Turn the Page

The new year provides an opportunity to look back on 2015 and ahead to 2016.  As always, it’s a blend of  disappointment that much-needed changes have been so slow in coming, gratification for the accomplishments, and hope for a continued shift in our transportation priorities in the future.  What is offered here is a highly personal, mostly local, list of the best of 2015 and some of my aspirations for bikes and alternative transportation in 2016.

The best of 2015:

1. A shift in the conversation about climate change.  2015 may well be seen as the year the global community got serious about recognizing the necessity of radical action on climate change.  The Pope’s Encyclical on Climate Change, “Laudato Si,” provided a powerful moral argument for reducing carbon emissions while addressing the combined social and environmental injustices of the current economic model.  Then, in December, leaders of over 190 nation-states met at the Paris Climate Summit and agreed to commit their nations to voluntary reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Pressure from citizen activists from around the world and from vulnerable nations elicited an “aspirational” goal of limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial averages.  While the agreement lacks any binding enforcement mechanism, it is an important starting point from which continued climate justice activism can and must proceed.  In order for these goals to have any chance of success, transportation sustainability (and equity) are going to play a role.  That means transit and bikes.
2. Construction of Phase 1 Extension of the Gold Line from Pasadena to Azusa was completed.  The extension opens up possibilities for more transit choices in the San Gabriel Valley, and eliminates one more excuse for people who live nearby to go car free or car light.
   

   Bike parking at Arcadia station.

3. CicLAvia came to Pasadena!  The fun of cruising down a car-free Colorado Blvd. with thousands of other people still brings a smile to my face and reminds us why we must continue to push for more car-free space (temporarily or permanently) in our cities.  The car-free movement continued to spread in 2015, as iconic Paris opened its streets to people for a day in September. 
4. New Bike Co-Op opened in El Monte.  BikeSGV’s new bike co-op, the Bike Education Center, provides a space for people from the local community to build or fix their own bikes.
5. Metro’s Bike Hub at El Monte Bus Station. An important amenity for transit users who want a secure storage space for their bikes and a place for quick bike repairs right on the premises of the transit station.
6. Pro-Bike Mayor elected in Pasadena.  The election of Terry Tornek as Mayor of Pasadena means that City Hall will continue to provide strong leadership for transit, walking, and bicycling in the city.
7. Mobility 2035.  LA City Council passed an ambitious mobility plan that, if implemented, will provide more sustainable mobility choices for people in LA.
8. Local bike infrastructure.  This is the weakest of 2015’s accomplishments.  But it is important to applaud any improvement.  For me, the bike lanes on First St. in Arcadia, near the new Gold Line station, even though they only stretch for about half a mile, are a sign that the city is trying to accommodate bicycle commuters.  Here’s hoping they are extended in 2016.

What I’m anticipating/hoping/wishing/working for in 2016:

1. Gold Line extension opening, March 5, 2016.  This is a red-letter day for sure.  Looking forward to that first ride out to Azusa.
2. Monrovia’s new bike plan.  Monrovia, at the behest of it’s local active transportation advocacy group Move Monrovia, has contracted with Alta Planning to produce a bike plan for the city.  I’m anxious to see the new plan and work with local advocates to make sure it gets approved and funded.
3. Golden Streets 626: The San Gabriel Valley’s big open streets event, June 26, 2016 (i.e., 6.26)
4. More bike lanes … everywhere.  Bike lanes are good.  Buffered bike lanes are better, and protected bike lanes (a.k.a. “Cycle Tracks”) are best.  I’m especially hoping to see some progress in Pasadena, Temple City, Arcadia, Monrovia. Et tu, El Monte?
   

   First Av. bike lane to Gold Line in Arcadia.

5. More bike racks (not the crappy, wheel-bender kind) … everywhere.
6. Commitment from university administrators for a transit center on Cal Poly Pomona’s campus.  Cal Poly Pomona, where I teach, currently has no transit stop on campus.  Bus riders are forced to walk a long distance to sit on a splintered bench on Temple Ave.  Yet the University is building a multimillion-dollar parking garage and raising student parking fees.  Time for this otherwise “green” campus to make its transportation system green, too.
   

   What passes for a “transit center” at Cal Poly Pomona.

7. Buffered bike lanes on Sierra Madre Blvd.  This has long been on my wish list.  There’s no reason it can’t be done.  The street is wide enough, the traffic speeds warrant it.  Hasn’t happened yet.  Still, I’ll keep asking ….

Happy car-light 2016 to all, and remember, there’s no such thing as a “green” car.  Whenever possible, leave your tin polluter box at home.  Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.  Walk, bike, take the bus or train.  It makes a difference!

CicLAvia Pasadena

It has been a while since I’ve attended CicLAvia, but with this one practically in my backyard, I could not resist.  It was the first ever CicLAvia outside the city limits of LA (and not the last) and the first one I attended with my whole family.  As we rode to the event, we encountered others headed to the event.  As we got closer, we saw more people, different ages and cycling abilities (i.e., not “cyclists”), and families with children who were headed to CicLAvia.  We waved, smiled, and exchanged pleasantries.  I always get excited as I see more and more people on different kinds of bikes headed to the open streets, like we are headed to a gathering of the tribes, distant kin on the same pilgrimage.  As always, it seemed everyone had a smile and the crowd represented a huge, diverse cross-section of Southern California.  As always, there were lots of families, lots of people of different ages, colors, backgrounds.

I loved observing my wife and kids experience the delights of car-free streets and the sense of community that pervades CicLAvia.  My 15-year-old daughter, who rides to school with me each Monday, was awed at the sight and feel of Colorado Blvd filled with cyclists.  “This is so cool,” she said as we cruised the Boulevard.  “I wish it was always like this!”  Uh-huh, I smiled.  My wife, something of a chatty Cathy, particularly seemed to relish the conviviality of the event, striking up conversations with what seemed like every other person on the route.  After lunch at a local restaurant, as we rode up Raymond Ave next to a young couple who were singing a Maroon 5 pop song, my wife spontaneously joined them singing the chorus (much to the embarrassment of my daughter).  I smiled at the serendipitous, joyful human connections people make when they are released from dependence on their rolling isolation chambers.  Just another CicLAvia moment.

This particular route was only 3.5 miles, the shortest CicLAvia to date, but since we rode there and back home, it didn’t seem too short to us.  There were local “feeder rides,” sponsored by a variety of groups, but I’d like to see a greater effort to get even more people to and from the event on their bikes, so that more of the surrounding streets become informally “CicLAvia-ized” on the day of the event.

I’m a huge fan of such Open Streets events not only because they’re wonderfully fun and allow everyone to connect with their community in ways they cannot in a car, but because they also enable people to experience the freedom of car-free streets.  When I asked my son what he liked best about CicLAvia, he told me it was the freedom of being able to ride around town “and not have to worry about cars.”

This experience, I believe, is potentially subversive of the domination of our public spaces by the automobile, and offers an immensely popular signal to political leaders that people hunger for car-free streets.  As the open streets movement expands and becomes a regular part of the Southern California landscape it may alter people’s perceptions of what streets can be and expand their understanding of mobility beyond the automobile.

On our ride home, when I asked my son what he thought, his one word answer: “Awesome-tacular.”

Yup.  ‘Nuff said.

CicLAvia and Bike Lanes

Much has been happening in the bike-sphere, but I’ve been buried under a hectic schedule at my university, and it is only a brief spring break that allows me to break my silence.  We’re still fighting bad ideas like Sen. Carol Liu’s ill-considered mandatory helmet law and the multi-billion-dollar 710 freeway tunnels, but there are some hopeful signs here and there.  Here in the San Gabriel Valley, the Gold Line extension is nearing completion, and there is potential for this light rail to be a game-changer for commuters in the foothills of the SGV, especially if local cities make an effort to connect bike lanes to the stations.

One of the other bright spots is the growing willingness of cities to consider protected bike lanes (sometimes called “cycle tracks”) that have some form of physical separation, such as planters, curbs, medians, bollards, or other decorative barriers between cars and bikes.  For decades, the traffic engineering profession in the US has resisted protected bike lanes, but they have been extremely popular where they’ve been installed, and now they are starting to appear in cities all over the United States.  Long Beach was the first Southern California city to install one, and Temple City recently installed another on Rosemead Blvd.  There is a proposal by LADOT for the first one in Los Angeles, and I hope that there will be at least one in Pasadena’s pending mobility plan.  Once these protected bike lanes begin to proliferate, I believe they will significantly change perception of cycling for transportation in US cities.

Another bright spot is the growth of the “Open Streets” movement throughout Southern California and the US.  LA’s own “CicLAvia” is a prime example of an open streets concept that has spread and gained popularity wherever it has been tried.  Last weekend, CicLAvia held an open streets festival in the San Fernando Valley, and it was extremely popular (a bad cold kept me from attending).  The Valley was in many ways the epicenter of Southern California’s traditional car culture, so the success of a car-free event in the Valley is an indication of how far we’ve moved from the stereotype of American Graffiti.  The Valley’s CicLAvia also featured a “pop-up cycle track” on Chandler Ave. that gave people a taste of what it feels like to ride in a protected bike lane.  These events are important insofar as they provide people with a vision of street space radically flipped from cars to people and bikes.  The popularity of these events underscores the reality that people are hungry for public space that is safe to walk and bicycle in.  And where there is popularity, politicians will follow, perhaps even changing their own perceptions.

People who participate in these events often realize they haven’t really seen their city until they’ve seen it on a bike.  Businesses realize there is money to be made from clientele on bikes.  Open streets events also introduce people to the idea that distance is not really as much a barrier to bicycling as people assume.  When you realize that (with car free space) you can easily bike from one end of LA to the other, or one end of the Valley to the other, it erodes the automobile imperative just a little bit more.  These events bring people of different backgrounds together in an atmosphere of healthy, active, fun.  Every time CicLAvia occurs, I hear someone say I wish it was like this every day.  Gliding down the street, free from the fear of cars, free from the noise and the pollution, people begin to imagine car-free space every day.

I’m excitedly awaiting the next iteration of CicLAvia, which will come to Pasadena at the end of May.  As it becomes regularized, expected, and anticipated, I think it will continue to grow in popularity and, with it, the subversive idea that streets are not just for cars.  To paraphrase Che, we need “one, two, many CicLAvias,” to overthrow the tyranny of the automobile.

Calling for Bike Lanes in Pasadena

Westbound traffic on Del Mar and Craig. Note room for bike lanes on the shoulder.

The recent tragic death of cyclist Phillip O’Neill in Pasadena reinforced for me the idea that Pasadena needs bike lanes on more of its streets, especially on at least one of the key east-west routes near Pasadena City College and Caltech.  This area already has a significant amount of bicycle traffic due to its proximity to these colleges, but the proximity to transit, shops, and jobs in the area means that bike-friendly infrastructure is an essential part of the city’s obligation to provide safe and sustainable mobility options to all its citizens.

As I’ve mentioned before, the wonderful people at Caltech’s Bike Lab have been circulating a petition calling for Pasadena to install bike lanes on one of its east-west streets, and it is high time for the city to act on it (if you haven’t already signed it, please click on the link).  Monday, July 1, I’ll be attending a Complete Streets Forum in Pasadena where these issues will be discussed, and preparations will be made to call on Pasadena officials to commit to improving Pasadena’s bike infrastructure.

As you can see from the photo of Del Mar Blvd in Pasadena, above, taken near the intersection of Craig and Del Mar one recent morning rush hour, there is room for bike lanes on Del Mar, either by converting curbside parking lanes to bike lanes or by reducing traffic lanes from four to three (a “road diet”), or a combination of both, depending on location.

I was reminded how important bike lanes and bike-friendly facilities are to a city when I visited a friend in Claremont earlier this week.  I took the Foothill Transit 187 bus from Arcadia to Claremont and then rode my bike the rest of the way to my friend’s house, a distance of a little over a mile from the bus stop.  My friend recently moved to his new abode, so it was my first time riding this particular route, but I was pleasantly surprised to find bike lanes or sharrows along almost the entire route, and it makes a huge difference to a cyclist, especially on unfamiliar streets.  Moreover, there was no apocalyptic traffic jam caused by the bike lanes (as bike lane opponents claim), and I saw lots of people of all ages riding bikes.  Lesson to cities about bike lanes: if you build them, they will ride.

Bike lanes not only increase safety, they provide a sense of comfort for the less-confident bicycle rider, and they send a message to all that bicycles belong on our streets.  If they are well-designed and if they actually help people get from point A to point B safely, they encourage more people to ride because they increase the feeling of safety and reduce the stress of riding in automobile traffic.  Drivers of automobiles never have to think twice about this (or they haven’t at least since the early 1920s when streets were redesigned to accommodate automobiles), but an auto-centric road design says to the pedestrian and bicyclist, “you don’t matter.”  It is so refreshing when a city says to you, “you do matter.”

Bikes and Farmers’ Markets

Looking for ways to incorporate your bike into your life?  Try riding your bike to the farmers’ market.

Bikes and farmers’ markets are a natural fit.  Your local farmers’ market is probably within easy bicycling distance (i.e., less than 5 miles) from your house, and those fresh fruits and veggies are a healthy compliment to the exercise you’ll be getting on your bike.  In fact, one of the reasons people shop at farmers’ markets is that these local markets represent a healthy, sustainable lifestyle, so why take an unhealthy, unsustainable mode of transportation to get there?   Farmers’ markets are also family-friendly, and a family bike ride to the farmers’ market is a great way to enhance that family time.  If your family’s bikes have racks or baskets (which I highly recommend), everyone can easily carry a share of the produce home.

In recent months, I’ve seen an increase in the number of people biking to my local farmers’ market in Pasadena.  The Pasadena market has good road access for bicyclists, with bike lanes on Sierra Madre Blvd, the main road leading to Victory Park, where the farmers’ market is held every Saturday.  There are also plenty of places to lock up your bike while you shop and you’ll avoid the gridlocked parking lot.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gleefully zipped out of the parking lot while drivers honk and yell at each other over scarce parking spaces.  I do sympathize.  It’s got to be frustrating to have to find a space to park a 4,000 lb dinosaur to pick up 20 lbs worth of produce, (and then to drive to the gym to get exercise).

Some day maybe they’ll catch on.  In the meantime, I’ll see you (and your bike) at the farmers’ market!