The Bike Is Back

In 1900 Pasadena opened the first leg of an elevated bicycle highway designed to run the length of the Arroyo Seco to downtown Los Angeles. Although deemed an engineering marvel, the bikeway’s first three miles were also its last. The automobile soon brought the golden age of bicycling to a close. The proposed bike route became the Pasadena Freeway, the region’s first such road.

A hundred years later, area freeways are jammed and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is back to thinking about bikes. The MTA staff recommends investing $21.6 million over the next three years on projects ranging from an 18-mile bike path across the San Fernando Valley to a one-mile path connecting Long Beach City College to the Willow Street Blue Line station. Pasadena would get eight new segments of bike lanes.

Building bike paths and lanes to make commuting by bicycle safer and more appealing is not only a matter of getting more people out of their cars. It’s also about better serving the people who already commute by bicycle. The MTA estimates that cyclists already make up a not insignificant 2.4% of all daily travel trips in Los Angeles County. Some bicycle by choice--for the exercise or because it’s better for the environment. Others, many of them immigrants, do so by necessity. Often they can’t afford cars, and buses have stopped running long before their shifts as security guards or custodians have ended.

Linking bike paths to subway stations, providing additional spaces to lock bikes and adding bike racks to more buses are all part of the MTA’s plan to double the percentage of cycling commuters in the next 25 years. Equally important is safety education for both motorists and cyclists, particularly those who now ride at night without reflectors or lights on their bikes.

The MTA bicycle proposals, which will go before the agency’s board next month, are nowhere nearly as ambitious as the elevated bikeway of a century ago. That has disappointed cycling activists who would like more recreational trails. But like that early attempt to build a bikeway to downtown, the projects recommended by the MTA staff put the emphasis on commuting. That is where it should be.