Leave the Gas at the Pump and Pedal Away

LOS ANGELES – Dick Riordan was the last Los Angeles mayor to preach the joy of bike riding, so when the price of gas soared north of $3 a gallon and oil company profits finally gave us a clear definition of obscenity, I thought about giving him a call.

People tell me I’m off my rocker, but it seems to me that since L.A. is mostly flat and the weather is good year-round, thousands of people could get out of their cars and onto bicycles.

It would take vision, if not wild imagination. I say we shut down a lane of Arroyo Parkway now and then and open it to bikes. You can’t get anywhere on Wilshire Boulevard in a car, so let’s get them out of there altogether.

We’d need the right kind of role model to make it happen, though. And as my colleague Steve Hymon noted in Monday’s paper, Jaime de la Vega, L.A.’s deputy mayor in charge of transportation and mass transit, drives a Hummer.

LA Times