what’s in a network?

According to Streetsblog, the LA City Council’s Transportation Committee is planning a bike-themed meeting this coming Friday. Damien Newton writes,

Next Friday, November 21 at 1 P.M., the Transportation Committee will hold a hearing on six different bike themed measures as well as the continuing the shuttle service to Dodger Stadium, and a RAND Corporation report outlining short-term strategies to reduce traffic.

The meeting’s agenda can be found here, via the Streetsblog article here. A follow-up to that article was posted this morning, where Damien notes that one of the items on the agenda is bringing bike sharing to Los Angeles. As he continues:

The largest obstacle?  The city’s disjointed bicycle network.

…

This simple statement seems to be both a blunt assesment of the city’s failure to bring provide comprehensive infrastructure for cyclists, but also bit of bar raising for the Bike Master Plan currently being developed by the city and Alta Planning.

Again, being new to this whole discussion, I know next to nothing about bicycle sharing. What thoughts I’ve worked through (most recently here) about planning and infrastructure are very much shaped by the routes I ride (mostly east/west from Koreatown to Westwood). But I’m thinking of a comment that DJ Waldie made in passing the other day in conversation with Greg Hise at the LA Public Library (another reaction to that talk here).

Roughly, he said that one of the things that marks Los Angeles politics is our collective fixation on the future. We’re so busy trying to reinvent ourselves that we sometimes neglect the process of living in the present. It was a rather penetrating comment, and so I’m cheered that in addition to discussing the admirable (though perhaps distant) idea of bike sharing, the Council is also taking up the Cyclist’s Bill of Rights and adding sharrows to city streets. Looking to the future, I suppose, while staying firmly fixed (or if you roll that way, fixied) in the present.

Advertisement