During May 3rd’s Bike Plan Implmentation Team’s meeting, officials from LADOT laid out their plan to delay implementation of many parts of the city’s new bike plan in order to perform expensive, lengthly, and unneeded environmental impact reviews.
Joe Linton reports:
the city is proposing to spend 500 thousand dollars to spend “12-18 months*” to decide whether it will implement 100-200 thousand dollars worth of bike lane projects. The main issue is whether the city has to spend huge amounts of money studying environmental impacts before proceeding with implementing approved bike lanes.
It appears that LADOT has begun to revert back to their standard operating procedure of delaying progress and hiding from public scrutiny their decision making processes and criteria.
Many of you worked long and hard to see that the city designed and passed a real bike plan with potential to actually impact the role of bicycles as transportation in Los Angeles. But we knew the fight wasn’t over. Call and write the Mayor, your city councilman, and DOT officials to let them know that you insist that Los Angeles follow through on its promises and plans.
Write the Mayor
Write your council representative
Contact the Department of Transportation
Tweet to @villaraigosa and @mobilitymaven
Looking for a chance to help Los Angeles become more bike friendly and get paid to do it? The County Cycling Collaborative is hiring a “Bike Wrangler” who will scour the County’s universities, police departments, Metropolitan Transportation Authority and other sources to find used bikes, recover them, and redistribute them.
More information and a full job description are available on the LA County Bicycle Coalition blog.
Deadline for applications is June 7th.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Bill Rosendahl will chair a meeting of the council’s Transportation Committee that will focus exclusively on bicycling issues on Wednesday, December 9, 2 pm – 5 pm.
Subjects on the agenda are:
- An update from the Planning Department and DOT on outreach efforts for the Draft Bicycle Master Plan
- Report from LAPD on bicycle incidents and conflicts between bicyclists and motorists
- The Sharrows pilot program
- A bicycle sharing program for the City of Los Angeles
- Bicyclist anti-harassment ordinance
- Revising the Zoning Code that would improve bicycle parking requirements for new development
LAPD issues promise to be especially heated given the recent incident at Critical Mass. It is unlikely that anything related to that incident will be resolved at this meeting, but it is important for the cycling community to continue pressure on the LAPD to rethink the way they interact with the cycling community and live up to the promises they have made to improve.
Even if you don’t have anything to say, attending these meetings lets the City Council, LAPD, and city departments know that these issues are important to a broad group of LA citizens.
The meeting is here:
Wednesday, December 9, 2009 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Los Angeles City Hall
200 N. Spring Street, Room 1010
Los Angeles , CA 90012
The offical agenda is here.
And there’s some commentary here.
Measure R raised the local sales tax rate to pay for transportation improvements. Cycling and pedestrain projects should get some share of this money, but the amount is still under debate. Please come out to Wednesday’s Transportation Committee meeting at 2pm to continue to support 10% for bikes and peds so that it becomes officially approved. A strong showing at the meeting will make a big difference in getting 10% for bikes and peds!
10% for bikes and peds will directly affect the funding available for bike projects.
When: Wednesday, November 18, 2pm
Where: City Hall, 200 North Spring Street, Los Angeles, Ca 90012. Room 1010
Announcement via Aurisha Smolarski of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition.
SoapBoxLA also has some information on the weird math being used to calculate that 10% number.
Please take the following survey to assist collecting the “experience and knowledge of cyclists in the City of Los Angeles.”
The survey will also support a “white paper” that will be released in February on behalf of the Los Angeles Sustainability Collaborative (www.lasustainability.org).
Click Here to take survey
LABOR DAY BBQ SEPT 7 -4PM
Rounding up empty bottles” Bring beer in bottles
to drink or start saving your beer bottles for
bottling of the bike oven brew.
BREWING CLASS $5 BUCKS 7PM
Bottleing of brew we did two weeks ago.
Come take your drunk picture you know
you need one and we’ll put it in the show
DRUNKENOMICS
OPEN ART SHOW
Bring at related to the theme
Drunk pictures/ stories//tramatic injuries
No one gets rejected. Last day to drop off Sept 11 6pm
There is also the Bikable LA show at the Flying Pigeon it is open show as well requires entries of the theme. Anything you wish for just might come true since we are preparing this for the mayor’s office
Last day to drop off FridaySept. 11 6pm
SPOKE’N’ART RIDE
Meets at 7pm Saturday September 12
and visits 5 or so galleries then back
to the oven for the drunkenomics
and Bikable LA show at 10pm
Biking and brewing your own beer will get you out of this recession and we’ll show you how. Similar to speakesies with prohibition a lot of people made a lot of money. Every month we’ll try a different recipe and have a different master brewer to show you how and eventually you’ll get the hang of it. Why get arrested while stopping at a liquor store carry your own brew for a fraction of the cost.
BIKE OVEN
3706 NO FIGUEROA
LOS ANGELES CA 90065
(323) 223-8020 info@bike oven.com attention veronica
www.bikeoven.com
Join us for bike the talk tlk the bike. we cant really get the title right but it’s a place where we try to get things done on our own and become an bike advocacy group. We are aimimg to get an appointment with the mayors office so we’d like to organize our wants and needs in a way in which they can be implimented. plus the art show for next month september is bikable LA and drunkenomics. we want to make those suggestions to the mayor in a visual form and will work on that and those presentations will be part of the art show. pasta/salad/conversation and planning and ice t. 6pm bring sketch paper and the like.
KPCC wants to know.
As part of American Public Media’s Public Insight Network, local public radio station KPCC is looking for personal stories of how bicycles are changing your economic life. Whether it’s going car-free, saving gas, or canceling the gym membership, KPCC is looking for personal stories for material in their stories and to drive their reporting.
Please fill out a quick survey here: www.tinyurl.com/SCPR-Bike
Please give them feedback even if you don’t think you have anything vital to add. Just the volume of responses will tell KPCC that bicycling issues are important and should be reported on. I encourage you to use the comments section on their form to not just tell your personal story, but also comment on how local policy issues impact you directly.
Sunday February 22 at 6pm come for some donuts and coffee and to strategize and plan and do bike projects on our own . Im tired of hearing people talk about change and shit happens. We have an army of bikers why not initiallize them and get stuff done on our own. Raise our own funding if we have none, make our own sharrows, paint curbs red so that bikes can fit on the street plus all your ideas on how to infiltrate the city and bring down people that dont help us but are assigned to positions of power. So we’ll talk, assign assignments and go out paint a sharrow or a bike lane somewhere in the second half of the meeting.Let’s group up to get more done. Every 3rd sunday at 6pm tentatively we’ll be able to get more done and really get organized.
Here are five ways that you can send a message to your elected officials at various levels about what you think transportation policy should be in Los Angeles and the United States. While no one of these contacts is likely to have a large impact, ongoing silence only serves to support the status quo. Take the time to tell politicians what you think is important. Remember that a written letter, call, or fax is given more weight than an email comment. If anyone knows other good initiatives out there, post them in the comments.