Bicycle Fixation Weblog
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07/20/2010: "Bike Racks in the Embryonic State"
So sometimes things work the way they should.A few weeks ago I was whining to Chris Kidd, the LADOT bike blogger, about (can you guess?) the sad state of bicycle infrastructure in Los Angeles, and he referred me to a Carlos Morales, the coordinator presently in charge of bike racks at LADOT. In particular I was nagging about a damaged rack in front of Black Dog Coffee a couple of blocks away.
Carlos said he'd get on it, and suggested I send him a list of other locations that I thought deserved bike parking in my 'hood.
Poor fellow, of course he got a comprehensive list!
Well, we went back and forth, and today he sent me an email suggesting I go look at the spots he marked for bike racks.
Damn me if he'd not only marked nearly every spot I'd mentioned, but had added a few on his own! So, within a couple of months the stretch of the Miracle Mile between La Brea and the Tar Pits will receive twelve, maybe more, much-needed bike racks.
In case you want to see what a bike rack looks like in the embryonic state, I've appended some snapshots below. The orange blobs with the legend "LADOT" between them...that's where they'll go.
Particularly ironic since I received Carlos's email shortly after spending a couple of hours bitching and moaning to Stephen Box about the sloth of the DOT bureaucracy. (And of course the racks aren't actually in place yet....)
Speaking of which, I also extracted a lot of history from Box--how he became an activist, what projects he's worked on besides the bike advocacy my crowd is familiar with. He's looking much more like a viable candidate to me as I learn more. But you'll hear about that in detail later on, when I've dug a little deeper.
