defeat and take up arms using existing law: Teach your friends and fellow cyclists, and most importantly teach yourself how to ride safely and legally in the traffic lane. After my years of experience with this technique, I’m confident you’ll find that the water is fine.
Another harsh reality has gradually become clear. As unfair as it may be, and as much of a double standard as it is, we are at a point in cager-bike relations when you have to take care of yourself first. This means lights. If you’re running anything less than two powerful headlamps and anything less than 3-4 powerful lights from the rear at all times, day and night, you are heaping additional risk onto yourself, especially if you are still riding in the gutter or in the door zone. As much as the PV cagers may hate cyclists, the chances are slim that they will kill you intentionally–with the exception, of course, of John Bacon, who appears to have died precisely because of an intentional hit.
In short, the people have spoken: They hate you and don’t care if you die. But at the same time, they don’t want to get your blood on their hood or, even worse, see an increase in their insurance premium. So take the lane. Ride like a Christmas tree. It still beats living on Mom’s couch.
END
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Malibu’s middle finger to cyclists on PCH
May 4, 2015 § 41 Comments
When the Rolling Stones released “Some Girls” in 1978 I was in junior high school. Like most rock lyrics, the title track sounded like “Some girls blahblahblahblah some girls blahblahblah everything I own!” The ratio of blah-to-intelligible-words was about 27-to-one, which meant that I, like most kids, had to hum a lot.
Many years went by and thankfully rock music went with it. However, after moving to California and getting initiated to riding on Pacific Coast Highway I was able to encode one of the mystery lyrics of “Some Girls,” and it was the “blah” after “Let’s go back to blah beach, I’ll give you half, of everything I own.”
There it was, in living color: Zuma Beach. And the reason Mick was going to take the girl back there was to ply her with drugs and then, in the paternity suit/divorce settlement that followed, give her half of everything he owned because California is a community property state.
Even 1/10,000th of everything that Mick Jagger owns in Zuma Beach would be awesome because Zuma is stunningly beautiful. It has great surf. It has eye-popping scenery. The first thongs of spring usually alight here, and the section of PCH that runs through Zuma deposits cyclists onto the doorway of famed canyon climbs like Decker, Encinal, Yerba Buena, and the Beast of the Coast, a/k/a Deer Creek.
PCH also winds its way up to The Rock at Point Mugu, another stunning vista that also happens to mark the turnaround point for most 100-mile PCH sojourns from the South Bay. The stretch of PCH that goes through Zuma Beach is like the rest of PCH after you bust out from Santa Monica. It’s easy and safe and pretty much hassle-free as long as you have the presence of mind to take the lane. The flip side is that being a gutter bunny on PCH is nerve wracking and deadly.
What PCH isn’t, is susceptible to “bicycling infrastructure,” i.e. bike lanes that collect trash that you’re required by law to ride through and that make you fair game for motorists and buses who are only staring straight ahead. PCH is thankfully not susceptible to bike lanes because in most places along PCH to Zuma Beach the highway abuts cliff on the left and streetside parking on the right. There is no place for the misguided to build bike lanes into which cyclists must be corralled.
This is great because the absence of a bike lane really encourages you to take the lane and learn how to ride in it.
The City of Malibu, however, driven by bike-haters, non-cyclist city planners, foolish CALTRANS highway engineers, and I suppose a coterie of cycling “advocates” who are worse than ignorant when it comes to the reality of cycling on PCH, has put in a two-mile bike lane on the southbound section of PCH that goes through Zuma Beach.
For 25 miles in either direction there are no bike lanes and then suddenly, bam, a bike lane. To make things worse the bike lane is jammed up against a two-mile stretch of Zuma Beach streetside parking. All of the Some Girls and all of the Kelly Slaters park here. You don’t know fun until you whiz by a parked van at 22 mph only to have the door thrown open and some stoned dude tumbles out with a 7-foot surfboard. Then he yells at you and tells you to fuck off assuming you aren’t now on the pavement and awaiting a life flight.
After two miles the bike lane ends and you’re back where you started — hopefully in the lane, but more likely crammed over onto the shoulder because the bike lane has primed you to cower and huddle and avoid the passing traffic. This is an easy fear psychosis to fall into because the traffic is passing you at 60 when you’re in the bike lane, unlike when you’re in the travel lane and the approaching traffic slows, changes lanes, and passes you in the No. 1 lane with space and speed to spare.
Even if you’re a bike lane advocate (and I hope you aren’t) this one is complete rubbish unless you live in Zuma Beach. For anyone just passing through, and trust me, like Mick the residents really want you to keep on trucking, the bike lanes are the ultimate in confusion and stupidly incomplete infrastructure.
On May 9 I’ll be protesting the illegal harassment of cyclists by LA Sheriff’s Department at Malibu City Hall on Saturday, 9:00 AM and also complaining about these awful deathtrap bike lanes. I’m leaving the parking lot at Temescal Canyon and PCH at Will Rogers State Park at 8:00 AM-ish and will be riding slowly, safely, and legally — in the lane! I’m leaving the South Bay from the Manhattan Beach Pier at 6:30
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Cycling in the South Bay 