L.A. Bike Plan Presentation Inaccurate and Misleading

Published December 10, 2009 by C.I.C.L.E.
By Joe Linton : Photo credit: LA Streetsblog

Yesterday at the Los Angeles City Council's Transportation Committee meeting, city staff made some incorrect statements about the city bike plan draft. Here's one that we find especially misleading.

The City Planning department's Jordan Turner stated the draft bike plan includes 529 miles of bike lanes. We wish this were true. Based on numbers in the city's own plan, Turner off by 98 miles. He's also combining the "designated/proposed" bike lane category (28 miles which is more likely to be implemented someday) with the "potential" bike lane category (404 miles which the city stated is infeasible.) We don't think that Turner is intentionally lying, but we do suggest that he should read his own plan more thoroughly and be more careful and accurate in any future public presentations.

C.I.C.L.E. did a quick spreadsheet here comparing the totals that Jordan refers to with the actual numbers:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tbZplx45n0dbkLoHWGmKFRg&output=html

He's using the mileage numbers from page 41 of the draft plan:
125 proposed +
404 potential
529 total

Those numbers are wrong. When C.I.C.L.E. adds up the numbers from the actual facilities shown on the draft plan's maps and appendices, we get:
28 proposed +
403 potential
431 total

Most of this discrepancy C.I.C.L.E. already exposed at our earlier article here:
http://www.cicle.org/cicle_content/pivot/entry.php?id=2479