It was big news when prosecutors filed criminal charges against a motorist who allegedly slammed on his brakes in front of two experienced cyclists July 4 on Mandeville Canyon Road, sending both to the hospital with serious injuries.
What didn't make headlines was another Mandeville Canyon incident that day. Resident Lisa Block was finishing a morning walk on the narrow, winding road when she realized a clump of cyclists were coming up the hill straight at her.
"A guy heading right for me couldn't move over because there were at least two other bikers to his left," Block said. "I had to dive off the street and jump into the bushes."
Though the cyclists were not acting maliciously, she said, the experience rattled her.
These days, many Angelenos are rattled as more cyclists hit the streets to combat high fuel prices, stay fit or help the environment. Riders on two wheels say drivers run them off the road, threaten bodily harm and unleash expletives, if not fists. Motorists counter that cyclists rip off car mirrors, zoom through stop signs and hurl expletives of their own -- often drenched in spit.
With the city of Los Angeles in the early stages of formulating a bike plan, and with motorist-vs.-cyclist road rage on the rise, politicians, engineers, residents and cycling enthusiasts have begun what all agree is a long-overdue conversation about how best to coexist on the city's highways and byways.
"It's a citywide issue of people sharing the road, whether on foot, a bicycle, a Vespa or in our cars," said Jeanne Field, a Mandeville Canyon resident. "Manners have just gone out the window."
Sprawling, smoggy and gridlocked, car-centric Los Angeles hardly pops to mind as a locale where cycling would thrive. But Bicycling magazine recently lauded the nation's second-largest city as "a future best city" for biking.
The city has hired Alta Planning and Design, a transportation planning consultant based in San Rafael, Calif., to update its outmoded bicycle plan and attempt to create a safe, cohesive network from its more than 350 miles of bike routes, lanes and paths. Another goal is to identify a list of on-street bikeways, bike parking facilities and education programs that the city could develop over the next two decades.
"Los Angeles is a very challenging environment to ride in, given the condition of roadways, the storm grates that will eat your wheels, the lack of formal bike lanes or bike paths, and just a lack of respect and a lack of awareness from motorists about the rights of bicyclists," said Matt Benjamin, an Alta transportation planner who says he bicycles "everywhere."
