Come to the Los Angeles Street Summit!

This Saturday is the second iteration of LA's Bike summit, this year dubbed the Street Summit. I've been invited to speak on a panel discussing the safe routes to school movement in Southern California.

I'll be discussing the successes we've had in Santa Clarita, as well as some of my blogging efforts to promote the movement of family biking. Stop on by if you are in the area. The Street Summit will be held at LA Trade Tech College, in downtown Los Angeles.

google maps provides "bike there" option

This is revolutionary.

Sort of. It provides a great online source of designated bike routes/lanes/paths in cities. From my experience, this news is an incredibly sharp double edged-sword.

Good news first:

One stop shopping for all your bike directions.

Bad news:

It relies on city-data that is...hopefully up to date. Many existing municipal routes or "class III" (in CA) were first installed in the 70's during the first bike boom. A good amount of these routes were slapped down willy nilly and now find themselves on major arterials. There's nothing "routey" about them.

Also, it could make people think that because their destinations aren't served by a complex network of bikeways, then it's impossible to access their destination by bike.

So it could give people a false sense of security, at least to the ill-informed. But it could also encourage a lot of people out there to start riding their bike. Hopefully, the latter.