This fast and this close:

I’m not always successful, but whenever I’m biking around Los Angeles, I try to return a way different from whatever way I came and/or devote a little bit of my rides to exploring someplace new and/or at least revisiting an area I hadn’t been through in a while. Such was the case yesterday coming back to Silver Lake from a trip out to SPCALA headquarters near the Jefferson Park community that I ventured up through the Pico-Union area from Hoover, and made two discoveries.

The first is the hole-in-the-wall bakery pictured at right, seen just as I crossed Washington Boulevard. Looking up I spied that yellow banner hanging outside a Panaderia for the Bicycle Bread Company (BBC). While it’s true I hadn’t been on Union in about six months, unless this place opened during that time than I was guilty of never seeing it before. Because if I had seen it I most certainly would’ve stopped and bought something, given much I like bikes. And bread.

Sure enough: guilty. According the the BBC website it’s been in business since 2009. Also according to the website they’re hours in that space are limited to 5-8pm on Thursdays, but I apparently got both lucky and over-charged in that the place was open and I was able to come away with a one-pound round loaf of BBC’s cinnamon raisin whole grain sold by the panaderia owner for $5 (apparently there’s a hidden 25% commission surcharge above the $4 per-loaf price listed on the BBC website). Thankfully that extra dollar dinged didn’t detract from the absolute homemade milled-on-site scrumptiousness of the bread.

A little bit more about the BBC as well as a great mural found up the street, plus a bonus Victorian that surprised me after the jump.

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Go ahead, call me a train geek, I won’t deny it. While biking toward downtown along Exposition Boulevard yesterday, I got my camera out just in time to catch a brand spankin’ new Expo Line train on the move eastbound (raced by a hearse of all things). The line is not yet open to the public and there is yet a firm date set as testing of it continues, but this was sure a purty sight to see.

UPDATE (3.23): Streetsblog Los Angeles reports that an April 28 opening date for the Expo Line has been announced!

Pink Fur Covered Bicycle in SaMo - click to embiggen

I spotted this PINK fur covered bike in Santa Monica yesterday afternoon near the Promenade.  I loved this bike, totally impractical but so expressive.  I stuck around a bit for the owner to find out the why’s and how’s but unfortunately I had to split for a meeting before they showed.

Pretty Terrific stuff there.

The 2012 edition of my Watts Happening Ride took place this past picture-perfect Saturday, and it was my complete pleasure to share the following landmark people, places and events I’ve discovered there with the 28 cyclists who joined me:

1. The last residence of jazz great Jelly Roll Morton
2. The childhood home of Nobel Prize Winner Ralph Bunche
3. The location of the 1969 Black Panthers shootout
4. The Hotel Dunbar, centerpiece of the Historic Central Avenue Jazz Corridor
5. The location of the 1974 SLA shootout
6. The actual fictional location of the Sanford and Son Salvage Yard
7. The Watts Towers of Simon Rodia
8. The location of the incident setting off the 1965 Watts Riots
9. The home of Eula Love, killed by police in 1979 as a result of a past-due gas bill dispute
10. The motel where legendary singer Sam Cooke was killed
11. The flashpoint of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots
12. The location of Wrigley Field, demolished in 1966.

Unfortunately, the above annotated timelapse video abruptly ends at the third-to-last location we visited, leaving me to discover that I need to get a bigger memory card if I want to capture the entire 33-mile, six-hour tour on camera the next time — and there will be a next time. I hope you’ll join me.

The first Watts Happening Ride I organized five years ago was a simple there-and-back to Watts Towers from the Cornfield downtown, spurred on by the lamentable fact that as a native angeleno I had spent my whole life to-date never having been to the true treasure that is the amazing, inspiring and enduring work of Simon Rodia.

In its various editions since (the last one taking place in 2010), the Watts Happening Ride’s destinations have grown well beyond the iconic towers to include a variety of landmarks involving people, places and events in and around South Los Angeles.

The 2012 incarnation of the Watts Happening Ride will be departing from Silver Lake on Saturday, February 18 at 9 a.m., and will include the addition of a couple locations I’ve recently found. So if you’re not heading out of town for the long weekend and have a hankering to get your bike-riding discovery on, I hope you’ll join me.

For the latest info and any updates, the ride’s Facebook page is here.

When: February 18, gathering at 8:30 for a 9 a.m. departure
Start/Finish: Silver Lake’s Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign (northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard & Benton Way)
Distance: 32.95 miles (route map)
Pace: Casual
Terrain: Flat
Weather: In the event of rain that morning, the ride will be canceled and rescheduled to a later date.
Approximate Time: 5-6 hours
Optional Partial Ride: If doing the full route isn’t feasible, consider joining the ride at approximately 9:30 a.m. downtown on Spring Street (anywhere between 2nd & 9th streets) for the roughly 9-mile portion to the Watts Towers. The 103rd Street Blue Line station is near to the towers and can be an alternative to get you back into downtown.
Things You’ll Need (in no particular order): A functioning bicycle; $7 for the half-hour optional tour of Watts Towers; snacks and water for along the way; money for a late lunch at King Taco.

In the past Burbank’s given me a couple big opportunities to balk at how that city’s done bicyclists wrong. The first time was major in the mid-2000s when its council responded to resident outcry that more bikes would somehow equal more traffic and more crime and roundly rejected what had been an already approved and funded route plan connecting the LA River Bikeway with the Chandler Boulevard Bikeway. The second was a couple years ago when Burbank political and law enforcement officials overly sympathized with a noisy contingent of Chandler Bikeway pedestrians who demanded that police officers should have nothing better to do than devote their limited resources to speed-trapping and citing all of us speeddemon cyclists who imperil the pedestrians’ entitled (and in some cases: irresponsible) use of the bikeway.

But on a trip to Burbank and back by bike this week, I have nothing to say but “Bravo!” to that burg after I chanced to discover an unheralded and entirely unmarked bike/pedestrian path that was so brand-spanking new it had to have only been recently completed. Paralleling the Burbank Western Channel between Alameda Avenue and Victory Boulevard, it’s short and sweet at barely a quarter-mile in length, but it provides a serene off-street shortcut connection between the two busy thoroughfares that not only serves cyclists passing through but also the residents of the neighborhood to the north of the channel.

Here’s hoping it’s the first of more to come.

UPDATE (1.24): I received an email from Cory Wilkerson, an assistant transportation planner for Burbank, who confirmed that more indeed is to come. He wrote, “We are planning to extend the pathway to the Burbank Metrolink Station, Top Priority Project #8 in our Bike Plan. The project was funded through Metro’s Call for Project and constrcution is schedule for FY 2015.”

After the jump you can find an annotated and embiggenable Google Map screengrab of the path’s location along with two timelapse clips of rides on the segment, the first traveling from Victory to Alameda and the second coming back from Alameda to Victory.

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It wasn’t that long ago that I was biking 6,000-plus miles a year across this city. Then came the opportunity to work from home in 2010 and all that mileage evaporated. Case in point, with the close of 2011 I’d tallied only a few miles over the 700 mark. But I kicked off however comparitively little I’ll be riding this new year on the right note, with a 20-mile ride today that started in the pre-dawn, included a meet-up with the sunrise about nine miles in and then got me home via Chinatown in time to watch the Rose Parade. Here’s that 83 minutes of pedaling condensed down to a four-minute timelapse:

Electric Santa, 4th Street Bridge. Weeeell after midnight. All is calm. All is quiet.

It’s not every Friday night of the year I dress up in an electric santa suit and go biking around Los Angeles  — just this one upcoming Friday night for the Midnight Ridazz 6th-Annual All-City Toy Ride.

This yearly convergence of multiple rides starting at various points around the greater Los Angeles area will bring hundreds  of toy-bearing cyclists together December 9 at 10 p.m. at the historic Plaza de Los Angeles gazebo to donate their gifts to The Alliance for Children’s Rights a worthy organization serving children in need.

All participants are asked to bring an unwrapped toy valued at $5-$25. The celebration will then continue after the toy collection with a ride through downtown that will end up at what I’m feeling will be the most kick ass after-party in the history of All-City Toy Rides, where there will be delicious foods, drinks, musics and funs.

The satellite rides to Olvera Street that are presently organized are as follows, so find the one nearest you and get yourself some of the most unique holiday spirit to be found in town (with or without an electric santa suit):

• Downtown
• East Hollywood
• East Los Angeles
• Echo Park
• Griffith Observatory
• Huntington Park
• Koreatown
• Long Beach
• North Hollywood
• Northeast Los Angeles
• Pasadena
• San Gabriel Valley
• West Los Angeles
• West San Fernando Valley

IMPORTANT: The post-ride party will have a guest list and you won’t be able to get in if you don’t RSVP, so if you’re coming do so either through the All-City Toy Ride’s Facebook page or via email at allcitytoyride@gmail.com.

After the press conference this afternoon to celebrate the completion and opening of Los Angeles’ first-ever buffered and bright green Class II bike lane running on Spring Street between Cesar Chavez Avenue and 9th Street, the cyclists in attendance then inaugurated the wonderful thing with a bike ride upon it. During my second lap my timelapsing handlebar-mounted bike cam snapped the above shot as I passed great Los Angeles photographer Gary Leonard crouched as he snapped me. Of course I yelled “Take my picture, Gary Leonard!” while rolling by.

One of the cool things about biking around Los Angeles is the stuff you get to discover that’s hidden in plain sight, with a favorite of mine being sidewalk vandalism. Most of the time you’ll just see a name and maybe a date scratched in the concrete or perhaps a decades-old shoe print. But sometimes you’ll come across more enigmatic stuff — like the following for example, written into the sidewalk by George, Bobby and Robert on the east side of San Fernando Road south of Figueroa Street, directly under the Arroyo Seco Parkway overpass (here) and right at the bottom of the steps leading up to what I like to call the “super-secret freeway bike/ped path” paralleling the southbound 110 between here and the what once was Chavez Ravine (click to enlargify):

I’ve accessed those steps easily a couple dozen times over the last few years, but it was only today that I looked down and found this odd permanent record of the existence of George, Bobby and Robert. That crack running around it like a frame is interesting, but I’m at little more than a guess at the significance of the comma-delineated numbers that follow each name: 28, 1969; 27, 1969; 29, 1969. Birthday date and birth year, maybe? Or their ages during that fateful year? Or perhaps a year yet to come in the lives of these future thinkers?

What’s most curious is the decidedly more faint shapes scrawled at the bottom: a five-pointed star bookended on either side of it by swastikas that mirror each other. Three names, three figures. Kinda makes you go hmmmm.

Brentwood bike racers

This year, the Amgen Tour of California bike race got as close to Los Angeles as Mt. San Antonio a/k/a Mt. Baldy. Now, race organizers have announced that the 2012 Tour will finish at L.A. Live. Details are still sketchy as to just how the finish will take place next May, but it could be like the Tour de France finish in Paris, where the racers make a series of high-speed laps around the Champs-Elysees to the delight of cheering crowds.

The 2012 Tour will also again include a stage at Mt. Baldy, which is becoming the equivalent of the Alps in the Tour de France. So if you’re thinking of trying to compete in the 2012 race or ride the local stages of the route yourself, you have about six months to get those legs and lungs in shape.

Here being this spot around sunset yesterday, about three-quarters of a mile downstream from Fletcher Drive on the westbank of the Los Angeles River, from which I did not previously know that the Hollywood sign was visible. One gets so used to looking at the landmark straight on that it’s a bit of a surprise when it pops into view from such wider angles (click to embiggen):

After the jump I also caught a bit o’ video of a great blue heron successfully fishing in an eddy for dinner, and after that in about the same place as the shot of the Hollywood sign grabbed a really crappy still of a perching osprey, one of the rarest birds to be found around the waterway, who swept in for a landing while I stood there gaping.

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Need an 8-minute frivolous diversion?

With my camera rigged up to the eyepiece of my spotting scope (with duct tape and adhesive putty), from my backyard I pointed it at Sunset Boulevard between Descanso (just out of view at the bottom) and the Maltman bend in Silver Lake (at the top) to timelapse capture the afternoon traffic flow.

Image by WatchCaddy via a creative commons licence on flickr.

I was catching up on my blog reading and spotted this bit on Truth About Cars.  The maximum fine for driving and using a cell phone is increasing to a maximum of $528.  Bicyclists are being included for the first time as well though their fines are only a maximum of $50.  I think they should be on parity with each other but what the heck at least the disparity is being addressed now.

Link to the senate proposal HERE in pdf format.  Pages 2 and 3 are where the good stuff concerning the changes to the cell phone and driving proposals can be found.

I for one am glad to see some stiffer penalites coming for using the phone while driving.  What say you?