palos verdes peninsula | Cycling in the South Bay

Hired Guns: Part 8

April 12, 2017 § 12 Comments

Part 8: The Interchickens

Anonymity is a powerful thing, and sometimes it’s a force for good. The Federalist Papers were written anonymously, and the numerous hacks that have exposed public and private corruption in our own century couldn’t have been done except under cloak of secrecy.

But anonymity’s power can be used for evil just as easily for good. Threats and harassment from nameless adversaries can punish the innocent and allow the person hiding behind the mask to behave in ways deserving the most extraordinary opprobrium. The most famous of these was probably the troll Michael Brutsch, who, despite his online bravado, became a whimpering sop when he learned he would be outed as a troll and purveyor of hate speech: “When Chen informed [Michael Brutsch] about the impending exposé, he pleaded with Chen not to publish it because he was concerned about the potential impact on his employment and finances, noting that his wife was disabled and he had a mortgage to pay. He also expressed concern that he would be falsely labeled a child pornographer or anti-Semite because of some of the subreddits he created.”

Using anonymity to push political agendas is time-honored, and it is under cover of anonymity that at least one of the major players is leading the charge against the PV Estates Police Department. This culture of secrecy and clandestine hate follow the trajectory of racism in PV Estates as well, where blacks have epithets painted on their homes under cover of darkness and racial insults are scrawled on cars at PV High by nameless vandals.

Who are these people so opposed to the PV Estates Police Department? Why are they so fearful of signing their name at the bottom of the screeds they write? How do they look at themselves in the mirror knowing that for all their keyboard bravado, they still lack the courage of a simple signature?

Answering this question takes us yet one more step along the journey of understanding law enforcement in Palos Verdes Estates. The police report linked below is disturbing in the nth degree. Read it for yourself, and imagine what would have happened if the antagonist had been black, rather than a well-known and infamous resident of PVE itself.

[Link here: Resident’s blatant obstruction_of_law_enforcement during a traffic stop.]

If you read the link, you will doubtless be wondering who this person is. Is it the same bedwetter who wastes countless hours of police time with barking dog complaints? Is it the same person who has launched attack after anonymous attack on cyclists who both live in and ride through the community?

More disturbingly, is this one whackjob all it takes to throw PV law enforcement off its game? A bizarre resident wielding a camera phone? What happened to those staples of law enforcement known as mace, handcuffs, radio, and baton?

The answer is simple: There are two penal codes in PV Estates. One for white, rich, spoiled, angry residents, and one for everyone else.

END

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Hired Guns: Part 7

April 11, 2017 § 15 Comments

Part 7: The delicate bedwetters on the Hill

When we turn to the PV Estates Police Department and try to compare it with the LA Sheriff’s Department, a number of problems arise. The first is that they are completely different organizations. One is a massive, multi-billion dollar police force that, like an aircraft carrier going off the edge of a cliff, is extremely hard to control. The other is a tiny, semi-private security service whose employees are easily manipulated by the taxpayers who pay their salaries.

The media and the rich love to paint the image of wealthy people as being super confident, strong, hard-to-rattle titans of industry. Sometimes they are. But just as often they can be thin-skinned, vain, petty little people whose financial security gives them little to do but whine, complain, and grouse about the minor annoyances of life that the rest of us shrug off without a moment’s concern.

It’s hard to grasp how infantile some of the PV Estates residents can actually be. There’s one particular area of the city located by Bluff Cove and dominated by a couple of streets, Paseo del Mar and Via Horcada, where there is an unbelievable concentration of events that can only be described as the anxieties of adult bedwetters.

It’s these people and their ilk who dominate much of the time and efforts of the PV Estates police, people who demand to be coddled, mollified, hand-held, and who require that their every damp didy be accompanied with a gentle butt-wiping by a steady hand. These people consume untold hours of the police department’s time, are often abusive, nasty, aggressive, and make endless calls to police dispatch complaining about everything from raccoons to imaginary sounds.

You think I’m making this up? Keep reading.

This matters because as police chief Kepley points to increased police department expenses specifically due to cyclists, he fails to mention the hundreds of man-hours burned through by one or two whiny bedwetters, and he fails to tell the city council that a lot of the city’s police expenses result from the fact that the police force behaves like a nanny rather than a police department. At the last city council meeting we were treated to a rogues’ gallery of brown and black arrestees, showing the residents how busy the police were controlling serious crime.

What they didn’t show were the stats and incident reports filed by short, balding, middle-aged tattletales that make policing PV Estates the law enforcement equivalent of a nursery school for spoiled brats.

So I’ve compiled the reports for them.

Below is a very small sampling of police reports from the Via Horcada/Paseo del Mar area, which seems to be ground zero for pee-pee in the pants, anxiety-ridden grown men. The names of the complainants have been redacted by the department, but it won’t take you much independent investigation to figure out who at least one of these infantile crybabies is. More importantly, it shows that the city isn’t necessarily overrun with bad people, it’s just that a handful of truly deplorable bedwetters with too much free time and too little maturity have made it a living hell for everyone else.

As you click on the links below, ask yourself a few questions:

Are you fucking kidding me?
Are these the same people who complain about cyclists?
Can a police department slavishly obedient to people like this fairly enforce the law?

Also, note that virtually all of these “incidents” occur in the vicinity of the 700 block of Via Horcada and the 600 block of Paseo del Mar. I’ve highlighted the relevant items that the officers were called out to investigate, as well as the number of officers who responded to the call and wrote up the supplemental report. Apparently, the time clock at PVE PD gets ridden so hard it should have a saddle on it … and most hypocritically of all, the same people who complain about the cost and the overtime of the police don’t seem to mind at all when it’s their butt that’s being wiped at time-and-a-half.

So here ya go, with apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

Mystery of the Assault by the Baby-Stroller Jackanape (Link: assault_of_minor)
Mystery of the Bedwetter Bothered by the Barking Dog (Link: barking_dog_1)
Mystery of the Off and On Barking Dog (Link: barking_dog_2)
Mystery of the 15-Minutes Barking Dog Causing Multiple Bedwettings (Link: barking_dog_3)
Mystery of the Barking Dog So Mysterious That It Can’t Be Found (Link: barking_dog_4)
Mystery of the Barking Dog Who Could Read Notices in the Mailbox (Link: barking_dog_5)
Mystery of the Barking Dog Who Was Taken Inside (Link: barking_dog_6)
Mystery of the Barking Dog Who Was Reading More Notices (Link: barking_dog_7)
Mystery of the Multiple Bedwetters Upset by the Mysterious Barking Dog (Link: barking_dog_8)
Mystery of the Family of Bedwetters Awoken by the Barking Dog (Link: barking_dog_9)
Mystery of the Dog that Knew to Stop Barking When the Police Showed Up (Link: barking_dog_10)
Mystery of the Not Excessively but Just Enough Barking Dog (Link: barking_dog_11)
Mystery of the Two Dogs Night (Link: barking_dog_12)
Mystery of the Non-Barking Dog Left Out in the Non-Rain (Link: barking_dog_13)
Mystery of the Legally Barking Dogs in the Area (Link: barking_dog_14)
Mystery of the Home Alone Dogs Who Didn’t Bark (Link: barking_dog_15)
Mystery of the Complainant Who Wanted to Find Out About the Dog That Didn’t Bark (Link: barking_dogs_16)
Mystery of the More Non-Barking Dogs (Link: barking_dog_17)
Mystery of the Dogs Not Barking After Two Hours (Link: barking_dogs_18)
Mystery of the Dog That Didn’t Bark for Ten Minutes (Link: barking_dog_19)
Mystery of the Dog That Didn’t Bark for Over Ten Minutes (Link: barking_dog_20)

This is a tiny fraction of the complaints emanating from this very small area of a couple of blocks; most of the complaints I’ve obtained were either made by or involve the same bedwetter. Keep in mind that these complaints about noise are coming from a place where the lot sizes are massive and the homes are essentially walled compounds. How would these people even exist in normal society if the sound of an imaginary barking dog drives them nuts? Answer: They wouldn’t.

I’ve obtained hundreds and hundreds of pages of this crap from 2010 to 2017, mostly in this one neighborhood, covering everything from the Hound of the Baskervilles mystery above to even more unbelievable stuff–and yes, I’m going to post another batch of these high crimes and misdemeanors tomorrow. Hopefully when the city council meets on April 25 they’ll make an impassioned plea to save the police department so that it can continue preventing diaper rash from these pillars of the community.

From the looks of these reports, they’d better be buying their talcum powder by the barrel.

END

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Hired Guns: Part 5

March 29, 2017 § 42 Comments

Part 5: Let the Past Speak for Today

If you had told me last July, when I participated in the first protest against the PV Estates police department and the city’s failure to seriously deal with cyclist safety, that I would be digging into old newspaper articles about the PV elite’s choice of Halloween costumes in the 1960s, I would have given you five dollars and suggested a shelter.

But here I am, doing exactly that, following the wicked strands that explain how PV Estates became what it is, and trying to figure out how that can inform someone trying to decide whether, as a rider, your fortunes are best with the local cops or with the county sheriff. Because racism in PV Estates didn’t simply begin in 1923, it is alive and well in the present.

Indeed, it never left, and in the words of the city’s own boosters, it was until recently something to be bragged and chortled about in the society section of the Palos Verdes News. This newsclip from 1965 tells you much of what you need to know.

1965_halloween_party

And for those who think that 1965 is ancient history, that things have gotten so much better, there’s the memoir by Jennifer Baszile, who recounts the welcome her family received when it moved from “low-rent” RPV to toney PV Estates:

braszile_black_girl_next_door

This bit of “ancient history” occurred in 1975. Still, some will argue that 1975 was more than forty years ago and that surely things have changed. Except that as of 2014, they hadn’t. At a Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration, one of the surfers alleged to be a member of the Lunada Bay Boys surfer gang purportedly donned blackface and an afro wig. Did I mention it was on MLK Day?

lunada_bay_boys_blackface A year later, garden variety racism in PV Estates had blossomed into allegations of a full-on hate crime. On the September 11 anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York, PV Estates teens savagely attacked a Pakistani liquor shop owner in the city, beating him to a pulp and causing serious injuries. In this amazing bit of reporting by the Daily Breeze’s Larry Altman, readers are presented with the anguish and suffering… of the teens’ parents, who now find themselves being sued by the victim. Instead of focusing on the teens’ admissions that they almost beat the victim to death, the Daily Breeze makes sure that its readers know that defense counsel believes the victim is “looking for dollar signs.” Getting beaten with bats is a tough way to earn your payday, is all I can say to that.

And why stop in 2015? 2016 had this gem:

racial_slur_on_car_pvhs

Finishing with a current racism update for 2017.

swastika_pvhs

So there you have it, racism fans: A founding document enshrining segregation, and an unbroken string of hate crimes and racist activities stretching right up until three days ago. Does anyone doubt that PV Estates has a problem?

Department of Justice investigation, anyone? And yes, this has something to do with cycling. But even if it didn’t please tell me you’d still be appalled.

END

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Hired Guns: Part 4

March 28, 2017 § 55 Comments

Part 4: White-out, Whites In

The PV Estates CCRs came in three booklets, one for each of the city’s three subdivided tracts: Margate, Lunada Bay (home of the racist surfer gang, and Valmonte. The beginning of each booklet is promotional copy designed to show new home owners how fortunate they are to own property in this exclusive, snowflake community. It’s all harmless stuff until you reach page 4. In each booklet the third paragraph from the bottom is whited out.

Before …

After finishing the ad copy I came to page 17, which lists the actual declarations setting forth the covenants and community regulations. Article I contains the basic property use restrictions, and Section 1 lets you know in no uncertain terms that if you wanted to erect a “columbarium” in PV Estates, well, you’d better take your funeral urns elsewhere. In the same vein of keeping the neighborhood Beaver Cleaver wholesome, landowners were barred from erecting institutions for the care of those “afflicted with tuberculosis,” the “mentally impaired,” and the “victims of drink or drugs.” This last prohibition might empty out much of the community, and especially the high school if ever enforced. A ban on the mentally impaired would take city council qualifications to a whole new level.

Section 1 then mysteriously skips to Section 3, and it’s not because the founders couldn’t count to 2. It’s because, as with the ad copy on page 4, the Palos Verdes Homes Association has meticulously gone through each and every CCR booklet and whited that section out.

article_1_section_2_white-out

I got a can of acetone, a pocket knife, a piece of Scotch Brite, and sat down with a cup of patience. Carefully sopping the Scotch Brite with acetone and gently rubbing it over the white-out, little by little the censored text appeared. On page 4, here’s what it said:

After.

And on page 17, the cleaned up text read thus:

article_1_section_2_cleaned_complete

So my suspicion about Garrett Unno was borne out—not to mention other anti-cycling opponents active in PV Estates with non-Caucasian names like Zaragoza and Bianchi. They all live in a neighborhood whose CCRs specifically and legally stated that no one of “Asiatic descent” or not of the white “Caucasian race” may live there. Other names immediately came to mind: Council member Lin, new council member Kao … they all sounded pretty “Asiatic” to me.

After a bit more reflection it occurred to me that perhaps the offensive language had been whited out for an admirable reason. Perhaps the PV Homes Association had, after Shelley v. Kraemer and the passage of Civil Code 1352.5, voted to amend the declarations. Perhaps the homes association whited out the language because these odious racist restrictions had in fact been stricken from the CCRs and it was cheaper to use liquid paper than reprint a whole new set of books. Perhaps PV Estates wasn’t still living on its racist foundations after all.

That’s about the time the results from my title search came in. I’d run the search on the home in PV Estates I once rented, 1720 Via Zurita. With the exception of changes to property setback rules and alterations in the minimum housing prices, nothing else in the CCRs had ever been amended, at least according to the title search for this property. The racially restrictive language in PV Estates, as far as I could tell, was alive, well, and still breathing life into the prejudices of the people who lived there — regardless of whether or not they were legally enforceable.

And in case you wanted to know where the Palos Verdes Homes Association stood on the matter, well, look no farther than the white-out, because that’s the language assuring whites they will always be in. They’ve whited it out, but you know, wink wink nudge nudge, the real meaning is literally just below the surface. Of course it’s still possible that the CCRs have been amended and recorded with the county and my search simply failed to turn them up.

We all know about founding documents that don’t have the force of law but that nonetheless serve as moral and philosophical guiding lights. The most famous one is our Declaration of Independence, which had no force of law but whose aspirations to freedom for all people were the moral philosophy that abolitionists and those who believed in civil rights never lost sight of. The hopes and dreams of noble ideas can work their way down through the years to bring out the best in us.

But on the other hand, the foundational philosophy of racial hate that underpinned PV Estates has carried its noxious stench down to the present day. Harassment, violence, exclusion, corruption, and even death have been its spawn. And to make the irony perfect, that legacy is propagated by people in PV Estates, who in the technical terms of the CCRs that originally governed this special little snowflake on the hill, are still non-white, non-Causasian persona non grata.

END

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Hired Guns: Part 3

March 27, 2017 § 28 Comments

Part 3: Under Their Thumb

As I slowly got sucked into the Biker Gang Imbroglio, a contest between people protesting the death of three cyclists on the PV Peninsula and a small coterie of outraged residents who hated cyclists, the bad people began coming out of the woodwork. In addition to the “everyone knows who he is” anonymous troll, a handful of PV Estates residents, rather than hiding behind anonymity, publicly decried the presence of cyclists in their city and strongly opposed any steps to erect signs or to enforce laws protecting them.

One of the city’s most committed opponents to signage was the husband-wife team of Garrett and Cynthia Unno. At first I concluded that they simply disliked cyclists, didn’t want outsiders (black people) in their city, and had zero concern for the recent victims, one of whom, John Bacon, may have been murdered.

But the more I listened to their implacable opposition to the basic safety steps recommended by the city’s traffic safety committee and approved by the city council – decisions later rescinded thanks to anti-cycling anger – the stranger it seemed. Of all people, Garrett Unno should have been advocating for cyclist safety. Of all people, Garrett Unno should have been on the side of the weak and the harassed. Of all people, Garrett Unno should have been fighting for justice.

Why? Because he is apparently of Japanese descent.

So?

To answer that resounding “So?” I had to dig a little bit more into Supreme Court history, because the segregation of communities like PV Estates didn’t stop with Buchanan v. Warley, and it wasn’t limited to blacks. In fact, after Justice Day struck down city ordinances banning the sale of property to blacks, communities like PV Estates, far from throwing in the towel, approached the goal of segregation even more aggressively than before.

And in California, where the object of white hate was every bit as intensely directed at Chinese and Japanese as it was at blacks, newly forming communities had a brutally racist and segregationist tool at the ready: A device called the racially restrictive covenant.

Thanks to the single most destructive decision by the Supreme Court ever directed at civil rights, aptly named The Civil Rights Cases, the Fourteenth Amendment was held in 1883 to apply only to state action. Private discrimination and segregation were and are still legal. PV Estates and almost every new community in California used this carte blanche to write restrictions into their founding documents that forbade ownership by certain people.

“Certain” had a specific meaning: “Negro,” “Of African Descent,” and “Asiatic.” Racially restrictive covenants eventually ran aground in 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that although racist restrictions were legal, the Fourteenth Amendment forbade their enforcement by the state. The case was Shelley v. Kraemer, but it had little effect on desegregation because by 1948 communities like PV Estates were already lily white and the Federal Housing Administration had already been redlining California communities for ten years, a practice that made it impossible for blacks to buy property in “white only” areas as designated by the federal government’s housing agency.

As I read the Supreme Court decisions and sifted through the copious online information about FHA redlining, I started wondering about PV Estates. What did its original covenants, conditions, and restrictions – its CCRs – actually say? Were they really racist? And if they were, had they ever been amended? In other words, were people like Garrett Unno the specific target of racist exclusion from PV Estates? Were people like Garrett Unno, non-whites, still living under CCRs in PV Estates that technically forbade them from living there, even though such bans were unenforceable?

I began to doubt whether such restrictions had ever even existed. The more I searched the less I found. So I hired a title company to do a search on a property in PV Estates, hoping that the search would come up with the original CCRs, as well as pull all of the amendments that would show me that even if PV Estates had originally been a racist-zoned community, at some point in the enlightened future the residents would have amended them to strike out the offensive language, enforceable or not.

Since CCRs were given to all new homeowners in the city by the PV Homes Association, it was inconceivable that along with your purchase you would receive a shiny copy of regulations banning all blacks.

Then I heard back from the title guy, who said “It’s gonna take a while. And in the meantime you might check with the city clerk to see if they have a copy.”

I did, and they didn’t. But they referred me to the Homes Association, which happened to office next door to city hall. I called. “Can I get a copy of the city’s CCRs?” I asked.

“Sure!” the cheery woman said. “Just come down and pick up a copy.”

The next day I was sitting on my couch with copies of the original CCRs. Almost a hundred years old, printed on the highest quality paper, yellowed from age but still sturdier than any new book you’ll find at Barnes and Noble, this was the founding document that governed your residency in the city when you joined the community as a property owner in 2017. And what I found in it was incredible.

Original 1923 CCRs for Palos Verdes Estates, Lunada Bay Tract

END

Hired Guns: Part 2

March 23, 2017 § 32 Comments

Part 2: Red Cross Store Blues

When I was a kid there was a lot of empty time. My Dad had a set of Leadbelly’s Last Sessions and I’d put them on the record player when no one was home because if you were a little kid using the adult record player you would get an ass beating. Huddie Ledbetter was himself part of the great black exodus from the South, leaving Texas after serving a prison sentence in Louisiana.

Towns across America were viciously racist in the early 20th Century, and few protests capture the times better than Leadbelly’s Red Cross Store Blues, a song in which the protagonist refuses to be snookered by the Red Cross welfare stores to enlist in a war he has no intention of joining. The other giant of the early blues era and a World War I veteran, Bill Broonzy, was even more to the point with Black, Brown and White.

The work of great blues musicians may seem irrelevant to cyclists pedaling through a rich white town a century later, but the tools put in place to oppress blacks in PV Estates almost a hundred years ago have proven equally effective at harassing another group of undesirables: Bicyclists.

There is disagreement about why so many PV Estates residents so virulently oppose bicycling. My opinion is a minority one, but it has the advantage of being backed by over four hundred years of history: The city’s behavior is rooted in racism.

We don’t have to go back to the slave ships to understand how important racism was to the founding of PV Estates, as well as the founding and maintenance of its police force. The city’s founders spelled it out, quite literally, in black and in white. Their founding document? Racially restrictive deed covenants that forbade the sale of property to non-whites.

In this regard PV Estates was no different from hundreds of other communities across America, and its origins are indistinguishable from California’s other richest and whitest coastal communities. Of the 13,438 people who lived in PV Estates as of the last census, 161 were black. That’s 1.2 percent. This segregation of the races was inherent in the development of the community and countless others like it. Leadbelly and Broonzy would recognize PV Estates today at a glance for the “sundown town” that it is.

Even though we take vague comfort (as long as we’re white) that in some ways race relationships in America have changed since PV Estates was created as a subdivision in 1923, in some fundamental ways those relationships haven’t. I always assumed that PV Estates, like the urban Texas cities I grew up in, was racist. But it wasn’t until I got embroiled in the Great Bicycle Gang Imbroglio that I began to understand that PV Estates wasn’t casually, or accidentally, or coincidentally racist. It was methodically laid out, planned, and executed as a racist community. But as with so much else in our national fabric, to understand how important racial purity was for the founders of the city, you have to turn to law, and you have to understand that PV Estates’ desire to remain racially pure was not unique, special, or unusual. A look into PV Estate’s founding mythology of racial purity is a click away on the Supreme Court’s 1917 decision of Buchanan v. Warley.

Gazing back a century to 1917 it’s almost impossible to use the right lens. Rather than focusing on the future they didn’t yet know – computers, phones, air travel for the masses, television, video cameras, full carbon bikes that are 100% pure carbon, or even bicycles with gears – it’s a lot easier to focus on what their recent past was. The year 1917 was only fifty-two years after the Civil War. 1865 was to them as 1965 is to us: Recent history to most, living history to many, and still redolent with personal recollection and experience.

Americans were still struggling with the awesome weight of understanding the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution: Blacks were people, citizens, the equal of whites, and entitled to the same rights. Much of that “understanding” though involved a low-grade, unending war against implementing those guarantees, and no place was a more bitter battleground than the U.S. Supreme Court.

Joseph McKenna, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Day, Edward Douglass White, Willis Van Devanter, Mahlon Pitney, James Clark McReynolds, and John Hessin Clark were on the U.S. Supreme Court when lawyers argued Buchanan v. Warley. All were northerners except for McReynolds (Kentucky), and White (Louisiana). Louis Brandeis had not yet been confirmed at the time of oral argument and was nominally from Kentucky, but raised in a Jewish family from Prague that valued German culture and that prized Schumann and Schiller as dinner time conversation topics, it’s safe to say that his childhood had little in common with the redneck state in which he was raised.

This constellation of justices, that included two of the greatest jurists to ever sit on the court, rendered the opinion in Buchanan v. Warley, which confronted a simple issue: Can a white man sell property to a black man even though the city of Louisville had an ordinance prohibiting it? It was a test case set up by the NAACP to fight the new wave of segregation that was crashing like a giant close-out over the cities that were absorbing the great black migration from south to north.

Justice William Day, writing for the majority, was no slouch. In his nineteen-year tenure on the court he penned over four hundred opinions, of which only eighteen were dissents. He was an enemy of large corporations and voted with antitrust majorities throughout his time as a justice. But it was nonetheless surprising when he ruled that ordinances prohibiting blacks from owning property in white neighborhoods were unconstitutional.

The decision sent shock waves through the nation. It was the first time in the prior thirty-eight cases that had come before the court regarding civil rights that the court had ruled in favor of blacks. And although the racist south was most deeply entrenched fighting the Fourteenth Amendment, few if any northern or western communities in America wanted to integrate either, and a quick review of PV Estates’ 2010 census data shows that for this enclave at least, little has changed. “If you’re black, oh brother, get back, get back, get back.”

But in those days when questions of race were still so close to the carnage of the Civil War, and the status of blacks had only been elevated in principle rather than in fact, racists felt no qualms about putting their bestial arguments into Supreme Court briefs. Justice Day noted “That there exists a serious and difficult problem arising from a feeling of race hostility which the law is powerless to control, and to which it must give a measure of consideration, may be freely admitted.” This is of course the mantra of the anti-politically correct, or the Trumpers of 2017, a hundred years later: We hate blacks and the law can’t stop us from hating them.

Yet Justice Day was not hobbled by this reality as he considered and then struck down the racist arguments supporting discrimination in housing sales: “It is the purpose of such enactments, and, it is frankly avowed, it will be their ultimate effect, to require by law, at least in residential districts, the compulsory separation of the races on account of color. Such action is said to be essential to the maintenance of the purity of the races, although it is to be noted in the ordinance under consideration that the employment of colored servants in white families is permitted, and nearby residences of colored persons not coming within the blocks, as defined in the ordinance, are not prohibited.” The racists wanted separation of the races but, apparently, not when it came to their servants. This parallel in PV Estates is evident any weekday on countless city streets, where Hispanic workers tend the yards on condition that they leave the city at day’s end. Justice Day made clear that the case was not one of maintaining racial purity, but a white man’s right to sell his property to a black man if he saw fit, and vice versa.

The appellants argued that the proposed segregation would promote the public peace by preventing race conflicts. “Desirable as this is, and important as is the preservation of the public peace, this aim cannot be accomplished by laws or ordinances which deny rights created or protected by the Federal Constitution,” was Day’s curt response.

Finally, Day rebutted the racists’ strongest suit, one that PV Estates residents still bandy about today — property values: “It is said that such acquisitions by colored persons depreciate property owned in the neighborhood by white persons. But property may be acquired by undesirable white neighbors or put to disagreeable though lawful uses with like results.”

And just like that, the constitutionality of these ordinances was tossed on the rubbish heap.

If only racism could have been tossed on the rubbish heap with it.

END

*Note: I’m cobbling this together in fits and starts and am only up to Part 2. The next three installments will be published next week. In the meantime, back to our regular bike racing programming nonesuch and whatnot and etcetera.

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Hired Guns: Part 1

March 22, 2017 § 29 Comments

Part 1: The Tax Man Goeth

The mayor of Palos Verdes Estates, the city council, and over sixty percent of the voters in the last municipal election on March 7, 2017 voted for something so important and crucial to the community that it could only have been given the most anodyne name imaginable: Measure D.

This ballot item, if it had been forced to comply with the same rules of truthful disclosure that we require of foodstuffs, would have been called “City Fire Department and EMS Tax.” Because that’s what it was: A tax to continue paying for that least objectionable and most necessary of all city services – a fire department and its attendant emergency medical services.

Who could possibly vote against that?

The answer turned out to be “about forty percent of the people who voted in an election that had less than thirteen percent of all eligible voters show up to vote.” Normally that would be a crushing victory for the tax man, sixty to forty. But in PV Estates, tax proposals like this one had to be approved by two-thirds of the people who voted, and the end tally left the tax supporters about three hundred votes short. In other words, the people of PV Estates voted, incredibly, not to pay for their own fire and emergency medical services.

It might seem strange to think that a mostly older community with a large proportion of retirees would vote against a fire department. This is no henhouse filled with spring chickens; the city’s median age is a sun-wrinkled, HGH-assisted 50. PV Estates sits on a hilly slope that is highly susceptible to the wildfires that make California such a staple of national night-time summer weather news reports. Setting aside the conflagrations, the fire department is also the first responder when people wake up in the middle of the night with chest pains, when they fall and break a hip, or much more importantly, when their cat gets stuck in a tree.

But voting against the fire department and EMS wasn’t really a vote against either, and it certainly wasn’t a vote against cats. It was a vote against the PV Estates Police Department, an agency that of late had become the endless target of bad news, litigation, and virulent anonymous hate speech attacks.

To understand how a minority of voters could torpedo an entire police department, though, you have to go back to 1978, to Howard Jarvis, and to Proposition 13, the mother of all regressive tax laws. And to understand why the white voters in PV Estates were so staunchly behind regressive taxation, even to the detriment of their own community, you have to go all the way back to the city’s inception and the deed restrictions that marketed PV Estates as an ideal community that would bring together “the cream of the manhood and womanhood of the greatest nation that has ever lived, the Caucasian race and the American nation.” Those were the words of its founder, and his adherents are alive, well, and kicking like hell.

END

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Hired Guns: Introduction

March 21, 2017 § 16 Comments

Introduction

The city of Palos Verdes Estates, or part of it, is battling for the survival of its municipal police force. Opponents want to demolish it and replace it by contracting for law enforcement services with the monolithic Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. It sounds like pedestrian city politics, unless you happen to be a bicyclist. In that case, it isn’t pedestrian at all.

This issue affects a lot more than the pedal pushers who often run stop signs as they breeze through one of the most scenic and challenging bike routes in the United States. Class war, surfing localism, contempt of outsiders, hate speech, enraged small town racists, the California Vehicle Code, murder, Wall Street predators, regressive taxation, and the complex act of understanding and enforcing the law all turn up when this topic is spaded over, like wriggling earthworms in a cool mound of leafy compost.

I got involved in this whole thing backwards, simply by riding my steel Eddy Merckx with down-tube shifters on the way to work one day. I had been in California for a couple of months and was renting a house in Palos Verdes Estates, a place I ended up in entirely by accident. The law office I was working at was in San Pedro, and when I arrived in California I told the realtor, an avid cyclist nicknamed “the Badger,” that I wanted to rent in San Pedro because it was close to my office.

“Dude,” he said. “You don’t want to live in Pedro unless you like lung cancer or want to hang out at Godmother’s. Let me show you some places in PV Estates.”

To my unsophisticated eye it looked like a lot of other suburbs I’d seen throughout my life. Nice homes, affluent people in nice cars, white people everywhere, and, oh yeah, the most stunning scenery imaginable stuck right in the heart of Los Angeles. I traced the road on a map and saw that my commute to San Pedro would be along PV Drive South, a twenty-minute drive with three stoplights, no traffic, and postcard views of the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island from start to finish.

Did I mention that this was in the heart of Los Angeles? Because when I told my family back in Texas that I had a twenty-minute, no traffic, sprawling ocean view commute in the middle of LA, they thought I was lying through my teeth and everywhere else.

One morning as I rode to work, because it didn’t take long to figure out that the most beautiful, car-free road in California was also the most beautiful car-free bike commute in California, I blew through a red light at the intersection of Hawthorne and Via Vicente. There was no traffic in any direction, but I hadn’t gotten through the intersection before I heard the siren of the guy I would later get to know as the dreaded Deputy Knox.

By 2007 I had been riding competitively and racing for thirty-five years. I had run tens of thousands of red lights and hundreds of thousands of stop signs, and I had done it in Texas, Japan Germany, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. I’d never been ticketed, not once, and had never been hit by a car. Deputy Knox of the LA Sheriff’s Department pulled me over and wrote me a ticket. I knew enough not to argue with a 6’4” dude carrying a gun, handcuffs, and a radio, but even so I was surprised at his glowering anger. He was prodding and pushing me to react, but I’d experienced that in plenty of other venues with cops, so the more he pushed the meeker I got. I wanted to get to work, not star in a new chapter on civil rights.

Knox wrote the citation, gave me a nasty lecture, and sped away. That encounter, between a meek, bony guy on a bike endangering no one in a victimless crime, and an angry cop trying to prod him into a confrontation, made a huge impression on me. “What if I’d been black?” I wondered, scared. Knox was lean but he was muscular, he was big, and he was ready to arrest me and haul me off to jail if I had given him any guff. My instinct, by the way, proved dead-on the following year when my friend and fellow riding partner Jeff Konsmo was pulled over and cited by Knox. However, unlike my red light violation, Jeff was pulled over because Knox didn’t understand – or chose not to understand – vehicle code section 21202a and its exceptions. When Jeff objected to the grounds of the citation, Knox slapped on the stainless steel jewelry and shoved him in the back of the patrol car.

This was my first and lasting impression of bikes and law enforcement on the peninsula. They hated your guts. You didn’t belong. Get the hell out.

END

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Broke, broker, brokest

March 14, 2017 § 40 Comments

It is always sad when people who pretend to be rich are too poor to pay for luxuries like fire departments and ambulances.

While Garret and Cynthia Unno of Palos Verdes Estates were banging the drum for stricter enforcement of traffic laws, a/k/a EVIL CYCLISTS ARE RUNNING ALL THE STOP SIGNS AND ENDANGERING OUR 5,000-LB. STEEL BOXES, someone forgot to keep the home fires burning, or rather someone forgot to make sure that there was going to be someone to put the home fires out.

In an impressive push to punish skinny, hairless, underwear-clad bicycle riders, the rabidly unfit PVE bike-hating minority whipped its police department into a veritable ticket-issuing orgasm of stop, cite, and pad the local budget. In addition to stationing Deppity Doofus on Paseo del Mar every Saturday to apprehend the criminal Donut Ride biker gang and cite its riders for blasting through stop signs, the hue and cry reached such fitful proportions that all you had to do to get Mayor King to lose it was whisper “Cyclist! Stop sign!” and she’d sound off like a hound with a treed possum.

And the fever was catching. Councilpersons Jim Goodhart and John Rea, although initially of the opinion that perhaps cyclists weren’t much of a problem in PVE, and might even be vulnerable road users deserving protection, eventually caught the Biker Plague Rage and abandoned all pretense of making reasoned decisions about allocation of police resources vis-a-vis bikes and traffic enforcement.

The more tickets that got written, the hotter the fever grew until Garret, Cynthia, Zaragoza Lady, and the other advocates of SAVE OUR STOP SIGNS had logged so many attaboys and attagirls and lockemups and hangemhighs on NextDoor that the servers started to smoke.

Problem was, in this case where there was smoke there wasn’t any fire. If there had been, the LA Fire Department, under contract with the city, would have come and put it out and the nutty SAVE OUR STOP SIGN folks would have realized that the real issue they had in Palos Verdes Estates wasn’t the honor of their violated stop signs but something much more important: Whether or not they were going to have a fire department and EMS to haul them off on a crash cart when their clogged arteries, hypertension, erectile dysfunction, scabies, stroke, aneurysm, gout, and cardiac arrest kicked in.

Because at the same time the Unnos were training their lasers on the STOP SIGN SANCTITY PROJECT, another cabal of tax-hating, Trump-loving, Everything-for-me-Nothing-for-you residents was quietly putting together a measure that would defund the city’s fire and emergency medical services. They quietly drafted the measure. They quietly put it on the ballot. And they quietly laughed all the way home while the STOP SIGN WORSHIPERS, gloating over the daily count of traffic citations, neglected to mobilize their forces to preserve something that actually mattered.

And when the tax measure that supports fire and EMS services was rejected because it couldn’t pass the hilariously high 2/3 vote ceiling, Mayor King, Defeated Councilman Goodhart, and Defeated Councilman Rea (beaten in his quest for city treasurer) realized that they were now facing a budget shortfall of almost $2.5 million out of a total city budget of $17 million, and the cuts would begin in July.

What does this have to do with flatlander transients pedaling into PVE and making a mockery of the modesty and virginal pureness of the city’s stop signs? Well, this: The body blow to the city’s finances may well lower the boom on the city’s police force.

PVE, unlike the ghettos of Rancho Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills, and Rolling Hills Estates, has its very own police force whereas the other peninsula cities contract out with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. PVE has long been willing to pay for the extra cost, which is significant, because it gives the city extreme control over law enforcement (such as directing its manpower at keeping stop signs safe from bicycles) that simply can’t be exercised over the county sheriff’s department, a massive law enforcement agency that had a budget of almost $3 billion in 2015.

Fortunately, the city has an emergency budget of over $9 million, but even lawyer arithmetic will tell you that this rainy day fund won’t last for more than a few seasons of stop sign protection when it has to cover EMS, fire, and the erection of a crying wall for the politicians who’ve been booted out of office. As the high-G note of panic shrieks through the town, a huge contingent of citizens now plans to attend the March 14 council meeting to protest the outcome of a democratic vote that most were too lazy to participate in.

Maybe in the grand scheme of things spending all of your political capital to attack bicycles via anonymous troll web sites, yappy-yap comment threads on NextDoor, and defense of the Lunada Bay Boys on Mom’s Couch wasn’t so smart after all, unless of course you never plan on needing fire protection in a place frequently ravaged by wildfires, and unless a population of geriatric couch-loungers never plans on waking in the middle of the night with chest pains.

The silliest part is that despite losing their fire and EMS, the angry minority’s attempts to oust cyclists from the peninsula hasn’t even worked. Last time I checked, the Donut Ride was still going strong. And I heard through the grapevine that last Saturday Deppity Doofus sat and waited at Paseo del Mar a lonnnnng time for the ride to come by, but for some funny reason it never did.

Weird.

And I guess if your house catches fire, you can call the Unnos, the Lunada Bay Boys on Mom’s Couch, or the city’s hidden-in-plain-view anonymous Internet troll. I’m sure they’ll hurry right over.

END

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Double header crazypants

September 29, 2016 § 44 Comments

On Monday night there was a traffic safety committee meeting held by the city of Rancho Palos Verdes. You think committee meetings are boring?

This one wasn’t.

It featured a guy who began by complaining about people taking pictures. The chair told him he was “out of order” which is nice speak for “shut the fuck up” and informed him that it was a public meeting, open to the public, held for the public, and publicly regulated under the Brown Act, which publicly regulates public meetings.

The guy was not mollified by the law because he was part of a contingent who demanded that the city put up signs saying “Bikes Must Ride Single File.” No matter that this isn’t the law, and no matter that the California Vehicle Code doesn’t prohibit riding two abreast, no matter that the committee has given extensive, detailed PowerPoint presentations on CVC 21202(a) and its exceptions, and no matter that the most fundamental principle of statutory construction is that the law permits everything that is not specifically prohibited.

In Rancho Palos Verdes these NIMBYs had come to the meeting to advise what they thought the law should be and to demand that the city put it on a sign. Right? Because after inventing a few new anti-bike provisions for the vehicle code they could follow it with signs that said, “No poor people,” “No Torranceites,” “No San Pedroians,” and of course “No people whose last names end in a vowel.”

It was clear that, having bought a second-hand home with an ugly garage on top of a hill and surrounding the whole faux estate with an iron gate and guard shack, this guy thought that the public meetings were private, too, and no amount of explaining that the meeting was “public” seemed to have any effect on him at all.

Because polysyllabic words and laws and facts kept getting in the way of his opinions, the guy followed up his outburst a few minutes later by showing the middle finger at what appeared to be the committee. When the sheriff’s deputy came over and told him he couldn’t flip off the committee, he told the deputy that he hadn’t been flipping off them, he’d been flipping off … me. For taking pictures.

I hadn’t said a word the entire meeting and when I looked back he threw a fleck of paper at me while raising his middle finger again for emphasis. There I was, back in Third Grade with the classroom bully showing me the finger, throwing spitballs, and daring the teacher to get on with her job. If you think it’s extraordinary that a grown man would go to a public meeting and show his contempt for public participation by flipping people off and flinging flecks of paper at his imagined enemies, you need to come to one of these meetings.

But what’s more extraordinary is that the very people who flipped us off, threw things, and booed Delia Park at the previous meeting when she described the catastrophic injuries of a friend belong to the same anti-bike contingent that opened the meeting with an appeal for civility and made pointed complaints about the militant biker bullies–never mind that not a single cyclist in any public meeting has insulted, attacked, threatened, or made an obscene gesture to anyone ever, and never mind that several cyclists began by thanking the committee for their efforts.

One first-time biker attendee later commented that “I thought you were exaggerating, Seth, but these people really are batshit fucking crazy.”

The discussion point of the meeting was colossally stupid. A handful of NIMBYs on Crest Road were seeking to apply the city’s event permitting ordinance to “organic” groups of ten or more cyclists. Unable to understand the law’s intent–regulation of large events that had a significant impact on the public right of way–these folks yammered on endlessly about how the law should be applied to local, unorganized, organic bike rides.

Under the ingenuous pretense of “safety,” though none of them had consulted any of the cycling groups whose safety is most imperiled in traffic collisions, and after having a prior petition to ban cyclists from the roadway being unceremoniously booted due to its patent illegality, they were now trying to regulate unorganized group bike rides in the hope it would make things somehow more orderly, i.e. get rid of bikes. When I asked one of the NIMBYs whether or not he would attend a free Cycling Savvy course to get educated about the law from the cyclist’s perspective, he told me he was “too busy” because he “had a 16-year-old who was just getting his driver license.”

Well, of course! No responsible father with a new young male driver in the family would possibly be able to make time to go learn the law and safe traffic skills that have to do with cyclists, especially the cyclists who allegedly cause so many traffic problems up on Rancho Palos Verdes Estates Wish We Were Palos Verdes Estates Crest Road.

The details of the ordinance appeared irrelevant to many of the NIMBYs, the main “detail” being no detail at all but rather its most salient feature: The ordinance specifically applies to “organized” events. Speaker after speaker on the cyclists’ side tried in vain to explain to the waxed-in brains of the NIMBYs that THERE IS NO ORGANIZER FOR THE DONUT RIDE. But they either didn’t understand, wouldn’t understand, or couldn’t understand.

It’s true that you can’t fix stupid, but in this case you couldn’t even shut it up. The committee, obviously perplexed by having to deal with something that made no sense at all, referred it for further “study by staff.” This will presumably involve someone sitting in a lawn chair watching groups of cyclists go by at 25 mph and trying to determine if they’re “organized” or “in a group” or “ten or more.” One fool suggested that group riders be required to ride with identifying stickers, a great idea that was used with much success in the late 1930’s.

A cyclist speaker offered the NIMBYs a thousand bucks if they could find the organizer of the Donut Ride, which one of the crazypants asserted was any person who mentioned it on their web site. Kind of like, you know, how you’re an organizer of the Super Bowl when you note on your blog its location, date, time, and the teams who are playing.

Almost three and a half hours later the meeting adjourned, but not before one guy spent several minutes complaining about committee member David Kramer’s “conflict of interest” because in addition to his duties as a committee member he was formerly an officer of Big Orange. We’ll set aside for a minute the fact that nothing on the agenda affects Big Orange as a club at all, another detail that didn’t matter because it so obviously contradicted this guy’s attack.

Lacking any ability to understand that Big Orange doesn’t have a single organized ride in RPV, and unable to do anything other than wave tax returns and Secretary of State filings, this bonehead repeatedly insisted that Kramer “recuse” himself.

Kramer repeated, as he always does, that the committee makes no decisions (ergo there’s nothing to be recused from), that all committee recommendations must be voted on by the city council which has the power to accept, reject or modify anything done by the committee, that the committee acts in a volunteer advisory capacity only, and that his activities as a cyclist have long been public, but the NIMBY didn’t care. All that the NIMBY could grasp is that Kramer is a cyclist, Kramer belongs to Big Orange, therefore Kramer has a conflict of interest. Of course with NIMBY logic, all of the motorists would have to recuse themselves from the committee, too, since no motorist could possibly be expected to be neutral on issues that affected cars. But in an absence of understanding and in a surfeit of ignorance, facts meant little, and one of the NIMBYs assured me outside the building that a lawsuit would be brought to remove Kramer from the committee.

“You’re not going to like that,” he said. I could only hope that he retained a very expensive lawyer with a huge, nonrefundable retainer.

In line with the NIMBY hatred of cyclists on Crest, riders recently reported a white Toyota Corolla buzzing, honking at, and harassing cyclists going up Crest in, surprise, single file. It’s hard to understand what they meant by civility, except perhaps this: Please shut up and go away from RPV.

The next day was Tuesday. I mentally flushed out the cremains of the night before with a good bike ride, one of those organic rides without a leader or promoter that’s been going on for over 30 years, and that evening I was back at another city meeting to witness another series of mindless assaults on cycling. This one was at Palos Verdes Estates.

At the end of the meeting I was accosted by a guy who claimed to be “Frank Ponce” and who “wanted to talk” to me. Imagine a pudgy bully whose hairpiece has been dipped in a bucket of chiGrecian Formula, clad in a two-for-one suit from Men’s Wearhouse, wearing an imitation of a fake Swiss watch and looking like he wanted to kill you.

Then imagine another guy, larger, blobbier, dumber looking (possible? yes!) who was also wearing a sandwich board with my picture on it and the caption “This Clown Wants More Signs.”

This clever fellow had discovered a picture that was on my web site and was now going to expose me as an advocate for bike signage. Plus he was going to call me a clown. Unfortunately, Mom’s allowance must have been a bit on the low side because the construction of the sign had the quality you normally associate with a cardboard roof used by a homeless person to cover his shopping cart.

How a person can strap on a homemade sign and duck-waddle around in public while calling someone else a clown is a metaphor for the wholesale absence of reflection, perspective, or self-awareness that the bike haters displayed at every turn. I was waiting for the Sandwich Clown to ask for gas money since Mom had perhaps kicked him off the couch for the evening, the best explanation for him even being out of the house.

Upon leaving the parking lot, Mr. Men’s Wearhouse, still furious that none of the cyclists would engage with him or take him up on his unspoken offers of a duel using tubes of Rogaine, taunted me as I walked by. Rumor has it that the fake watch consortium is going to set the wheels in motion to “revoke my law license.” It will be fascinating to watch the $99 suits tangle with even more words, rules, laws, and procedures, seeing as they still haven’t been able to read and understand CVC 21202(a) and its exceptions. Imagine their surprise when someone tries to draw them a stick-figure diagram of what an anti-SLAPP motion is and what attorney fee sanctions look like.

As I left the parking lot, catcalls ringing in my ears, it occurred to me that there it was again! Third Grade! Another flaccid wanker thinking that no one could possibly resist the idea of jumping into a verbal sewer with him. I kept walking, slightly pleased that with so little effort I’d taken up permanent residence into such a small and sand-filled head. And best of all, I was staying there rent-free.

The PVE City Council meeting itself was something of a clusterfuck. Because the council had seen the large turnout of cyclists in past meetings and been inundated by NIMBY emails complaining about outsiders/flatlanders/transients influencing their special snowflake on the hill, they sought to do an end-run by moving the time from 5:30 to 7:30 in order to conduct a workshop on traffic safety. It was never articulated as such, but the idea seemed to be to wear down the cyclists with an earlier meeting that would cut off speaking times. The plan only half-worked because the fire marshal had to stop people from entering after the room filled to capacity with cyclists.

While the tiny Men’s Wearhouse contingent had vociferously sought to rally the anti-cycling troops for the meeting, the packed-to-capacity council chambers were filled predominantly with cyclists. When asked to stand if they supported BMUFL signage, only a smattering of the 90+ attendees remained seated. If the plan had been to get all the concerned PVE residents out in force, it worked, because the meeting showed what we’ve known all along: Most residents don’t give two ratfucks about five new BMUFL signs and the only ones who oppose them are either still subsidized by Mom or are retired or are woefully underemployed or all three.

The workshop, although ostensibly held to educate the council as to this “complex” issue of four signs, seemed in fact to be Traffic Safety Principles 101 for the Completely Clueless NIMBYs. It was a rehash of many, many presentations I’ve heard in bits and pieces from the city’s traffic engineer, and it was all politespeak for “These BMUFL signs are legal, you dumbshits.”

But the problem was this: If the NIMBYs were so thick-headed that they couldn’t understand CVC 21202(a), and if they were so pig-headed that they refused to recognized the legality of BMUFL, how in the world was the workshop going to educate them about something as complex as “basic principles of traffic engineering”? Their go-to guy was a stooge in a sandwich board and a sub-literate, flabby realtor in a cheap suit whose Linked-In profile picture reminds me of a hubcap thief from the 1920’s. These people were going to be “educated” about engineering and the law?

No. They were not.

It was like having a civil rights lawyer address a group of Trump supporters on the illegality of segregation.

Civil rights lawyer: “Segregation is illegal.”

Trumpers: “But we hate black people.”

CRL: “It’s still illegal.”

Trumpers: “No, it isn’t.”

CRL: “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).”

Trumpers: “Can we change the law just for here? PVE is unique!”

CRL: “No. It’s the supreme law of the land and codified in numerous federal and state laws and the California Constitution.”

Trumpers: “We still hate black people. We still hate integration. We love segregation. We don’t understand why we can’t have it. We grew up with it. And we’ve lived here since 1984.”

The part of the workshop that did work was that it promptly concluded at 7:30, before even a fraction of the cyclists had gotten to speak out in favor of BMUFL signage. This served the city and the NIMBYs’ agenda perfectly: It delayed the decision on the signs even further, it forced the cyclists to come back again (and again and possibly again), and it let the BMUFL advocates know that the city wasn’t going to easily and quickly fold to the recommendations of its own attorney, traffic engineer, safety committee, and what one NIMBY at the last traffic committee meeting referred to as “transients.”

The other part of the workshop that worked out exquisitely for the NIMBYs was that the latter half of the workshop degenerated into “cyclists running stop signs.” No matter how many times the police say they have limited resources, no matter how many times people point out that stop sign violations are equal among cars and bikes, and no matter how many times people point out that stop sign violations have nothing at all to do with BMUFL signage, once the Dreaded Stop Sign Issue is raised, everything goes running down into the gutter.

It’s as if you convened a meeting to discuss space travel and no one could stop talking about stop signs.

Bike Advocate: “BMUFL signage is legal and saves lives.”

Men’s Wearhouse: “Bikes run stop signs!”

Bike Advocate: “So do motorists but that’s not the issue.”

Men’s Wearhouse: “Bikes run stop signs!”

Bike Advocate: “Yes, but today we’re here to discuss BMUFL signage.”

Men’s Wearhouse: “Norm is videotaping all the scofflaw bikers running stop signs!”

Bike Advocate: “Yes, we’ve seen samples of the high quality videos made by Mom’s Couch Productions. But today we’re here to discuss BMUFL signage, how it’s legal, recommended by the city engineer, and how it saves lives according the the NIH.”

Men’s Wearhouse: “Blobbly Bob is going to make another sandwich board showing bikers running stop signs!”

Bike Advocate: “I hope it’s a wide one.”

END

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