Bike Lane Vigilantes

After the NYC Department of Transportation sand-blasted a popular bike lane out of existence in Brooklyn, some vigilantes repainted it late at night:

Lest we think only the east coasters have fun, Bicycling magazine wrote about some renegade Los Angeles lane painters last year. The LA painters only wanted a safe and marked way to cross some downtown bridges.

If you ride long enough in the SCV, you come to sympathize with these big-city cyclists. But at the same time, we here in the suburbs have it worse. It’s scary out there on Santa Clarita’s roads. Unlike big city roads, many of our large roads operate at almost highway speeds with few traffic lights or traffic calming measures.

And that’s the way people here want it, even as they kvetch about speeders, traffic, and gas prices.

As a result cyclists are relegated to a nice but incomplete network of Class I and II lanes throughout the SCV. Sure we have some on-street lanes here and there, but try actually completing a cross-valley trip on them, and you’ll end up in the middle of a big road like McBean, dodging speeding cars.

I’m not one to advocate vigilante lane painting, but boy would it be a fist-pumping/power-to-the-people moment if someone in the SCV actually did it on one of our busier boulevards, like say Lyons from Peachland to Railroad. Just saying.