Sprol

You could say that Los Angeles has a love/hate relationship with the bicycle, but (in the manner of all things LA) it’s a rather eccentric one. Angeleno bicyclists love so much about LA—the weather, the mountains and beaches, the leafy side streets, the breathtaking light — but LA as a whole does not love bicyclists.

The City of LA loves bicyclists, officially, and tries to do what it can for them. But the great congested mass of benzene-addled motorheads does not. And the infrastructural legacy that seven decades of pandering to the personal automobile at all costs has left most of the city grimly cold to human life in general, and to bicyclists in particular.


It is stunning, really, that in a city that’s mostly flat, warm, and dry, so few people ride bicycles at all, whether for utility or pleasure. There are fifteen million plus people in LA; there are maybe 1/20th that number in cold, rainy, hilly San Francisco.

Yet there are bicycles around you almost anywhere in SF, whereas it’s unusual to see one anywhere in most parts of LA, except as a prop. Ditto Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York—and let’s not even bring up Amsterdam or Tokyo, all cold, wet burgs half the time that are buzzing with bikes.

What is it that makes LA a strong contender for the label of the World’s Least Bicycle-Friendly City?

Sprawl is a good place to start, especially in the city that defined the term. Distances in Los Angeles are vast in the conurbation Dorothy Parker once described as “seventy suburbs in search of a city.” Commutes of ten to twenty miles are not uncommon, and some folks drive in to work from distant corners of adjacent counties, sitting in their cars for one to two hours each way each day.

That this is a collective madness that generates individual psychopathy is undeniable; that the galactic scatter of workplace and domicile mitigates against bicycle commuting for many people is self-evident.

The concentration of retail and services into gigantic malls, and concomitant decimation of neighborhood commerce (literally illegal in most parts of the city) makes it difficult to bike or stroll to a nearby bakery, greengrocer, shoemaker, hardware store, or what have you for a simple purchase, because such places simply do not exist except in the luckier, historic districts.

Since each trip involves an expedition, the tendency is to bunch them together so that one braves the intimidating expanses of mall parking as infrequently as possible, loading up the car to the brim with whatever goods one feels compelled to buy that week. Mall culture and bulk buying are antithetical to bicycling, not to mention to civility itself.

This exaggerated dependence on the motorcar coerces the denizens of this automotive dystopia into spending endless hours staring at the bumper ahead of them on freeways, streets, and parking lots, leading the citizenry to clamor for -— you guessed it! -— more freeways, streets, and parking lots.

For which you tear down yet more local stores and cozy neighborhoods, only to replace them with more malls and bedroom communities even farther apart from each other and the central city, thereby perpetuating the very syndrome one thought to escape thereby, in a slow but inexorable feedback loop.

The result is wide, eternally crowded asphalt planes that don’t even deserve the name of “streets,” fourteen lanes filled with cars from curb to curb and horizon to horizon, with nothing to look at but the cinderblock soundwalls demarcating malls, industrial parks, and the occasional cloistered pink stucco ghetto.

It creates a place that no one wants to be in, especially not on a bicycle.

The motorist’s salvation was to be the freeway, which simply replicated the conditions of the streets with added horrors, such as the practice of lowering the road into a trench from which escape is possible only at long intervals of sometimes several miles between off-ramps.

The solution, for many drivers, is to cut through residential streets. So many drivers have chanced upon this obscure but clever idea that now little narrow lanes have one or two dozen cars per block, squeezing past each other with engines roaring in opposite directions, chirping their tires as they blast away from the stop signs, and yelling the LA motor-moron’s slogan, “get off the road!,” to any bicyclists they may have to pass.

And pass and pass and pass. It so happens that one of those hapless roads is Hauser Boulevard, which comprises the first half of my bike ride to the office every morning. Let me recount an all-too-typical incident of recent date:

I was pedaling on to work one morning, going up Hauser as usual. About the middle of one block a gigantic SUV — an Escalade — swung past with the usual flurry of rasping motor sounds and tire hisses. The tires alone seemed nearly as big as my wife’s Mini Cooper. He bounded around a slower car ahead of him too, and crowded up on the next one , since there was opposing traffic and the road is narrow, as are most residential streets.

A block or so later I caught up with him at the light, waiting behind a short row of his fellows. I went past, the light turned green, we all started up again. A half a block later, he passed me again. A block and a half later, I caught up to him again, and passed him again.

This went on for nearly three miles. Finally we came to Santa Monica Boulevard. I pulled up on his left this time and motioned for him to lower the window.

Of course he was probably expecting a lecture from a self-righteous bicycle radical (which I am). Instead I just told him his right brake light was out, and that he might get a ticket for that. He thanked me and turned; I went on.

Maybe, just maybe, he’ll reflect on how much he was spending in gas and nerves to go uphill at exactly the average speed of a greybeard on a bicycle. We can only hope.

At least he didn’t yell at me. Some do. Besides the usual “Get off the road!” mantra, I’ve had drivers inform me that I wasn’t a car, something I thought was pretty obvious. The implication is that I shouldn’t be on the road. So one fellow bitterly informed me one rainy night on Van Ness Avenue. I didn’t bother to argue with him. I just pulled on ahead in the space between the cars and the curb. The cars that were actually blocking his way. I was a mile closer to home before he got to the end of the block. So maybe he was jealous of my freedom.

That both the Universal Vehicle Code and the California Vehicle Code classify bicycles as vehicles and require that one operate them only on the roads is something that these boneheads shouldn’t be ignorant of, considering that they have to pass a test of their knowledge of those very codes to get their licenses. But immuring oneself in a car nurtures ignorance, and here, at Ground Zero of Autogeddon, ignorance is seen as, if not bliss, at least the comfort of the falsely self-righteous.

Plus, if tedious distances and Neanderthal drivers weren’t enough, there’s Proposition 13. Sold to the public as a way to save grandma from being taxed out of her cottage, what it really did was insulate anyone who held onto property past a certain date from paying any reasonable share of property tax. Well, grandma died, and anyway the average homeowner in LA moves every seven years, so all the small property owners were paying high taxes again fairly soon. But the Big Corporations, who hold vast tracts of land for decades, sometimes centuries, well, they’re holding onto their cash. This first great success of the starve-the-beast movement gutted California’s budget, and one consequence of that was that streets and highways that used to rival Switzerland’s now more closely resemble the shattered lanes of particularly destitute Third World countries.

Ripples, cracks, and bumps—why, you hardly even notice them! But potholes the size of real cooking pots do get your attention. Solidified asphalt washboard with repeated three to six-inch heaves that convert your bike from a thoroughbred stallion to a spastic camel as you bounce down the space between the speeding cement truck and the trash-filled gutter are hard not to notice.

Irregular longitudinal trenches up to four inches deep and wide enough to swallow a motorcycle tire, let alone a bicycle’s, occasionally inspire concern. Not to mention the surprisingly unrare blocks of concrete left in the street for weeks at a time—chunks of curb broken off in violent accidents are common, as well as fistfuls of macadam torn up by the relentless pounding of heavy trucks. Never mind the sheets of plywood, constellations of broken glass, and half-mashed shopping carts…

And dead rats. Lots of those in Hollywood, for some reason.

Fourth Street, near where I live, is a designated bicycle route. Halfway down one mansion-bordered declivity is a bad patch job where a one-by-four foot rectangle of road drops four inches down, leaving edges of jagged concrete.

The bike lanes on the eastern stretch of Sunset Boulevard place you about eighteen inches from car doors—if they’re small cars. Of course the SUV-stretch pickup with the dual rears sprawls well beyond the painted line designating your space, forcing you out into the path of stoned gangbangers, imbecilic teenagers, hemmorhoidal lawyers snarling into cell phones as they swerve their Beemers through traffic, and befuddled immigrants who took their first driving lessons at age seventy-five.

You’ve really got to love bicycling to ride in LA.

It’s a tribute to the World’s Most Efficient Machine that some of us do.

More and more each day; I see them every morning, every night, and unlike the Spandex Superheroes who attack the canyons Sunday mornings, they wave back when you say hello. We’ve even got Critical Mass, and when a phalanx of bicyclists occupies a whole block of La Brea Avenue, the diners at the sidewalk tables look up, shocked by the sudden tranquility—and everyone smiles.

So there’s hope, even here. But we’re still pioneers against our will. All we want to do is ride our bikes and create a little peace in a weary world. LA makes it difficult. But still we ride.

See more writing from Richard at EBykr