Using the LACBC's Data to Make the Case for Active Transportation

The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition is out counting cyclists, doing the work that our local government should be doing, and I'd like to offer up a suggestion as to how to use the data they collect.

The street in front of Flying Pigeon LA bike shop and the Bike Oven, North Figueroa Street, is classified as a "Major Highway". There are two classes of Major Highways in L.A., a "Primary" (or Class I) and a "Secondary" (or Class II).

A Class I Highway is "zoned" for 50,000 average daily car trips.

A Class II Highway is "zoned" for 30,000 to 50,000 average daily car trips.

North Figueroa Street handles a lot of automobile trips during a typical work day even though (or, rather, because) it runs parallel to the 110 Freeway (aka the Arroyo Parkway).

But does North Figueroa have 50,000, or even 30,000, average daily car trips? If N. Fig. is moving less cars than it is zoned for, then we have grounds to fight to remove excess road capacity from cars in order to move more people using other modes, like bicycling, taking the bus, and walking. Using the LACBC's data, we can show that we can move just as many, or more, people using a mix of cars, buses, bikes, and walking while also reducing noise, pollution, car speeds, and crashes - we will have a pretty solid case to take away a car lane from N. Fig. and to replace it with road space for those other modes.

If North Figueroa is pulling in its "zoned" amount of car trips (or more), we can use our data to ask, "Is this really the best way to move people in this area?". The cyclists using the roads make, relative to automobiles, no impact on our pavement. By riding a bike, they are making themselves less prone to long term diseases that plague our neighborhood. Further, they are more likely to spend their money locally at locally owned businesses - sending more sales tax dollars into LA's coffers. Finally, cyclists take up a fraction of the space of automobiles, making bicycles a more efficient use of the limited roadway space (more people can use the road and not be delayed by others doing the same if they ride bicycles). This type of argument (backed up with actual cycling data, and not "best guesses" from City staff) is what bowls over engineers and peovides talking points for the politicians and locals we must lobby to see bike friendly changes made.

Finally, the LACBC's data can be used to say "With no bicycle amenities we're moving X thousands of cars per day and X number of bicycles per day. Knowing what we do about the local benefits of more people cycling, let's try and alter the design of the roadway to increase its bicycle and transit capacity wile reducing it automobile capacity and measure the results."

As an addendum, here are a few other avenues to explore with data collection to make a legal and scientific case for more bicycle and transit capacity on LA's surface streets:

The LACBC would do itself a favor and contact Assemblyman Kevin de Leon's office (currently the chair of the Appropriations Committee in the CA State Assembly) and ask him to get the California Board of Equalization to provide the Bradley-Burns Sales Tax income (that the state collects, and the City gets a cut of), block by block, for the corridors that the LACBC is studying.

There is a fine literature on the negative effects of loud sound on human beings, I would suggest measuring the noise generated on the corridors being studied (next time around) and using that data to make the case for a road designed better for non-automobile based transportation.

The LACBC, in coordination with perhaps a university (Occidental Colleges' UEPI?), would also do itself a favor by surveying residents in their study areas to find out how in favor they are to various types of traffic calming. The City of LA's Planning Commission can force a private developer to pay for traffic calming measures, and can make an "Neighborhood Protection Plan" a condition of approving the developer's permits. An NPP and traffic calming is a pre-written format for a non-governmental agency to use in the City of LA to measure the effects of the City's policies as regard the right of way. Perhaps a call to the Planning Commission would unearth a template for the traffic calming criteria the city uses and a few versions of the types of surveys the City uses to judge the effectiveness of traffic calming.

There are more addenda I'd like to add, but I'll call it quits here. I'v got to get to the shop, drop a bike off at the Fedex shipping center using my bakfiets, and get the shop ready for a few days without me (I'm going to pinche Las Vegas for Interbike).