Nov 24 '09 - 418 W, 2 I - Vote Good + 9 :: Bad - 9 LA City Bike Plan: Only 28 Miles of New Bike Lane
Published November 24, 2009 by C.I.C.L.E.
By Joe Linton
If you read the Los Angeles city bike plan draft, you might think that the plan contains 125 miles of designated bike lane... because that what the draft plan states is its total number of bike lanes (Chapter 4, Page 1.) Unfortunately that 125 figure is erroneous. If you read the actual list of facilities and add up all the miles, then you'd be aware that the plan only calls for 28 new miles of bike lanes.
Only 28 miles. That's all.
28 miles.
The city of Los Angeles has (per the LADOT website) 6,499 miles of roadway. Of all those roads, 135 miles already have bike lanes. When the city's Planning Department and Transportation Department evaluated the roadways, and engaged Alta Planning and Design - world leaders in bikeway planning... they put their heads together and could only find 28 new miles to stripe.
Recent headlines showed that New York City striped 200 miles of bike lane in the past two years. Granted, L.A. isn't New York... nah... we've got lots more roads... lots more... opportunities. We can and must do better than 28 new miles.
(All the above is factual, and here's where we get speculative: Where did that erroneous 125 miles of bike lanes number come from? We don't really know...and the 2009 draft plan doesn't say how it arrived at any of its totals - it just reports totals... but we'll guess that the 125 miles are from an earlier draft of the plan, perhaps the recommendations that Alta initially turned in. The 125-mile number seems to indicate that there was an early version of this plan with 125 miles of bike lane, and that 80% of these were cut by folks in the Planning Department or the Transportation Department. We've asked to see the initial drafts that Alta turned in, but our requests haven't been answered... so this is just speculative.)
For the bike-geeks out there, check our numbers on our spreadsheets:
--Bike Lanes from the 1996 Plan
--Our Totals Compared to 2009 Plan's Stated Totals
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Great Stuff, Joe, – and remember, what you call the speculative part, this is actually a well developed scientific enterprise: I call it Book Scene Investigation (Analytical Bibliography) when I teach my students, and it consists in analyzing particularities in a document as indicators of the process that lead to its present shape. A similar piece of evidence could be found in Rita Robertson’s infamous Bikeways Closure Proposal, where a few lines across the page break were printed twice. There are also irregularities in the DMV Driver Handbook over the last editions. Who would have thought that the bibliographical expertise of studying old books and establishing lineages by the tradition of error would have such interesting applications. The next step is a Hinman collator. And what about errors in pagination for example?
Michael Cahn (Email) - November 24 '09 - 23:00
How on earth will we wring some facilities and findings out of this process?I am totally out of gas with rage. The only thing I’m looking forward to is the first CicLAvia. That is what I have my hopes pinned on.
ubrayj02 (Email) (URL) - November 25 '09 - 13:19
fyi – for detail-oriented peoples, I found a bike lane project that was missed and mistakenly omitted from the spread sheet, which I’ve now corrected at the link in the article. It’s Barbara Street in San Pedro which is designated for about 1/10th of a mile of bike lanes – plus a half-mile of bike-friendly street.This doesn’t change the overall 28 total miles figure, though. The actual total went from 27.87 to 27.97 miles of proposed bike lane.
If there are any other errors that folks find on the spreadsheets, please let me know.
Joe Linton (Email) (URL) - December 01 '09 - 11:26
the most telling number is that 9.94 NEW lane miles, they could only find 17 NEW places to put lanes, and only 2 of them are over a mile! the rest of the 18 miles were handed to them, they didn’t even have to do the work for those. insanity, absolute insanity…ramonchu (Email) (URL) - December 11 '09 - 01:08