My friend Siel (aka Green LA Girl) has been working on "de-car-ing", and documenting her progress in cutting back on the ole petro-guzzler.
Being newish to the bike commuting world, she wondered if a night bike ride to LA Green Drinks would be possible on streets with bike lanes. And what our route would be either way.
So I looked it up on Bike Metro, a tool for plotting bike routes. It works like mapquest, you enter your destination, your ability level, hill tolerance, and it gives you a suggested route.
I've used it to get to places on the east side - Hollywood, Echo Park, even Studio City. On the whole it's been pretty reliable, and I've found myself mainly on streets with bike lanes. Not sure if this is a criteria, or how one even finds out which streets have bike lanes, there must be a list somewhere.....
Bike lanes or no, drivers can be pretty clueless in terms of bike awareness. Though it doesn't stop me from commuting, and though tooling around Santa Monica is fairly safe, its still an issue - we really need more driver-awareness about sharing the road.
3 comments:
Good job! You have passion....we need much more of that in this country. Keep it up!
Uncle Hal
I just tried Bike Metro, but got an error message :( Not sure what went wrong -- I'll have to give it another try --
And dude! My poor car, Mut, is a petro-sipper, not guzzler :P
Hmmmm.....bike metro site seems to be down, again. Not sure what the deal is, it was down for months, then back up again...when its up, its a great resource.
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