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.

Five Guys El Segundo, open at night

I’m a big fan of Five Guys burgers and fries, but rarely make the trip down to Carson. So it was a nice surprise at about 9:30 the other night, after a day of negotiations down in the South Bay, to be driving up Sepulveda Blvd. just short of LAX and to see the red and white Five Guys sign on the east side of the road. A quick maneuver into the parking lot, and more luck as Five Guys was open until 10 p.m. I saw, I scarfed. It’s in an office park-nice little shopping plaza with a courtyard and outdoor tables.

Five Guys also has other locations, and planned locations, in and around the Los Angeles area. Of these, the El Segundo outlet may be the most dangerous for me. The In-N-Out Burger just on the other side of LAX may have better views, but I’m partial to Five Guys’ food.

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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“The Red Line (The Freeways Are Not So Nice),” by It’s Casual. Found at LA Taco

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:

Image from Creative Tools on Flickr, used via Creative Commons license

Metro will offer free fare rates on the Eves of both Christmas and New Years. Here is some information from the press release, as found at Metro’s The Source blog:

The free fare program will be in effect between the hours of 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. on the nights and early mornings hours of December 24-25 and December 31-January 1.

Patrons boarding a Metro Bus, including the Metro Orange Line, or the Metro Red, Purple, Blue, Green or Gold rail lines during the hours designated will receive a free ride to their destination.

Have fun; be safe. Happy Holidays!

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.

Cadillac ELR formerly known as the Converj coming to us soon.

Wednesday I got to meet up with GM exec Jim Federico, Executive Director of Engineering, Electric Vehicles at the L.A. Auto Show. I got to ask some of my own questions as well as those you readers posed as part of the ticket contest I was able to run. It was an interesting visit, certainly a lot of information with some answers as well. Where to start with the questions and answers is my big dilemma.

Al Pavangkanan posed the question regarding new battery technology. Jim couldn’t give specifics of what they have in store but did say that they are working with the battery suppliers to develop new technologies that will give us more power for the size compared to what we have now. The problem all the manufacturers have run into is that there isn’t a rush to develop batteries as there isn’t really a market demand for them yet in quantities to offset their costs. Those costs affect what we pay for an EV now, but as demand increases, production increases there will be more incentive to develop new battery technology and help lower costs.  Read the rest of this entry →

MINI Coupe: all fun, no mess

Like many Los Angeles area folks, I’m crazy about cars. Fortunately, I’m able to incorporate my love into my work, and covered the L.A. Auto Show on Press Day 1 yesterday. Unfortunately, my day was ruled as much by the cars on the roads outside than by the shiny new models inside the Convention Center.

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File this under found on road alive.  A Redondo Beach man bought the car new in 1964 and had it for 20 years before he sold it. His sons went upon the quest to find the car and return it to him. The quest led across the country where they finally found the car on a lot in Canada. They bought it and returned it to him as a gift.

In the land that rust forgot what old car from your past would you like to have back?  For me its a mixed bag but the one I regret selling the most that I’d love to have back is my old ’72 Centurion which took us on many a road trip to the beach and shows all over the L.A. area.

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.

Rally event poster, used with permission

Admission to the rally is free. If you want to enter a vintage bike in the judging, the cost is $10 and includes VIP parking. Others arriving by motorcycle can park for $5. According to The Argonaut newspaper, proceeds from the rally will benefit the American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association (AHRMA). I plan to arrive on foot, but if there are bikes for sale, then who knows, I may be leaving in a different manner.