Thread started by champagne at 08.9.11 - 10:06 pm

From Orange 20 blog via @BicycleFixation

August 7, 2011

Everybody Must Get Stonewalled….

Bike corral: Highland park, Si; Hel-Mel, No?

Well….

If you’ll recall, in the euphoria most of us felt when Highland Park received LA’s first bike corral, I wrote up a petition for a bike corral in the Bicycle District and took it around to Hel-Mel’s merchants, almost all of whom signed on. I then sent it to council member Eric Garcetti’s, which informed me I needed a maintenance agreement from one of the merchants.

Yes, drivers get tens of thousands of parking spaces all over town, which the city cleans for them, but we have to promise to clean our own bike corrals if we’re to have any hope of getting one.

So I got not one but two merchants to sign on. (Though one was Pure Luck, which has left.)

Then it was supposedly LADOT which was lagging. So I called my contacts at LADOT–who said they were ready to go and waiting for the council office to tip them the word.

So I got back to Garcetti’s office. Now the story was that there wasn’t any funding…for a while. Then there was. Then there wasn’t….

However, now there really is: Metro is cutting loose some cash specifically for bike corrals.

So a while ago I emailed the council office yet again, asking what sort of progress we might be making.

Silence. For five weeks now.

Maybe they’re just distracted. Maybe they’re just stonewalling us. Maybe they really don’t believe we really want one.

Could they be right on that last point?

Okay, here’s your chance to test the city’s responsiveness. After all, Garcetti is normally a good friend to cyclists.

Here is Garcetti’s email. Send him a note–a polite note–saying that you’ve heard about the bike corral coming to Heliotrope & Melrose, how happy you’d be to use it, and how puzzled you are that it’s taking so long to arrive.

If enough of you write, we might just get the damned thing. A bike corral for Hel-mel! What could be better?

And if enough of you don’t write, maybe we really don’t deserve one there.

He’s a public servant–your public servant, if you ever come to Hel-Mel–and he’s waiting to hear from you at councilmember.garcetti@lacity.org.

This is how cities work, folks. When they work. It’s not up to them; it’s up to us.

Posted by: Richard Risemberg @ 7:05 pm