A Friday night ride brought cyclists into a confrontation with cops along Hollywood Boulevard, near Highland as best we can make out from this video posted on cycling scene site Midnight Ridazz. Holding promise for a truce during the popular monthly Critical Mass rides, Police Chief Charlie Beck announced a policy to better train LAPD officers on the rights of cyclists. Apparently this one officer missed the briefing; at the 26 second mark a bike patrol officer in shorts and cycling helmet throws a snap kick at a passing rider.

Read More

Someone swings in from New York asks a crowd of Angelenos to listen to how things are done in New York and what do you get? Rousing applause. Our jaw dropped at this head spinning occurrence over the weekend when Janette Sadik-Khan who heads NYC’s Department of Transportation spoke at the Los Angeles Street Summit, a bicycle-centric pow wow hosted by Occidental College’s Urban & Enviromental Policy Institute. The Commish gave a slick presentation of her traffic calming efforts, crafting public spaces in Manhattan from roadways -like closing off traffic in Times Square- and reinforcing bike lanes, speaking at the LA Trade Tech College’s downtown architectural marvel of a campus and left a glow. She pandered to the bike nuts proclaiming “biking is not an alternative mode of transport, it’s a fundamental mode of transportation” and encouraged LA to follow NYC in measure she said had reduced traffic fatalities. She foresaw the future passage of congestion pricing, which the New York State Legislator killed, and we liked her advocating design competitions to enhance awareness of bike riding. But no one questioned that the projects she presented, all in Manhattan except for one in DUMBO where there’s little vehicular traffic (or bike or skateboards cause the streets are broken cobblestones) have no bearing on the traffic patterns cyclists and pedestrians face in LA. The fact is LA’s street traffic clogged with speeding commercial vehicles is more akin to that in Queens and the Bronx, and last we heard no one at the NY Daily News could refer to Queens Boulevard as anything but “the Boulevard of Death.”