Los Angeles Local News, Weather, and Traffic

Good news out of Eagle Rock. Last night, a public meeting on a proposed bike lane for Colorado Boulevard drew out supporters and opposition, but in the end there were more cyclists in favor of the lanes than cranky people opposing them. Recognizing the riding tide, Councilman Jose Huizar announced that the lanes will be painted, to the boos of the bullying crowd.

The lanes will extend from the Glendale City Limit to Avenue 64 in Northeast Los Angeles. The new design will remove one lane of traffic for a buffered bike lane, matching the road design in Glendale. The road diet and new bike lanes will be joined by new, freshly painted and more visible, zebra (aka continental) crosswalks.

This was clearly bad news for the Fox 11 team, who had clearly already planned most of their story to be about a minority of bicycling advocates trying to ram their agenda past the protests of the decent god fearing residents of Eagle Rock. They actually used a reader survey on the Boulevard Sentinel, a paper that outright lies about supporters of the bicycle projects, as proof that Eagle Rock residents oppose bike lanes.

From the opening segment, where a reporter sadly laments that “It’s bikes versus cars, and in Eagle Rock it looks as though the bicycle will win” through the interview with known liar and Boulevard Sentinel publisher Tom Topping, the Fox 11 report is clearly incredulous that anyone would think adding bike lanes on a street that is underutilized by car traffic for the existing lanes (they don’t mention that part either, referring to Colorado Boulevard as “busy”) is a normal person.

Despite the majority of the speakers and attendees being for the bike lanes, the report interviews only Topping and highlights four speakers, three of which are against the lane. They also broadcast a round full of bullying “boos” at LADOT’s Nate Baird (hilariously mis-identified as Huizar) and cheers after a person called the lanes a “waste of time, waste of money, waste of effort.”

So despite the best efforts of Topping and his cohorts, and the shocked reporting of Fox 11, there is good news from the meeting. Northeast Los Angeles will indeed see three new miles of badly needed buffered bike lanes.