Oh there isn’t a Pewter award? Perhaps our best hope is that the Nobel committee will take notice and honor Beverly Hills with their new prize for bike-friendliness – an action in line with their recognition of policymakers from Henry Kissinger (for butchering the Vietnamese and bombing the Cambodians) or Obama (the Peace Prize just before his policy of extrajudicial killings and drone strikes). Our policymakers here in BH would happily hoist an award for simply being recognized for inaction, and would hoist it even higher without actually doing any work to earn it. That’s how we roll.

I’m also sure that any failure to you or anyone else wasn’t intentional. The primary invitations came from the city, not the LACBC. I think we all assumed you had been invited by the city; I know I did. The LACBC also attempted to find out who had been invited to the press conference by the city, but was unable to get a clear response, and were limited by clear instructions not to tell anyone what the press conference was about.

In the future, I will do my best to ensure that you are informed of things like this as far in advance as possible, bearing in mind that I only learned about it a few hours before you evidently did.

As I pointed out in this post, credit for the award belongs to Wolfpack Hustle and the Ridazz as much as it does anyone else. You deserved to be there, and I was surprised that you weren’t. We’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

The League of American Bicyclists compiles a list of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey annual results for the bicycle commuting modal share in the 70 largest cities.

http://blog.bikeleague.org/blog/2012/10/infographic-bike-commuting-growing-faster-in-bicycle-friendly-communities/

As you can see from the 2011 data results, 39 of the 70 cities had received an award and with the latest 2012 presentations, over two-thirds of them have gotten bronze or higher designations. One of the cities at the bottom of the list had a commuting modal share in 2011 of a tenth of one percent and it has a bronze award. Los Angeles has a commuting modal share that has been anywhere from 2-10 times more than that city. Sixteen of the cities that have at least two-tenths less commuting modal share below Los Angele’s rate have awards.

The most important measure for the results of efforts to make a community more bicycle friendly should be whether there has been a significant increase in cycling over the years above and beyond the average, or the city was able to maintain a much high cycling rate than average.

If you look at the bicycle commuting modal share starting from the major gasoline price increase of 2008 (gas prices have a big influence on the commuting cycling rate), Los Angeles has not shown any change outside of the margin of error 0.2 percent. Whereas New York city made a one-third increase and Chicago 40%.

Los Angeles has been laying down miles of various thermoplastic symbols to encourages more bicycling from a limited segment of the population. However, to get to a point where the majority of the population would be willing to bicycle regularly, then there needs to be physical barriers on busy primary streets that separates the much greater mass and speed of the motor vehicles from the cyclist. Until then, Los Angeles is essentially trying to convince less than 10% of the population to ride a bike on arterial streets that have bike lane stripes or sharrows. What your going to end up seeing is a lot more bicycling injuries as a result of this.

Why is it considered reasonable to expect a unprotected cyclist to ride in between two stripes four or five feet apart on a busy arterial street and yet it would be considered appalling to expect pedestrians to do the same thing? Let me remind you that one of the key driving forces behind the installation of a mass amount bicycle paths in the Netherlands, starting in the mid 1970′s, was the protests from parents about the cycling injuries and deaths that were increasingly occuring to children due to the post WWII push towards accomodating the automobile.

As for participation in the press conference, my understanding is that the decisions were made at City Hall, and not by any bike orgs. The only invitation I got was to stand there with my bike and look pretty, and watch the event like anyone else.

Word on the street is that certain bike org(s) were tasked with deciding who got to share the podium in celebration of this accomplishment and guess what…. the biggest most influential most active bike “org” in years didnt get an invite… might have been nice being that the Midnight Ridazz have been fueling the bicycle revolution in LA for nearly a decade now…. But perhaps either Ridazz are too radical for the camera or perhaps not thought of in “legit” bike org circles because we are a bit uncooth or vocal or ok sometimes a little crazy and… un-funded…. but let it be known that the unsung heroes who’ve organized thousands of rides for FUN and culture and community have also done a good share of advocacy themselves. bringing literally hundreds of scrappy passionate voices to city hall out of pure passion hell even painting and postering the streets demonstrating and organizing. we did it to ask for safe streets and the endless years of chatter did just as much to convert LA that any of the non-profit orgs have. Ridazz deserved to be a part of this too… juss sayin…

The city does not yet deserve any kind of award really… LA still consistently kills and hits and runs just as much as it did last year one suspects…