jeremygrant.com

“The climb is swift with strong legs.”
-bike ninja

This past Saturday afternoon dozens of community minded cyclists attended the first LA Bike Working Group to review, discuss and formulate a response to the draft update LA Bicycle Plan. The draft, an update of the current Bicycle Plan first adopted in 1996 and re-adopted by the City Council in 2007, is now in it’s second public comment stage this October. More public meetings will be taking place and all comments will be sent to the staff transmitting the Plan to the City Planning Commission for its consideration and subsequently to the City Council for adoption.

Just visit labikeplan.com/ for more info on meetings and to make a comment

current plan update

Here are some points that I took away from helping facilitate the first small group discussion at the LA Bike Working Group:

What Cyclists Want from the LA Bike Plan

In the second group I was to help facilitate the engineering and technical stuff. We could have dissected all the inadequate and inaccurate diagrams and question the inclusion of unapproved design it offered. Instead, we questioned why such an extensive section of faulty technical drawings would be published (most Bike Plans just reference the well established sections of the required / approved codes and designs) In the end the we established that all streets and roads should acknowledge and support ALL road users and we should always consider the bicyclist as a road user… any thing less would be an inequality.

Of course there were many more opinions on the subject of the bike plan and I can’t include them all; but, I’d say that we all pretty much agreed that the draft update needs to be completely revised before it can even be reviewed for consideration. Another point we agreed upon was to demand the extension of the process / comment period. So many groups have asked for this and we still don’t have it.

(On a personal note) one immediate sore point of the City established meeting plan is that the first Saturday meeting occurs concurrently with the International Day of Climate Action, which is attended by many MANY cyclists. So many that it warrants a bike valet.

OCT 24th.
Heal the Bay, International Day of Climate Action
Bike Valet c/o LACBC & LA Greensters

for the more info on information in this article see:
labikeplan.com/
http://www.bikewriterscollective.com/
http://soapboxla.blogspot.com/
http://www.westsidebikeside.com/
et al.