Bad news: The thoroughly vandalized streetlights along the L.A. River Bike Path are still dark, and you could crack your head, run over a sleeping homeless guy or get mugged at night if you don’t have a good headlamp.
Good news: The L.A. Department of Public Works Bureau of Street Lighting is on the job. I saw a city truck out there a week ago, laying cones on all the wiring vaults!
So thoughtful. Maybe it helps the crackheads spot the vaults more easily so they can bash them open and extract the valuable coppery goodness in record time (see photo after the jump) …
They also put a helpful “High Voltage” warning sign on the vault up at one end to serve as a reminder that if you’re going to be stealing wiring you should first carefully short out the circuit breaker so you don’t get a little burn.
Is the city working to restore these lights? Or are they just happy to accept the risk of people wrecking their bikes, getting mugged, running over the sleeping homeless and filing the inevitable round of liability suits?
Is there a single crooked metals-buyer somewhere in Atwater Village who knows exactly what’s going on and doesn’t mind so long as the cheap copper keeps coming in?
Is there a DPW engineer scoping out vandal-proof wiring vauilts? Is this system ever going to be fixed?
Just wondering.
I’m surprised. Unlike the hugely unsatisfying encounters I’ve had with the LAPD and LA Animal Services, my experiences with LABSM have always been good. Anyway, I just emailed the LaBonge about it (which I forgot to do last time).
I filed a Service Request form with the city. I hope everyone who wants to see the lights returned to service will do the same. Just takes a few seconds. Squeaky wheel, and all that.
Be quadruple careful out there because liability lawsuits against the city will have no traction whatsoever.
From Metnews.com, May 2007:
Holy crap, that’s ugly.
Nice to know that cyclists are second-class citizens out on the city-owned and -maintained trails.
Good info, Will. Thanks for posting!
I’ve been exiting that gate at Victory for years, even at night, and one would have to be sight-impaired to crash into the fence. There is no curving sharply several times necessary. It’s unfortunate that cyclist was hurt so badly, and if it were a true hazard, it’s jacked up that the city isn’t liable, but really, the guy had to have been going really fast and not paying any attention to what was ahead of him to crash that badly.
As for the lights. I called and talked with a woman in the LA streetlight division a few weeks ago and was told that they were working on the repairs, but expected that the wires would be stolen again. She then added if anyone had helpful suggestions as to how to avoid theft, feel free to submit them because the city engineers didn’t have time to tackle this one.
Great.
I would suggest the City replace the pull boxes with
the bolt down type, Caltrans has a standard for bolt down boxes. Maybe replace the standard bolt with something like the ones used in lock lugs too. It wouldn’t make them “theft proof”, but I’m sure it would help stop some of the thefts.
They’re gonna have to be pretty tough.
The vandals have cracked open the cement vaults with tools, pried up their bolt-down lids with more tools, even dug up the earth around the vault’s thick cement lip so they could bash through the thinner wall towards the bottom of it.
This was the Bureau of Street Lighting’s response, via a Field Deputy who was responding to my email to LaBonge’s office:
“This condition is still due to the wire theft problem. The Department of Transportation (D.O.T.) and the lighting is provided by Street Lighting. Presently there are over 150 spans of wires missing. We first had to wait for the materials to start our repairs. Now that we have started our repairs, the thieves have started stealing the wires from our repaired section. The Bikeway overall has experienced a 90% loss of the wiring that we are aware of and we have only repaired approximately 9% to this date. The lights remain out due to the thieves stealing the feed wires as well. We expect our repairs to run through the next couple of months, or unfortunately longer. We are attempting to request additional personnel as the personnel we are presently utilizing are the same personnel responding to damages, outages, vandalized areas, etc. on the City’s streets in this Council District as well all of the other Council Districts. Also, we are requesting support from other City agencies as this is not only a Street Lighting issue.”