Need for a bike-friendly society

I was just thinking I should put up a page on my site about how our society is not very bike-friendly, and how the designers of roads and buildings show they don't understand the problems.  I don't think they even try to understand.

I hope to keep adding more points here long after I post this.  You can also email me with more, using the address at the bottom of the page.  It's good to give examples in the pattern of disregard in construction and maintenance.

Here's an example.  This is right near our house, and these vehicles are parked legally (ie, not too far from the curb), and yet the bike lane was painted to be the door zone, such that if you ride in it, you will eventually hit a door that someone opens just as you're getting there:

so you have to ride on the left line.

It's bad enough that people think bikes don't belong on the road because they don't pay vehicle license fees and gas taxes.  Local streets and roads are paid for by property taxes and sales taxes though, not vehicle license fees and gas taxes.  Most cyclists are also drivers anyway, but they're not damaging the roads when they ride bike like they would with their heavy vehicles.

Traffic-light sensors' sensitivity is often not turned up high enough to sense bikes and turn the light green for you.  BTW, these do not sense magnetic disturbances (so putting a magnet on your shoe won't help), nor do they sense weight.  The traffic-light controller puts an alternating-current signal, generally in the frequency range of 20 to 200kHz, through the loop of wire that's tucked into a slot in the pavement, setting up an electromagnetic field.  If you put your metal bicycle wheel over it, the field partially collapses on it, reducing the inductance of the loop, and the controller should know you're there waiting.  Put your wheel on the cut of the loop, not inside the loop, nor across the cut, but right on it and parallel to it.  See this page.

Then we have this kind of thing on trash day, where people put their containers in the lane:

We live near a 37-mile-long class-1 paved bike trail that's basically like an autobahn for bicycles, and you can go many miles at a time without slowing or stopping for anything; but I told a man in the county office that's responsible for it that I think whoever designed the trail went down a list of all the things not to do, for safety's sake, and made sure they had at least two of each.  And the thing about it is that it wouldn't have cost them any more to do it right if they had done so in the beginning, but they've had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing things after they caused severe accidents.

About seven miles west, there's the Los Angeles River bike trail, and there has been an eight-mile gap through the downtown area which they're planning on remedying.  In Dec 2026 / Jan 2026, they were soliciting input from the public; so I wrote the following:

I have, for years, wished the trail went through on this part of the L.A. river.  I'm very glad that it's finally being seriously worked on!  :)

I and my family have put over 100,000 miles on the San Gabriel River trail (SGRT), and some on other trails like the lower L.A. river trail and the Santa Ana River trail plus ones in other counties, and I can tell you from plenty of experience what the dangers and problems are; so I send you this material in hopes that the same mistakes in trail design won't be repeated in the new section of the L.A. river trail.

• tunnels that have a blind entrance / exit.  The Whittier Blvd tunnel on the SGRT is blind at one end, and the tunnel is too narrow anyway.  We've seen accidents there, caused by this.

• onramps where people come downhill onto the trail but you can't see them because of a nice wrought-iron fence blocking the view (three times, I've nearly been hit this way).

• gates to the river that open toward, instead of away from, the trail, such that someone not paying attention may run into one that's left open

• motor vehicles on the trail.  Minibikes are the worst, with professional bike racers' speed but lacking the riding skill which should accompany it, and they usually don't have even a lawnmower-grade muffler, and they're running much too rich and without smog equipment, so you have to hold your breath and hold your ears as they go by.  I understand one hit and killed a woman who was riding bike near El Dorado Park in Long Beach about 18 months ago.  Class-3 E-bikes are also illegal on these class-1 trails; but I don't see any enforcement.  Same with full-on motorcycles I've seen going 60mph+ on the trail.  There have also been homeless people's cars out there.  I want police to give heavy fines and also impound equipment for such violations.  It won't take many of these before word gets around and people stop doing this.

• underpasses that have very poor surface, and are curved as you go down under a street and up the other side, where the curving makes it hard to see oncoming traffic, and you're also trying to avoid the worst of the bumps and holes in the pavement in the underpasses, where it may be dark compared to being out in the bright sun you just came out of

• homeless people's shopping carts in the underpasses, where visibility is poor, and the trail is narrow in the underpass, and their carts, tents, or other obstacles are an especially huge problem if another fast cyclist is coming from the other direction and now suddenly there's almost no time to negotiate who will be first to take the narrow path remaining

• This one is not particularly a risk for accidents, but homeless people sometimes leave a stream of urine running across the trail, which is corrosive to our bicycles' drive trains, and there's no way to avoid riding through it.  It would be good to crown the trail, ie, make it slightly humped, like any street, to make water run off to the sides.

• In the drawing we keep seeing of the bike riders and pedestrians on the envisioned trail (which is in your email quoted below), I can tell you that with those kids in particular, they'll get to horsin' around and one kid will push the other one directly into the path of the rider shown coming up from behind, and it will all happen too fast to avoid an accident.  There needs to be some sort of strong encouragement for pedestrians to stay to the side, out of the way of cyclists.

• Drainage in some of the underpasses on the SGRT is very inadequate, and water and mud can get quite deep, and stay that way for many days after the rains have stopped.

• There are signs lumping the trail in with playgrounds as merely "recreational" facilities.  Some of us rely on the trail to get to work and to school, and it's not right to close the gates to the trail any more than it's ok to close Whittier Blvd just because people use it to go to the movies.  There have been times that I, or friends, have come home and not been able to easily get off at our usual exit, because the gate was locked while we were out; so we had to find a hole in the fence or try to climb over the gate and get our bike over, to get home.  I sometimes pull a trailer with all my tools in it.  There's no way I'd be able to get the trailer over the gate.  You might say it's necessary to keep people from drowning when the river water gets high and fast; but then I see portions where there's no fence between the trail and the water, and access gates to those portions were not locked.

Garth Wilson

here's the response I got:

Hello, Garth,

Thank you for sharing your feedback about the LA River Path Project.  Your feedback has been noted and shared with the team.  Please continue to be engaged as we move through the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) Public Comment Period.

Sincerely,

The LA River Path Project Team

Then there are things that are beyond stupid, like these:

or just inconsiderate, like these:

There are places where rumble strips on the side of roads make it impossible to ride there, and you have to ride to the left of it, closer to the traffic.  When there was a bill about this—it was probably in our state legislature, but I can't remember—I wrote to our representative, and she wrote back basically blowing it off, implying that cyclists don't matter.

Many streets lack safe shoulders with a good surface that's kept clean.  One I've ridden a few times, but don't want to anymore, has almost no shoulder, and has storm-drain grates that bike tires would fall into.  Bad, bad!  Another has a lot of broken-up concrete in the shoulder, and it's not getting swept regularly, and I've gotten several flats there.

Then there are all the businesses that provide plenty of space to park your car, but no safe place to lock up a bike, and they don't want you to bring it inside with you, even though it's much easier to steal than a car is.  As I write this, I just took my wife to a restaurant last night for Valentines' Day.  There was a glaring lack of any place to securely lock a bike, let alone in view of our table, and there would not have been any point in asking if we could bring bikes in, as the obvious answer would have been "No."  Afterward we went to a store she wanted to go to.  Same thing.

Our son tried to go through an In-N-Out drive-thru on his bike, and they said that was not allowed.  I took my bike into a Jack-in-the-Box, and the manager asked me to leave it outside.  I said it's worth more than my vehicle, and it's much too easy to steal.  She said she'd keep an eye on it for me; but I told her how they steal them, and that there's no way she'd be fast enough to stop it.  She let me keep it inside.  I was a paying customer after all.  Another Jack-in-the-Box I've gone into several times on rides never complained.  Before our other son bought his work van, he commuted by bike for years; so I asked him about going into various stores (hardware, electrical supply, plumbing supply, etc.) with it, and he said, "Just do it.  Don't ask."

I suppose that keeping your bike clean will make businesses somewhat less likely to turn it away.  I recently started going into the local Home Depot with my bike, looking respectable, not like a homeless man (which is something one of the associates had already said they don't like), and nobody has given me any static.  I also went to the supermarket to get a huge balloon for my wife's birthday, and took my bike in, and the security guard just nodded and smiled; but the balloons were near the front, so I didn't go back into the aisles with it.

Sweat is healthy, and part of detoxing.  It's too bad our society sees it as somehow uncivilized or gross.  When you arrive somewhere sweaty, you should be able to use paper towels to sop up the sweat, and once you've cooled off and dried off, you shouldn't stink.  If you do, it may be partly from a poor diet.  (Another great interest of mine is health, which I've studied thousands of hours, not medicine like MDs study.  They really don't know much about actual health.)  In 1982 I was riding bike to school, 25 miles each way, which consistently took me an hour and ten minutes.  When I got to school, I'd lock up my bike and go in the bathroom and use paper towels to dry off, and change clothes.  No one knew I rode unless they saw me ride in, or I told them.  I rented a locker, and the only bad part was putting my wet cycling clothes back on to ride home.  It only took a few minutes to forget about it though.

For carrying loads that are nomally too big to carry on a bike, see my bike trailer page.  I'm making another one now for much bigger, heavier loads, even up to something like a 40-gallon household water heater, and I'll make another page for that trailer when I'm done.  There are lots of commercially available trailers too, but I wanted features none of them have.



posted Feb 17, 2026, page last updated Mar 14, 2026             contact:  Garth Wilson, wilsonminesBdslextremeBcom (replacing the B's with @ and .) (southern California)  No SEO spam!