One of the odder things about LA, is the rather schizophrenic attitude the city, and its residents have towards bicycles. On the one hand, you have some of the most progressive, or at least some of the least restrictive, laws of any city in the US. It is legal to ride your bike anywhere you want LA county, sidewalk or street, provided you aren’t recklessly causing a hazard to either traffic or pedestrians. The city will provide free bike racks to business who ask for them, and even come install them for you. Politicians and resident are always talking about how important it is to encourage alternate forms of transportation, like bicycles. You can take your bike on the subway, and all buses have bike racks on them. I even have people occasionally walk up to me and thank me for riding a bike instead of clogging the road with another car. It sounds like the perfect bike city, on paper.
Problem is, as soon as everyone is done with their bike love-in, they get back in their $60,000 Hummer, and head right back out of the road. Even the guy who owns the shop that built my bike owns a Hummer, no joke! You see, everyone likes the idea of people riding bikes everywhere, but only because they think it will leave the road open for them to drive around more. They think that if more people rode bikes, then there would be fewer people in their way. If they are walking to a store, then of course the proper place for cycle traffic is on the street, but the moment they get in their car, all those bikes should of course get out of their way, and ride on the sidewalk. It is a nice idea to relieve traffic congestion, just not for them. For them, they will take their bike out every couple weekends to get a little exercise, or maybe ride their expensive fixed-gear hipcycle down to the Starbucks one day a week to reestablish their environmental street cred. Like so many other things in LA, bikes are just another lifestyle accessory that you keep in storage until the proper occasion pops up, where you can show it off. In LA, you are far more likely to see a bike on a patio or hanging from a trunk rack on an expensive SUV, than ever on the road.
This is of course why this scene jumped out at me. It is indicative of the attitudes in LA about bikes. I go to this store all the time, and while they have this nice big bike rack, it is always being used as storage for one piece of equipment or another. Some times they have discarded in-store displays piled against it. Sometimes they have shopping carts there. For several months it was where they kept their dumpster, and now it appears to be where they store their construction equipment. It always makes me wonder why they bothered putting it up in the first place. I have seen all manner of token bike racks around this city. I have seen ones mounted so close to the wall that there is no way to actually use it as intended. I have seen racks that weren’t even properly secured, so anyone who wanted to could just slip your bike right off the rack.
It is all just a symptom of LA’s rather odd fixation on the car, and the attitude that while riding a bike everywhere sounds like a smart, environmentally sensitive, healthy and economically rational alternative to sitting in traffic for hours, no one actually expects anyone who can afford car to really do that. Bikes are relegated, much like public transportation in LA, to how broke people get around until they can save up for a car. My wife and I constantly have people asking us when we are going to get a car, as though we just hadn’t thought to get one yet. What they never seem to get is that we actually do have a car, it is just several states away sitting in a garage untouched for years now, and we have just never seen a reason to get it working again, and bring it out here. In fact, we both had several cars before we decided they just weren’t worth the trouble, or all the money they cost just to own. I can’t even begin to tell you how many people have looked at us in horror and shock at the idea that we bike a whole four miles to come visit them! Of course what they will never understand is that in all probability, we covered those four miles faster than we could have in traffic with a car.