[M II A II R II K]

Backbone Bikeway Network


February 1st, 2010

By Alex Thompson



Read More: http://www.bikesidela.org/the-backbo...rk-labp-20100/

If you open the draft of the proposed Bike Plan, and you flip to the maps, you’ll find a sixteen pages of confusing mess: dashed lines, dotted lines, infeasible lines, and tiny street names. By contrast, when the Bike Working Group publishes its Best Bike Plan (a community effort to produce a ambitious bike plan for LA), you’ll be able to flip to the centerfold, and view three clean, coherent maps outlining a system of bikeways that will get you anywhere in the city.

t’s the Backbone Bikeway Network. The Backbone Bikeway Network will get you from Downtown to West LA, Crenshaw to Valley Village, and LAX to Hollywood. The Backbone doesn’t have neighborhood level detail, because that’s not what a citywide system is for – this system gets you 5 and 10 and 20 miles across town. It goes on major streets – arterials – unlike the proposed Bike Plan, and it gets you within striking distance of major destinations like Dodger Stadium and City Hall.

This is the first section – the Central Area. Mad props are due to Mihai Peteu for designing this beautiful map – let’s hear it for Mihai! In the next few days we’ll come out with the Valley map, and the South LA map. This is the hardwork of the 3rd Bike Working Group, and we fought and loved over each decision. Therefore, we invite you to criticize!

Here’s a basic criticism: what do you do once you get near your destination and you must leave the Backbone? Then you make use of the neighborhood network. The neighborhood network is whatever the neighborhood has – bike lanes, sharrows, traffic calming, narrow streets with high speeds and pot holes, wide streets with calm traffic, whatever happens to exist there.