President Obama is in town. A half hour before I was to drive to pick up the kid from school, I got an e-mail from a fellow parent with listings of street closures near the school, due to the president's visit. According to the LADOT website pretty much every main thoroughfare around school was to be shut down for a four-hour period.
So, our earthquake plan kicked in: ditch the car and use the bicycle and child trailer. When streets are closed or heavily congested, a bicycle works brilliantly. It would be my prefered method of daily transport, if I weren't concerned about driver aggression or indifference. L.A. has come a long way in terms of bicycle acceptance, culture, advocacy—but this isn't Davis.
For the trip home I rode on sidewalks to be extra cautious with my precious cargo. It wasn't quick, but it worked perfectly.
This is James Rojas. Among the many things he does are these magnificent candy-colored re-imaginings of our urban landscape, often excluding cars. The roads in his whimsical (yet serious) models, are intended for pedestrians and cyclists; public transport, too. Of the many reasons I enjoy his work, foremost is that it makes me not take for granted that the way things are in our built environment is the way they must be.
L.A. Trade Tech is a good place to go with a camera if you like the sorts of things I like.
The first L.A. Bike Summit took place today at L.A. Trade Tech south of downtown today. It was quite inspiring to see the large crowd of cyclists involved. Speakers from New York, Portland and Mexico City shared wisdom from the bicycle advocacy movements in those cities. As is common at bike-related events these days, there was bicycle valet parking. The valet parking at today's event was in a large meeting room.
"One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukoka is a book less about farming—as I had expected—than philosophy. It's more than a bit theoretical and assumes a foundation of knowledge uncommon among contemporary American readers. Reading it was helpful for me, though, in understanding the natural processes through which plants propagate, how human intervention fits into the picture and, most significantly, when our input is best minimized.
