News Feature: Smog Nation: LA County making moves to become more bike and pedestrian friendly
Thompson Creek Trail in Claremont, a shining example of a “greenway” renovation with concrete paths built aside the city’s river wash, May 28. 2018, Claremont, CA.
California drivers are not known for their kindness on the roads, but it is especially dangerous in Los Angeles County. Sharing the road is not a concept that lives here, in part due to the perception of an almost nonexistent culture of cycling or walking.
LA County lead the country in number of pedestrian deaths in 2016 with 265, as reported by the Los Angeles Daily News. This number is a blow to our progressive mindset of leading positive change and shows we have a fundamental issue of cars not respecting cyclists or pedestrians.
Becoming a more bike and pedestrian friendly county from the most car dominated one will be a slow process, but over the course of the last few years several LA County cities have adopted plans to become more cyclist friendly.
Organizations such as Bike San Gabriel Valley, based in El Monte, are working to make the SGV area safer for cyclists, pedestrians and public transport users. Glendora, Montebello, Monrovia, La Puente and Irwindale have begun to adopt bike-friendly city plans inspired by Bike SGV.
These plans include an interlocking grid of bike-paths called greenways to create a bike and pedestrian friendly network connecting all five cities. Bike SGV’s plan was inspired by the South Bay Bicycle Master Plan in which the cities of Torrance, Lawndale, Gardena, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, El Segundo and Hermosa Beach voted to begin creating a similar network connecting the cities though bikeways.
Bike SGV’s 5-city initiative wants to build greenways by renovating concrete washes such as the Little Dalton Wash in Glendora to be used by bikes and pedestrians. Concrete paths would be built both sides of the washes, taking advantage of an already existing infrastructure and repurposing it. A shining example of this is Thompson Creek in Claremont.
These greenways would help connect many of SGV cities and allow more people to more feasibly choose to walking or biking as transport.
Local communities can be slow to adopt new measures because people do not think there is a need. There is an overwhelming idea that nobody bikes or walks as a primary form of transportation, an understandable assumption but not factual.
The biggest issue in making LA County bike and pedestrian friendly is infrastructure. “The way that a lot of cities in San Gabriel Valley were built, they had cars in mind and not bikes,” said Diane Velez, a program coordinator at Bike SGV. She noted that in many cities, especially of lower income, there was a lack of basic resources like adequate bike lanes and even signage.
These lower-income communities are more likely to use public transport and therefore the most affected by the unsafe conditions in this county. The Census Bureau reported a total of 13 percent of U.S. households have household incomes of less than $15,000, but among transit using households the comparable figure is 21 percent as reported by the American Public Transport Association in a 2017 study. The people who need it the most are less likely to speak up and more likely to be marginalized groups.
In a 2008-2012 report released by the US Census on biking and walking to work states 2.1 percent of Pasadena residents used bikes as their primary form of transportation. That is close to 3,000 residents in the nearly 150,000 population city.
Owning a car is not an option for some of LA County’s residents. The idea is to make cycling a safer and more reliable option for these people. Cycling should be a more realistic option as transport.
Things like potholes that are a nuisance for cars can prove deadly for cyclists. Sherman Oaks resident Peter Godefroy lost control of his bike after hitting a pothole and crashed, causing severe injuries including brain damage in 2015. In 2017, the LA City Council paid Godefroy a $6.5 million settlement as reported by Los Angeles Times.
There are examples of cheaper options to improve safety. Bike activist groups are looking to improve flashing crosswalk signs and scramble crossings, improving visibility and times for pedestrians and cyclists to walk or cycle.
The other side of becoming more bike-friendly is the positive environmental effect it has on the city. The less people using cars as a primary form of transport, the better it is for our environment. This would help a city known for its smog.
People want to become more bike friendly, but the implementation feels slow in part due to a lack of financial backing.
Funding for can be hard to find, since most cities do not make bike safety renovations and construction a high priority. Vision Zero, the city of Los Angeles’ plan to end traffic deaths by 2025, was poised to receive over $90 million in funding in the 2018-2019 city budget but ultimately received $27 million as reported by the LA Daily News.
The plans gaining traction on a larger scale are those that connect several cities via bike pathways such as Bike SGV and the SBMP. They received funding from state and federal programs like the California Active Transportation Program and Center for Disease Control.
If local cities take initiative to create safe cycling and walk pathways for their respective locales, more people will use them. People seem to want safer and realistic ways to walk, bike and take public transportation. Consistent change on the city level in conjunction with their neighbor cities creates a network that makes this idea more feasible.
It seems that cities in LA County are open to working with each other to begin this change. Alternative modes of transport are slowly becoming more available to low-income communities, promising a sustainable long-term change to come in the future.
In February, Glendora voted to pass the greenway project and is planning to start construction by August according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.
What we can do for now is make sure the city follow through with the plans by keeping up with the proceedings of the greenways construction. Staying active both in local legislation and by using the bikeways will help keep the projects for renovation flowing. The more the cities see that the people want to be more cyclist and pedestrian friendly, the more they will make it a higher priority.
There are more feasible ways to bike when going long distances. The Metro Gold Line extended their last station to Citrus College in 2016 and can be ridden by cyclists. There is also a bike share program where you can rent bikes for the day at select stations such as Lake Station.
For now, progress looks to be on the horizon. The key to bigger changes is to consistently make small improvements to current conditions. Los Angeles County has a long road ahead to become cyclist friendly but is certainly on the way to it.
