Fountain of Death
Another door zone bike lane fatality.
“The new bike lane is welcome - and does make riding Fountain safer,” wrote Joe Linton of Streetsblog last St. Patricks´ day in a news roundup of alternative transportation in the Los Angeles area.
Photographs, taken by Linton himself shows the new bicycle lane.
Notice anything?
He finished that same sentence with, “but it's more one of those put-what-fits-without-taking-space-from-drivers facilities than a make-bicycling-really-safe-and-comfortable one.”
Mentioned nowhere is the fact this bicycle lane is in the door zone and that it replaced the previous configuration of properly installed shared-lane markings.
Linton was more focused on a typical delusion pushed by Cluster B(ike) activists, which is the almost zero-sum mindset that space needs to be taken away from motor vehicle usage to coddle bicyclists who are either unwilling to take a basic bicycling safety class, or are victims of pro-segregation Cluster B(ike) propaganda.
It’s the classic drama triangle common across Woke ideology1 and the Climate Crisis Hysteria movement. “Safety advocates” and Bicycle Infrastructure Industrial Complex apologists are the saviors of the “vulnurable road users” who are victims. It’s motorists, who they often assert are operating “two-ton killing machines” causing what they also assert is epidemic as the persecutors.
This isn’t the first time Linton has failed to cover a hazardous door zone bike lane either.
In his 2018 coverage of a “road diet” Alhambra Avenue in the Eastside of Los Angeles he noted the project, which included door zone bike lanes was a “safety improvement.”
Or when he praised another door zone bike lane in the region insisting their role in “connectivity” between other bike lane and paths in the area in addition to area schools.
Back when Streetsblog had a working comments section, several readers were critical of this “design,” writing that such such should not be considered worth praising. One went straight to the point.
A door zone bike lane is not a victory. It’s just the opposite. It’s unethical engineering that is worse than nothing. They encourage cyclists to ride where they can be seriously injured or killed in the blink of eye, while decreasing motorist tolerance for cyclists who know better than to use them. Stop advocating for them, and stop celebrating them!
In one of the replies, Linton wrote, “I would cycle there with my daughter. And I will push to keep making it even safer.” (His comment has striking parallels to those of Bill Schultheiss covered in Her Name was Maia.)
But the piece wasn’t meant to be about Linton’s work.
It’s about Bob George.
George, a Hollywood producer originally from Illinois, was killed in what multiple entertainment industry publications called a “bicycle accident.” So far it appears no mainstream news sites or newspapers have covered the fatality.
The Editorial Board of Desimartini noted his impressive career in Hollywood.
Hailing from Peoria, Illinois, Bob George's dedication to the film industry was evident early on, working as a production accountant for blockbusters like Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, The Sum of All Fears, and The Lone Ranger, to name a few. With a steady rise in the industry, George further expanded his horizons and took on the mantle of a production consultant for the film Divergent. His first foray as a film producer came with the 2017 feature Newness, which garnered attention at Sundance and subsequently got acquired by Netflix. Subsequent projects like Zoe, which premiered at Tribeca, and Endings, Beginnings by Samuel Goldwyn Films, showcased his talent in identifying and fostering compelling stories.
It took a bit of digging by the author of the website (and cycletrap apologist) Biking in LA and tipsters to reveal George’s fatality was due to being doored in Fountain Ave.’s new door zone bike lane.
The Google Maps Streetview imagery outdated and unfortunately doesn’t show the atrocity.
The author of Biking in LA framed it as, “because Los Angeles refused to remove parking to build a damn bike lane” echoing the massive blind spot present in a large swath of the bicycling community that no door zone is safe and that door zone bicycle lanes do not belong anywhere in engineering standards.
Saving Cyclists’ Dan Sullivan, in his article The Liberty Avenue Bike Lane noted these pushes to remove motor vehicle parking are flawed.
Bike lane advocates are largely ignorant of the history of street building. The streets are almost always built by the people developing the properties alongside the streets, and those properties would be useless without curbside parking, curbside deliveries and so on. This particular street was built prior to the advent of automobiles, but parking was necessary long before automobiles came along.
A far longer dive into door zone bicycle lanes, and why, despite their obvious hazards, remain as a “tool” is located here.
