The Past Two Weeks in Streetsblog

Sorry I missed doing this post last week, it's been a hectic couple of weeks. On the strength of reader curiosity about the Mandeville Canyon incident, and a story picked up by Planetizen about how roads don't pay for themselves; LA Streetsblog just finished it's two strongest weeks ever,

For any readers not from this area, the transportation press has been dominated by discussion of the Mandeville Canyon Road Rage Crash. Basically, on 7/4 a couple of cyclists were cut off by a driver in an act of road rage (you see the cyclists were going slower than the driver wanted) and you can see the non-graphic result above. For more graphic shots, go to our second most read story ever. Given what the story did for Streetsblog's traffic, I can only imagine what it did for LAist who broke and was the lead on the story as it developed.

The story doesn't end there. The local Councilman, StreetHeat favorite Bill Rosendahl, calls a town hall meeting between cyclists and Mandeville residents to respond to the accident. However, two days before the meeting, Rosendahl cancels the meeting and instead forms a "task force" to discuss the issue. The task force meets at the same time/place as the meeting was supposed to be causing some cyclists to scream bloody murder that all that really happened was that they were disinvited to a meeting. Kent Strumpell, Rosendahl's rep to the city's Bike Advisory Committee, was there and he sent a report to Streetsblog which can be read here.

This wasn't the only bike-ped news though. Ironically, the City Council Transportation Committee held an all afternoon meeting on bike issues. There was good news: the city is adopting a Sharrows program and the City Council expressed interest in pursuing a better Bike Master Plan. And there was bad news; the Council is moving ahead with its plan to close one of the entrances to the Ballona Creek Bike Trail.

Remember the Pico/Olympic Plan I covered here (pre-Streetsblog) so obsessively this fall? Well, despite its unpopularity and a judgement against it, it's going forward. The City Council is meeting a judge's request that it receive a full environmental review before the city can take the plan any further.