Today is Bike to Work Day in some parts of California, including the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Areas. That means: lots of bikes on the road—maybe more than usual, maybe not—but also lots of smiles, bike-bell-ringing, and high fives all around for everyone who chooses to use this most environmentally friendly way to get to work and everywhere else. And not just one day a year.
However, on this day we get to make a big noise about how great it is to be able to bike to work and how much better it could be.
Streetsblog will do another open thread like this next week for Southern California, which will mark Bike to Work Day on May 20, so send in your photos and stories to melanie@streetsblog.org and we'll add them to these posts. We've already seen a few blogs and ride reports, like Cyclelicious's report on the San Jose VIP bike ride this morning. More to come!
We'll start with the East Bay, where no fewer than THREE ribbon cuttings on new bike facilities got the day started off right. That's on top of the Telegraph Avenue protected bike lane ribbon cutting that took place two days ago—is this a record? Probably.
Streetsblog California editor Melanie Curry has been thinking about transportation, and how to improve conditions for bicyclists, ever since commuting to school by bike long before bike lanes were a thing. She was Managing Editor at the East Bay Express, editor of Access Magazine for the University of California Transportation Center, and earned her Masters in City Planning from UC Berkeley.
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Brightline West will be a 218-mile 186-mile-per-hour rail line from Vegas to Rancho Cucamonga - about 40 miles east of downtown L.A. - expected to open in 2028