Sustainability In Business

Last week, C.I.C.L.E. attended the L.A. Bike Working Group meeting, hosted by Bike Writers Collective, to bring bicyclists together to review, discuss, and critique the draft L.A. City Bike Master Plan.

Published October 27, 2009 by C.I.C.L.E.
By Joe Linton :: Photo Credit: BicyclesandDinosaurs.com

Last week, C.I.C.L.E. attended the L.A. Bike Working Group meeting,  hosted by Bike Writers Collective, to bring bicyclists together to review, discuss, and critique the draft L.A. City Bike Master Plan. 

At the meeting, during a small-group break-out session, Colin Bogart, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition's  PLACE Grant Coordinator,  put forth an excellent idea: the city of Los Angeles should have multiple bicycle coordinators. Colin mentioned that New York and San Francisco both have multiple coordinators.. so why is it that Los Angeles – a city of 4 million people and 500 square miles – has only one bicycle coordinator? The suggestion was passed along to the whole group, and subsequently appeared in the Bike Coalition's email newsletter.

I think it's a great idea. And I want to explore and it a bit here.

First a bit of background on what's out there now.

The city of Los Angeles has one bike coordinator. Her name is Michelle Mowery. She's the most visible face of L.A. city staff working on bike issues, and, as such, she takes a lot of criticism for the city's lack of support for bikes. She has a lot of ground to cover. She's not an engineer; she works with a group of less than a dozen engineers in the city transportation department (LADOT) Bikeways Division.

LADOT currently has five Operations Divisions that cover the entire city: West Valley, East Valley, Western Area, Hollywood-Wilshire and “Central and Southern” (which sounds like two, but it's one.) The Bikeways Division works citywide with these Operations Divisions to implement bikeways in various parts of the city. Sometimes, such as was with the Reseda Boulevard bike lanes, there are discrepancies between what various parts of LADOT are doing.

So… wouldn't it be great if the city would hire a bicycle coordinator for each of its five Operations Divisions? I think that this would be great, in an ideal world, in a city that's not facing a budget deficit and a hiring freeze… in a city that's not 2009 Los Angeles. It's probably a good thing for bicyclists to push for these additional coordinators in the city bike plan… but it's pretty unlikely to happen this year or next year.

So… an alternate version of this idea might be for each Operations Division to designate a bicycle coordinator. Maybe call it a division bike coordinator or a designated division bike point person or something along those lines. There have been some commentaries suggesting that doing a bike plan for a city the size of Los Angeles is such a huge undertaking that it's difficult for the public to participate in a meaningful way – and that planning might be better at local scale. Distributing some the bike coordination down to district levels might make for a more localized, more responsive, more human-scaled implementation of bicycle facilities.

What would that person's responsibilities include? Perhaps she or he could be responsible for knowing that division's part of the citywide bicycle plan, and for making sure that bike projects are moving forward in that area. The person could interface with local bicyclists in each area. Perhaps LADOT could arrange for additional training and/or conferences for that person. Perhaps annually each division bike coordinator could give a report on what bike facilities had been completed in her/his area, and post that report on-line and present it to the city council and/or the city's Bicycle Advisory Committee.

Let us know what you think? Should the city have more bike coordinators? How should it work? What might their responsibilities entail?

(Thanks to the Bicycle Working Group and the Bicycle Coalition for bringing up this suggestion.)