Last week, with the guidance of visiting Dutch bicycle experts (Amsterdam residents make more bike trips than car trips), the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation hosted the ThinkBikeLA event to imagine bike infrastructure projects for three areas around Los Angeles. (Check out YouTube user Cycl0ptic's video of Richard the Dutch bicycle engineer on a tour from the ocean to Downtown.) Three working groups--focusing on Spring/Main (Downtown), Van Nuys Blvd. (Pacoima), and Jefferson/Vermont (USC)--produced a bunch of creative renderings and street sections for you to enjoy. The Downtown group came up with a "head, heart & legs" concept, where the heart is the area between Spring and Main, and each body part has a different road profile. The Vermont group proposed bike lanes, a bike-friendly street, and a bike box at Jefferson and Grand. The Van Nuys group suggested adding sharrows, bike crossing signs, and bike parking, among other street improvements.
The wide open question after the event, of course is how these projects get implemented. LA City Planner Jane Choi tells Curbed that her takeaway was that Dutch ideas about biking can help make the streets of Los Angeles much safer without much intervention. Choi also made it clear that there are opportunities for implementation, "especially with the institutions involved, like USC in the Vermont plan area. We could see safety improvements for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists." LADOT Bike Planner Tim Fremaux told Curbed that LADOT staff met with GM Jaime de la Vega this morning, and that details about implementation of these ideas would be available at the end of October.
· ThinkBike L.A. Resources [LADOT Bike Blog]
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