In most parts of the state, today is “Bike to Anywhere” day. And while Santa Monica, and many other parts of SoCal, are waiting a week; I decided to take a morning rush hour ride to mark the occasion by myself. (For information on next Thursday’s bike fun, click here.)
I don’t actually ride my bike in Santa Monica all that much. Most of my riding has been practical, work or kids related, and the reboot of Santa Monica Next occurred at nearly the same moment long-distance running became my preferred form of exercise.
So, I broke this morning’s trip into two halves. The first half was a planned route (visible in the lead image and immediately above), and is probably similar to next week’s “Bike to Anywhere” ride as it took me past Santa Monica College (one of the announced pitstops) and ended at City Hall (another of the pitstops). The second was just a trip home doing my best to follow bike markings on the ground for as much of the route as possible…to experience Santa Monica’s streets as though I were biking them the first time.
There is good news. With even just a couple of minutes of planning, it’s possible to have a relatively easy low-stress trip across the city. The first leg of my trip was fast, flat, and had minimal contact with motorized vehicles. I started on Pearl Street heading east, cut up 14th Street all the way to Colorado, and took that all the way to Main. From there, it was less than 200 yards to City Hall.
Even without a planned route, the trip home was relatively easy. There was only one minor glitch I could blame on the city, a bike lane ending for construction with little warning and no instructions on the safest way forward (fortunately, it happened to end at MANgo).
But the largest challenges were brought by the age-old enemy of bicyclists, unsafe drivers.
Bicycling east on Broadway, in a protected bike lane, I watched a driver pull completely into the lane out of a driveway and stop, presumably so they could have a better view of oncoming traffic. Sadly, the driver failed to take advantage of the clear view she had of the mother pedaling her cargo bike in the bike lane she nearly t-boned. When the bike rider made a gesture at the rider, pointing to her kids, the driver chose to scream, “fuck you!” to the rider out her window.
The other two experiences were biking south on Cloverfield Boulevard. The first was a driver who stopped hard in the middle of the street without any signal so they could try to angle for a parking space. While I was several car lengths behind them, the other cars rapidly stopping created momentary chaos. The other was just the multiple times I was “Jerry Browned” by cars choosing to zip past inches away despite there being plenty of space to their left to “give me three.” Fortunately, I was soon back on Pearl Streets, Santa Monica’s unofficial Bike Boulevard.
Santa Monica has made great strides in creating a city that is a safe place to bike, including the ongoing construction of protected bike lanes. Two of my three negative experiences with drivers occurred on streets without those lanes, demonstrating, in a very small sample size, the need for protected infrastructure. However, as was evidenced by the other experience, there’s only so much that can be done when a driver chooses psychotic behavior over sharing the road.
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