La Grange’s Bike Advocacy
Bike Talk’s interview of Marco Fantone followed a segment on the legacy of 17-year-old United States National Champion Magnus White. Last year, Magnus was coming home from a ride when a driver ran him over on the shoulder of a Boulder, Colorado, area highway. After their loss, Magnus parents started The White Line, “dedicated to advocating for the safety of all vulnerable road users and to be a new voice towards creating safer road environments.” His mom told Bike Talk that she didn’t feel like she had a voice to advocate for road safety until after her son was killed. That is not unlike Families for Safe Streets, another organization of traffic violence survivors turned activists, who were on Bike Talk in June.
La Grange’s loss of Scott Bleifer, run down on Pacific Coast Highway by a catering truck in September 2005, had a similar effect. The Los Angeles Times reported the “collision … killed Stanislav Ionov, 46, of Calabasas, an accomplished physicist at HRL Laboratories in Malibu; and Scott Bleifer, 41, of Santa Monica, a vice president at Union Bank of California. The two avid cyclists do not appear to have known each other.”
La Granger Jeffrey Courion, who had been an aide to Los Angeles City Councilmember Joy Picus, was motivated by the PCH tragedy to step up as La Grange’s public policy director. "We're one of the few sports in the United States that is regulated by public policy by the mere fact that we use public property to do our sport,” he told SoCalCycling in 2008 when it reported that, “Rather than running from the reality that riding is a political act, the club, founded in 1969 by Frenchman Raymond Fouquet, tackled bicycle policy with gusto.”
Attorney Howard Krepak represented Scott Bleifer’s family in a wrongful death lawsuit. Howard was already an avid cyclist, and then-member Dan Weinberg introduced Howard to Jeffrey, after which Howard joined the club's public policy committee. Howard’s law firm was a prominent sponsor in the Los Angeles bicycling community. According to his firm’s newsletter, Howard said, “Cyclists, motorists and the government must work together to make the roads safe for all of us” and “There is no reason why Los Angeles can't be a bicycle-friendly city.” Union Bank donated $25,000 to a scholarship fund that Velo Club La Grange established to honor Scott; a club ride fundraiser added to the fund. (Some of that money has gone to Operation Firefly an education and bike light distribution program of LACBC intended to make sure people riding bikes in LA County are riding safely at night.)
Other La Grangers volunteered as safe streets advocates. In 2011, Jay Slater became chair of the City of Los Angeles Bicycle Advisory Committee. (At Jay’s urging, I was the Council District 5 appointee from 2009-2016.) Jay had been the La Grange board’s secretary and would be its president. Club members Jen Klausner and Alex Ameri both led the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition – now BikeLA. Current Bicycle Advisory Committee chair Rob Kadota is a former member. I’m likely missing others.
A different sort of tragedy, and a blow to our club’s advocacy, was losing Howard Krepak to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in 2015. Our last on-bike conversation was about becoming more active together in bike advocacy. It was not to be.
Where is the City of Los Angeles Today on Cycling Safety?
Whether riding my Specialized Tarmac for fun or putting paniers on my Trek FX 2 Disc to run an errand, I ride when and where I feel safe. But plenty of riders don’t have that choice, and it’s killing them. In 1977, 1996, 2010, and 2015, in order to be eligible for state funds, the City of Los Angeles adopted bicycle plans as part of its general plan. The 2015 plan (Mobility Plan 2035) included “Vision Zero.” (Vision Zero originated in Sweden in 1997, when the Swedish Parliament decided that the loss of life was an unacceptable price to pay for mobility.)
In 2018, Los Angeles’ Vision Zero website said, “Every year, more than 200 people are killed while trying to move throughout our city. Nearly half … were walking or bicycling …. In fact, traffic collisions are a leading cause of death for children in Los Angeles.”
Also in 2018, Hoboken, New Jersey (a city of 60,000) adopted its version of Vision Zero. Hoboken lowered the citywide speed limit, added stop signs, installed curb extensions to reduce crossing distances, and eliminated parking near intersections to improve visibility. Between 2015 and 2017, before Vision Zero, Hoboken had one traffic death per year. Nobody has been killed since then.
Los Angeles’ Vision Zero has been an abysmal failure: road deaths have nearly doubled since it started in 2015. In 2023, 336 people were killed by cars, an 8% increase compared with 2022. More than half, 179, were pedestrians and 24 were cyclists.
Population and scale aside, the biggest difference between Los Angeles and Hoboken is that Hoboken implemented its plan.
Reacting to the city’s inaction, in March 2024, nearly two thirds of Los Angeles’ voters passed Measure HLA, also known as Healthy Streets L.A. The measure requires the city to implement Mobility Plan 2035, which includes 238 miles of protected bike lanes, plus hundreds more miles of unprotected lanes. The plan also includes dedicated bus lanes, widened sidewalks, and improvements to move cars better on 79 miles of arterials that carry between 30,000 and 80,000 vehicles per day.
Our club can have a say in how these plans are implemented. But many of us see things differently than the “regular” population.
Views On Cycling Safety Determine Whether People Ride
Backing up to Marco’s Bike Talk interview, when it came to safe streets infrastructure – specifically, the traffic islands south of San Vicente Boulevard on 26th Street – there was some separation between Marco and the host. It reminded me of conversations I’ve had with club members decrying new bike infrastructure – the parking protected bike lanes on Venice Boulevard, the 17th Street Curb-Protected Bike Lanes, and the “protected intersection” at California and Ocean Avenues in Santa Monica.
Backing up further – to 2006 – that’s when Portland, Oregon, bicycle coordinator Roger Geller released a seminal paper entitled “Four Types of Cyclists.” He called them: Strong and Fearless (around 1%), Enthused and Confident (around 7%), Interested but Concerned (around 60%), and No Way No How (around 33 percent).
Seen in that context, some bicycle infrastructure – for example, off-road bike paths and parking protected bike lanes – is oriented toward the Interested but Concerned. Put another way, all-ages-and-abilities bicycle facilities are meant to get those 60 percent out of cars and onto bicycles – particularly for shorter trips. (A 2022 US Energy Department study found 52% of all trips, including all modes of transportation, were less than three miles, with 28% of trips less than one mile.)
