Bicycle Fixation Weblog
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05/16/2015: "Half a Loaf"
Well, the meeting I attended at LA's City Hall was dreary enough: despite petition signatures in the thousands, the testimony of dozens of stakeholders—a significant majority of whom favored a fully multi-modal facility—and the growing weight of evidence that building car-friendly infrastructure simply invokes more traffic and congestion and drains the public treasury…the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Public works voted unanimously to recommend the Option 1A plan for the Glendale/Hyperion bridge complex linking Silver Lake and Atwater.This option retains four lanes for mixed (ie, motor) traffic, the same four lanes that induce rampant speeding now, and adds two skimpy bike lanes and one sidewalk. Only one sidewalk, forcing walkers to detour about a half mile if they are unlucky enough to be on the downstream side of the bridge at one end and wish to end up still on the downstream side on the other.
This is the half-a-loaf plan: survival rations, not nourishment. It's better than the abomination that exists today, but it's far from a truly community-friendly multi-modal bridge. Option 3, preferred by the majority, featured three mixed traffic lanes, two protected bikeways, and sidewalks on both sides of the bridge.
The unimaginative minority in the audience could think only that there would be oh-my-god less room for cars—though there can never be "enough room for cars," if you follow the current paradigm of structurally mandating that everyone drive by making all other option unattractive or downright frightening.
The Bureau of Engineering even trotted out their "Level Of Service" computations, though the methodology used has long been discredited and is scheduled to be abandoned by the State of California soon.
So Silver Lake and Atwater will continue to be blessed with road-raging drivers barreling down from the apex of the bridge at freeway speeds—right into pedestrian-centered shopping streets.
Read more here:
Is the City Destroying a Bridge in Order to Save It? (By me)
Is the Death Bridge Dead? (By me)
A Tale of Two Future Bridges: New Bike/Ped Crossing on L.A. River, Fewer Sidewalks on Glendale-Hyperion (By Damien Newton)
Public Works Board Approves Sidewalk Deficient Glendale-Hyperion Bridge (By Joe Linton)
A cursory search on "Glendale Hyperion bridge" will find you many more articles on this issue.
But at least I had the pleasure of a ride downtown in a very light rain, so light that I just let it fall and evaporate from my woolens while I rode without rain gear. (Which I carried just in case.) It is only under rain that much of LA smells good, and so it was today.
And I wasn't alone: I came across many dozens of other cyclists on my way downtown and, especially, in the city's core.
At least there was that.
