Westside BikeSIDE!

Bicycling Magazine recently ran this fluffy blurb entitled “A Future Best City: Los Angeles”. The piece gets the facts all wrong and concludes that cycling in LA has a bright future thanks to LADOT. I won’t begrudge a journalist a fluff piece here or there in order to make the bank to buy milk on the way home, but at least get the facts straight.

The piece asserts that LA has more than 350 miles of bike lanes and bike paths. Wrong. The LADOT recently did a survey and found that LA has 193 miles of bike lanes and bike paths. Where did Bicycling Magazine get the 350 mile figure? LA has a little more than 350 miles of bike ways, which consist of bike lanes, bike paths, and bike routes. How many of you like the insanely dangerous “bike routes” that LA posts? How many of you have been nearly killed on a bike route? Bike routes give cyclists a false sense of security when they may just be on a normal, or dangerous, road. They ought to be banned. After all, CVC 21202 says that every route is a bike route.

More importantly, while the piece mentioned this 350 figure, it failed to mention that LA is enormous - LA is 469.1 square miles of urban crazy. So while 350 or 193 miles might seem like a lot in Nowheresville USA, in LA it’s a pittance.

Anyhow, if you’re bored I suggest ripping off an letter to the editor about it - email bicycling@rodale.com. If you don’t want to cover the same topic, I suggest asking why they published an irresponsible article white washing LA’s cycling situation, and didn’t bother to contact anyone other than a LADOT official with a vested interest in painting a rosy picture.

Here’s my letter:

Mr Fiske,

I was disappointed by the inaccuracy of your article “A Future Best City: Los Angeles”. You noted that Los Angeles has 350 miles of bike lanes and bike paths. In fact, according to your source Michelle Mowery, LA has only 193 miles of bike lanes and bike paths. The “350 miles” figure you quoted is mileage for bikeways, which is all bike lanes, bike paths, AND bike routes. This is an important difference, since bike routes in LA denote no infrastructure improvements, and are often placed on the most dangerous roads. The bike route on Sepulveda in West LA is one of the more dangerous roads to bike in all of West LA. Bike routes in LA are a laughable waste of signage.

More importantly, throwing a figure around like 350 miles or 193 miles without giving a rough idea of LA’s size is poor journalism. Los Angeles isn’t your average city - it’s 469.1 square miles! 193 miles of bike lanes and paths in Portland or San Francisco would be amazing. In LA that’s just .41 miles per square mile, which is not very impressive. And while you write that LA “has been toiling away for years building bike lanes and paths” consider that LA has added only 5 miles of bike lanes or paths per year since 1996. That’s only 56 feet added per square mile each year - the width of a small 7-11 parking lot. LA should have a complete network of bike lanes by 2108.

The situation in LA is bad, and it doesn’t help when reputable magazines badly mis-characterize the situation.

Alex Thompson

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