Editorial: Riding bicycles across bridges designed for cars is both scary and thrilling

At the start of this National Bike Month, my wife and I participated in the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure Ship to Shore cycling event in the city of Long Beach. Kicking things off in the shadow of the Queen Mary, the longest route takes a circuitous path around the local area and totals up somewhere around 100 miles. As this was our first time doing the event, and the first charity event that my wife has ever ridden, we opted for a much more manageable 11 mile route. The important thing is that the route allowed us the opportunity to cross the Gerald Desmond and Vincent Thomas bridges. Ever since I had learned last year that there was a chance to do such a preposterous sounding thing, I knew I had to make it happen, even if just once. Of course, experiencing this also got me thinking about just how different, yet still the same our needs are with different modes of transportation.

Editorial: All I want for Christmas...

It seems almost cliche to write a wish list for this time of year, but given that this is the first Christmas I am spending in my newly adopted home town of Long Beach, I thought it appropriate to share a few things that I would like to see happen in coming months. Most of this is borne of experiences since moving here in February, much of it slightly harrowing to say the least. I certainly do not expect any of this to change on its own and am working to participate in the civic process to try to help improve things, but it takes more than one person, even one organization, to really effect the kinds of change necessary to make things better.

So, all I want for Christmas is:

Editorial: Critical Mass just causes chaos, but there is better way

The modern iteration of the Critical Mass ride is over two decades old and started off as a way for cyclists to gather and assert their rights to use the road. It started out as a small ride in San Francisco but has grown into a rowdy and chaotic protest that takes place worldwide. With no leadership to speak of and no real hierarchy or formal organization, there is little effort to work with proper channels or the authorities to do things in a safe, much less legal, manner. That has caused the rides to become not only controversial for their lack of adherence to traffic laws, but have also resulted in numerous collisions or other traffic incidents where riders were injured.

Editorial: A case for changing our driver licensing process

Image courtesy of LBPost.com

This past week, the city of Long Beach suffered one of the most severe and lengthy power outages that I have recalled in recent memory. For 54 hours, over 50 blocks of downtown Long Beach were without any kind of power. Police scrambled to bring order by shutting down certain streets near work crews, directing traffic during rush hour, and stepping up neighborhood presence to prevent people from taking advantage of the darkness to commit crimes. Public works providers assembled generators and, at key intersections, set them up to power the stop lights to try and provide some semblance of order to the chaos, but the vast majority of stoplights were totally dark.

Now, a good driver would recall from their driver education training that when approaching an intersection with controlled by non-functioning traffic lights that one should treat the intersection as an all-way stop sign. That means bringing the vehicle to a complete stop, yielding to appropriate traffic, and then proceeding when safe. Apparently, the vast majority of drivers failed that part of the driving exam because the sheer number of near collisions that I observed because drivers failed to follow the rules - failing to stop at all, failing to yield, failing to give right of way - makes me wonder how we have managed to get by without many more utter catastrophes.

And speaking of yielding, every state's vehicle code has some provision in it to the effect of "motorists shall yield to pedestrians crossing in a marked crosswalk and only proceed when the pedestrian has reached the other side or at least some physical divider such as a center island." With stoplights out, that also meant pedestrian crossing signals were not functioning and pedestrians were to be treating the intersections as all-way stops as well. Yet, regardless of the presence of pedestrians in any state of crossing the street, some motorists edged into sidewalks, using their vehicles to physically bully the pedestrians into crossing faster, while others completely ignored the presence of pedestrians and proceeded through intersections with utter abandon, sometimes coming within inches of striking a pedestrian crossing the street.

It was during this period, when I tried to stick to my routine and take my regular walks with our dog that I fully understood just how utterly broken out driver education system truly is. It would be one thing if these kinds of close calls and near misses were uncommon and infrequent, but, alas, that is not the case. In the less than 2 full hours I spent outside walking the dog on just one single day, I crossed a grand total of 14 intersections and counted almost 100 near misses between cars and cars, cars and pedestrians, and cars and bikes. Every single incident was avoidable if the driver of the car had been paying attention, understood the laws, and took driving as a serious activity requiring focus and concentration instead of a chore to be done with the greatest degree of disdain.

Event: Bike Fest 2015 and the Wolfpack Hustle Short Line Crit 2015

Image courtesy of Downtown
Long Beach Associates

Imagine my surprise when I arrived home on Saturday after hanging out with West Brother to find that the streets right around my home closed off to traffic. There was a vague inkling of local retailers and restaurateurs mentioning that there was some event going on over the weekend, but no one had clearly indicated what that event was. And of course, the last few weeks had been so busy, I had not paid that much attention to the little posters popping up in the shop windows. Once I managed to make my way back to my parking space, it was time to go explore and find out what was going on.

As it would turn out, going on literally steps from my front door was the Long Beach Bike Fest, a celebration of all things two wheeled with vendors hawking their wares, local advocacy groups recruiting for members, and, of course, the obligatory biergarten to satisfy the thirst of the throngs of local cyclists who had come to attend. What was not expected, however, was the presence of a closed course race track on public streets. As a part of the Bike Fest, a square track had been cordoned off for the Wolfpack Hustle Short Line Criterium race. The race was open registration, meaning just about anyone with a bike that could pass inspection, could register to participate in any of the 4 races.

Event: 2015 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach

2015 marks the first year that East Brother and I were able to attend the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. It is an event that we have both been trying to find the opportunity to go in person to for a number of years now. With East Brother's return to California and a concerted effort to free up the Sunday in both of our schedules, we finally made it to the Grand Prix on April 19th, which also just so happens to be the main event: the Long Beach Grand Prix Indy Car race.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Long Beach Grand Prix, it is sort of like the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix in that the race is basically constructed using public roadways everyone drives [Editor's note: And rides bicycles on!] on every day. Every year, for a few days in April, the City of Long Beach closes down the roads near Shoreline Village to facilitate the transformation of city streets into a race track and brings in the spectacle that is an Indy Car race to the city that houses one of the largest ports in North America.

Editorial: The West Coast Port Labor Dispute

Image courtesy of Zero Hedge

A few weeks back, I posted an editorial about how the aftermarket parts industry hit a sales slump due to the new generation of drivers and the cars that are important to them. While these factors have made an impact, another more recent situation has created another problem for the aftermarket, as well as the automotive, motorcycle, and cycling industries in general. For anyone that follows the news, you should already be familiar with the recent port congestion situation that created a massive backlog of vessels and containers along the entire West Coast. If you are not familiar with this event, it simply boiled down to the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) working without a contract since July of last year. In order to force the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) to agree to the ILWU's terms, a labor reduction situation occurred, causing massive backups at all of the major ports along the West Coast. The details of the "slow down" are a story for another time though.