Beverly Hills Mayor Lili Bosse has notched a win for public outreach with her Walk With the Mayor initiative. You can’t miss 80-100 people wearing her favorite orange as we parade through the streets starting 8:30am every Monday. Continue reading
In an incredible turnabout, all five Beverly Hills councilmembers agreed to include bicycle lanes on our segment of Santa Monica Boulevard. The unanimous vote demolished the specious claims put forth by NIMBY opponents. And it recognized the solid arguments brought forth by forty speakers and scores more comments: bicycle lanes not only make riders feel safe, they actually make us more safe! Continue reading
Bicycle lanes on Santa Monica Boulevard come back to Council on Tuesday, June 20th. With a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make this corridor truly multimodal, we hope you’ll join us in Council chambers to urge city officials to encourage bicycle riding by making it safe. Continue reading
Among the ignominious developments over the last year in Beverly Hills, surely the one of greatest interest to bicycle riders was City Council’s decision not to include a bicycle lane on Santa Monica Boulevard. But on its heels came another decision: to step away entirely from an update to our 1977 Bicycle Master Plan. But we called it out! Continue reading
The Beverly Hills Courier, the perennial champion of anti-Metro hyperbole, has rotated its turret toward toxic contamination on Santa Monica Boulevard parcels 12 & 13. Riders know this land for the chain-link fencing and dense tree cover that casts in deep shadow pavement hazards east of Beverly. Well the shadow is no more: the landowner clear-cut the trees on a Saturday morning. But were the required permits secured? Did the city fail to ensure that soil contamination wasn’t disturbed? The incident raises questions not only about City Hall transparency but rider safety on the corridor too.
Perhaps nowhere is it better to be a cop than here in Beverly Hills. Find one of our finest in a cozy booth in a comfortable local restaurant near you. Continue reading
You would think it is top-secret: the city calendars a priority-setting exercise to craft policy-making for the coming fiscal year yet no press release promotes it. The website hardly mentions it. And our crackerjack communications team conducts zero outreach for an ostensibly stakeholder-driven process. Why not invite stakeholders? Do policy-makers & staff want the warm coffee and Costco cookies all for themselves?
To mark the close of Geography Awareness Week (which began Monday) we’re offering a few maps that highlight the varying commitment of local governments to ensuring safe, multimodal mobility.* Each highlights bike lanes and designated bike routes that we know make riding more safe, but also tend to increase the appeal of cycling as a mode of transportation. Let’s start with Beverly Hills as a reference point.
Every year, City Council establishes policy and program priorities. And for the past four fiscal years, the long-overdue update of our Bicycle Master Plan was one of them. The plan dates to 1977. Yet even as other transportation priorities have moved forward, the city has taken no step toward revisiting a forty-year-old plan that’s still on the books. At the November 5th Traffic and Parking Commission meeting we learned why from transportation chief Aaron Kunz: the plan update is not really a city priority after all.
Every two years the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition conducts a count of pedestrians & bicyclists. All across the county, volunteers stand on a street corner for a couple of hours with a clipboard to manually count those who walk and ride. Sounds inefficient, right? It is! But automated counters register only vehicles; they don’t measure multimodal trips. So intrepid volunteers take the reins! The objective: to document how people actually use streets and then use the data to inform policies that maximize safety and efficiency for all road users.
Earlier this year, then-Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation challenged American localities to make travel safer for bicycle riders and pedestrians. In March he invited US mayors to sign on, and Beverly Hills accepted the challenge back in February. But we’ve heard nothing from City Hall about it since then. Is our city doing anything to meet the Mayors’ Challenge for bike-friendly streets?
While reading a recent link-bait post over at Los Angeles Magazine, we were reminded just how unwelcoming is our local Whole Foods to those who would ride a bike. In its back-of-the-envelope comparison of “shopping experiences” at Whole foods in Mid City and Beverly Hills, the magazine nearly flunks the Mid City store. But ours gets a ‘B’ grade? For many years we’ve complained about a wheel-bender rack in a grimy corner of the Beverly Hills Whole Foods garage. But to no avail.
What’s more ridiculous than wasting ink on the now-departed Qatari sheikh who hot-rodded around Beverly Hills this August? The fact that no ink is spilled about everyday reckless driving tolerated by city policymakers and police officials. Forget Mideast sheikhs behaving badly in their Ferraris and such; we’re got a homegrown haute bourgeoisie who feel entitled to spin around at high speeds on quiet residential streets in off-the-shelf sports cars. And they garner nary a glance from the cops. For come sunset, there is no traffic enforcement in Beverly Hills.
Today the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed critical of efforts to plan for multimodal mobility. Titled, ‘Mr. Mayor, L.A. is not Stockholm,’ by 29-year Santa Monica resident Bruce Feldman. “As I’m sure you know, cyclists make up just 2% of all road traffic…[yet] your road diet would make congestion in our expansive region much worse than it already is,” the writer says of the city’s new mobility policy. Such measures will diminish quality-of-life, he adds, yet paradoxically he finds his cure to the region’s mobility morass in the very policies that today ail us.
A couple of weeks ago we reported on a genius LA Times interactive called Walking in L.A. that mapped 817 of the “most dangerous” intersections in the county. As we noted with no surprise, several of most dangerous county intersections (and clusters) are right here in Beverly Hills. Despite the long histories of crashes, not one of them has been made more safe. City of Los Angeles several years ago acknowledged the problem, though, with a plan to stripe 53 problematic crossings for high visibility. Three years later, KPCC asks listeners, Are there others in need of a fix?