Tag Archives: bikes

Canoga Park, CicLAvia

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Poor Canoga Park. It was their turn for a CicLAvia — LA’s bizarre, un-pronounceable, but doggedly persistent, city festival of the bike. Some lucky street is chosen, and for one day “CicLAvia” takes over a few blocks of XYZ (usually struggling) retail district. They shut down the traffic and suffer, specifically, bikes, but now also skaters and scooters and pedestrians, to take over the streets.

Poor Canoga Park. Sherman Way is really one of those awesome, cool, funky local Valley streets that really could have used a spanking blue sky to draw folks to its book stores, cafes, and services. Any other Sunday morning, Sherman Way might have been filled with clanging bicycle bells! Poor Canoga Park.

Still, the View, and the stalwarts on bikes who turned out, were alike lured from the foggy dew by the neighborhood’s old time comfort-food establishments, each of which had steamed-up windows, and each of which was dishing to packed houses. Indian, Cavaletta’s Italian Deli, mucho Mexicano, Vietnamese, and Henri’s American Diner. (Pho 21 won the View’s Choice Award.)

[The View is dim on CicLAvia, which I think diverts the public by making safe, temporary bicycle petting-zoos and calling it “green progress.” Meanwhile everywhere else, and every other day of the year, LA has the highest bike fatality rate on Planet Earth. The City does barely any– no, actually, nothing –about making an integrated, safe, point-to-point non-motorized vehicle (i.e., bike) path network. This should especially be a cinch in the flat Valley. CicLAvia solves nothing! STILL: poor Canoga Park.]

It was just clearing up when the View, and everybody else, was ready to hop on the Orange Line and go home. Still, it’s sweet to see that Safety Officer helping that little girl in the red coat cross the Orange Line. The View applauds such Protection and Service. Thanks LAPD.




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During the Great Depression, in the 1930′s, orange growers in the San Fernando Valley became notorious for dumping thousands of tons of ripe, juicy Sunkists into the Los Angeles River, because overproduction and Depression had reduced prices. Then the orchards hired goons to guard the rotting piles, by shooting at any hungry hoboes, Okies and homeless families who dared to reach for a handful of California gold.

Is it a sign of progress that Ofo, and the recycling yard, are not hiring goons to shoot all the car-less workers, the delivery people, the fitness buffs, the urban hipsters, or the neighborhood kids, who might need bikes and might swarm the pile? Probably not – standing by powerless, while seeing immense piles of wealth wasted every day, is the new normal. The fact that no little Johnny or Jenny or Bucky or Sue dares hop the fence to get a bike before its value is totally wasted, may be a sign of how sadly cowed and defeated by the goon-state we all are.

Meanwhile, the recycling market seems totally dead as of this year. These bikes probably will never be recycled into anything.  China already has mountains of rusting bikes nobody there will use, because they’ve fouled the air so badly with pollution from all the bike factories. Nobody in China wants to pay anymore, or thinks it ever could pay, to re-import, disassemble and recycle the bikes they sold to us, only to turn them back into.. cheap bikes….made in China….to ship to the bloated U.S. market….now under the new tarriffs….while our already rampant overproduction is destroying the environment and the climate….

Hundreds Of Bikes Dumped At Dallas Recycling Center As Ofo Leaves Market