Sarcasm is such a great political tool. This poster mocks the one put out by the LAPD after they invited themselves to Critical Mass. There is some background here.

You can see the video of LAPD kicking and assaulting cyclists on last month’s Critical Mass. The double standard is amazing.

I’ve been following this series at Good magazine, Walking in LA, by Ryan Bradley. It’s terrific. From there Sasha found a link to a story about our friend Dan Koeppel’s The Big Parade called Walking for Walking in Los Angeles. On the top photo our Swarm! socks make a center stage appearance. Anyway, in the most recent post he discusses parking and how it affects the ‘feel’ and layout of downtown:

If you took all of the parking spaces in Los Angeles’s central business district and spread them horizontally in a surface lot, they would cover 81 percent of downtown. I know this because of a paper called “People, Parking, and Cities” by Michael Manville and Donald Shoup at UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning [pdf here]. This “parking coverage rate,” they write, is “higher in downtown L.A. than in any other downtown on earth. In San Francisco, for instance, the coverage rate is 31 percent, and in New York it is only 18 percent.” Their paper goes on to show how this glut of parking keeps downtown from having a vibrant city center, because downtowns in general “thrive on high density … the prime advantage they offer over other parts of a metropolitan area is proximity—the immediate availability of a wide variety of activities…. So long as its zoning assumes that almost every new person will also bring a car—and requires parking for that car,” they conclude “[downtown Los Angeles] will never develop the sort of vital core we associate with older urban centers.”

I read it this like this: You can’t have both. Either give up your car and work toward compacting DTLA or keep your car and your parking and don’t complain! But it’s never quite that simple. As I say over and over, most people cannot or will not believe that their individual actions matter and can change the environment and culture we live in. Oh, but they do!

http://www.streetfilms.org/wp-content/plugins/flowplayer_wp/flowplayer/flowplayer.swf?REFRESH_FLAG

Instead of preparing for my 24 hour mountain bike race this weekend, I’m writing about veganism and getting worked up over bike/pedestrian policy here in Los Angeles and nationwide. Six and seven years ago when I first got involved in bike advocacy in Los Angeles the bar was low, as were my expectations. Any improvement or mere mention of bikes outside of our circles was reason for excitement. Fast forward to 2010 and I’m almost overwhelmed with the progress. Almost. We are making gains, but now I want more. It makes so much sense in our unique position today with the economy, environmental concern and a renewed interest in urbanity to shift resources to promote bicycling and walking. But then LA Dept of Transportation General Manager Rita Robinson says stuff like I wish we were New York and could magically make things happen. Argh.

It’s up to us to show her it is not magic. To start here is a post by the US Dept of Transportation in support: What we know about bike infrastructure: people want it. This is the freakin US DOT!! I never could imagine seeing this just a few years ago. And here we are. But, and this is a big but, too many people are not seeing this. Or understanding it if they are. Too few people get this:

from here: www.johnnyandstacie.com

As anarchist academic and hero-to-many Howard Zinn says, ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train.’ Everything is political. Your actions do matter. If you ride a bike, exclusively or occasionally, it’s up to you to share the statement above. AND its political importance. Bicycle infrastructure is good for everyone. Fewer people in fewer cars has social, environmental, health and personal benefits. So study up and share with others. We cannot wait for policy change to come from people like Rita Robinson. We need to change ourselves and to share these benefits with our circles.

Here’s a challenge. While I am riding my single-speed mountain bike for 24 hours this weekend, can you send one of the links above to 24 people?

While I do a variety of things that do not include updating my blog, Stephen Box over at soapboxla.blogspot.com wrote a terrific article called 2009: The Year of the Bike that anyone interested in bike advocacy in Los Angeles should read. We have an uphill battle, but the energy and effort by people like Stephen is paying off. He’s part of the Bike Writers Collective who organized the LA Bike Working Group (I wrote about it here) in response to the City of Los Angeles ‘Bike Plan’ that reduces the number of bike lanes from earlier plans.

To those of you in any number of major US cities this is not a big deal. Your mayor probably rides a freakin bike, but Villaraigosa had never even muttered the word ‘bicycle’. I’m not getting my hopes up because he talks way (way) more than he does, but it is a step in the right direction. Come on Los Angeles, we are so close. Let’s step it up in 2010.