CicLAvia—Heart of LA presented by Metro

CicLAvia—Heart of LA

On Sunday, October 15, we’re opening up the streets in the Heart of LA so you can jog, ride, bike, skate, run, walk, skateboard, spectate, and enjoy the route however you want. Our routes are welcoming to people of all ages and abilities! This CicLAvia is presented by Metro.

Be sure to join our email list so you don’t miss any event news and updates. Use the CicLAvia digital map to plan which businesses, local gems, activities along the route, and Hubs to check out during the event on October 15!

 

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The Future of Cars Looks a Lot Like an E-Bike

Fromm Inverse.com

BYTOM VANDERBILT

The electric vehicle revolution is already here — sporting two wheels and a pair of pedals.

Transportation, like most human behaviors, is shaped by a mixture of utility, convenience, visibility, and familiarity. As energy-conserving, satisficing humans, we reach for what is easy, what we can see, what we know. Nearly one-third of car trips in America, for example, take us less than one mile. Why not walk or ride a bike? Because our impulse to drive is a virtual muscle memory. Habits, notes Charles Duhigg, “shape our lives far more than we realize — they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.”

When the bike-share system CitiBike arrived in New York City a decade ago, I immediately and enthusiastically signed up. There was just one problem. The nearest station, in those early days, was precisely a mile from my house. As transportation planners have found, people are generally unwilling to walk more than half a mile to a transit stop — and so was I. The subway, meanwhile, was a block away. As you might imagine, whatever my intentions to embrace the service, I generally defaulted to the easier option. It wasn’t until a bike-share station opened a block away that I became a regular user. My behavior only changed because the context did.

Image courtesy of Cake

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What Is The Most OVERRATED Bike Tech? | GCN Tech Show Ep. 301

Are you wasting your money on overpriced and overhyped cycling tech? Alex and Ollie run through the bike parts and components they think are most overrated. Of course oversized pulley wheels are on the list, but what else? There’s also some hot and spicy tyre tech from Pirelli and Hutchinson, plus the new Pinarello Dogma X and details of Shimano’s big product recall.

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We rode a Rad Power RadWagon 4 electric cargo bike to see if it can replace a car

From CNN.com

By Michael Berk

popular take on the longtail cargo bike design, with an overbuilt frame that integrates a supersized rack that provides support for almost anything you might want to carry, from double-length panniers to a pair of child seats to an adult passenger. A longtail can easily hold a full week’s worth of groceries plus extra heavy items you might want to pick up along the way, say a couple of 5-gallon jugs of water (we did this a few times), a few chairs, a kid’s bike — whatever you can imagine.

If you’re motivated, a cargo bike really can replace a car for a whole lot of things, and it’s one of the disciplines of cycling where an electric bike makes the most sense, making the huge carrying capacity far more practical for riders who don’t have thighs like tree trunks. We put the RadWagon 4 into rotation for several months to figure out if it was up to the task.

Image courtesy of RadPower.com

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Metro Should Treat Walk and Bike Projects with the Respect They Deserve

From LA.Streetsblog.org

Prioritizing true first mile/last mile infrastructure isn’t somehow optional; it’s how your customers get to and from the transit stations.

Like many people around Los Angeles, I was excited about the opening of the Regional Connector. Like those of us who still drive sometimes (this is L.A., after all), but look for opportunities to do it less, the prospect of a better transit experience is an enticing one. I was driving one day from the Arts District to Union Station and noticed something odd. Construction was wrapping up around the new Little Tokyo Station, and with the barriers removed the basic geometry of the streets around it seemed the same as it was years ago. Remembering the walk across Alameda from the old station to Little Tokyo, I couldn’t understand why nothing was done in anticipation of the many new Metro riders who will surely be walking, biking, or connecting to buses at the new station.

In fact, things were supposed to be done: the $30 million Eastside Access Improvement Project, a package of bicycle and pedestrian improvements around Little Tokyo. At the 2021 groundbreaking ceremony, Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins promised that the project would provide “more access, more connectivity, and a safer pedestrian environment than when we started Regional Connector construction so many years ago.”

Soon after I saw Streetsblog L.A. coverage that the bike lanes and other improvements that were promised, approved, and funded were severely cut back or not built at all, without any justification or apology. Think about all the steps that go into a typical public construction project: years of planning, approvals by various agencies, scoping, public outreach, bidding on construction contracts, procurement, clearances, construction, inspections, and final project acceptance. How can half of a $30 million project just vanish?

Photo by Jamshed Khedri on Unsplash

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