City of Los Angeles Bike Plan

Mayor Bike Plan Rally Celebration Photos

The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition's number one goal in the City of Los Angeles is to create a Citywide Bike Network that will link the city with bike lanes, separated bike paths, and calm streets where everyone from an eight-year-old child to an eighty-year-old grandmother would feel safe and confident bicycling. Implementing the City of Los Angeles Bike Plan is an essential component for creating a seamless regional bicycle network throughout Los Angeles County.

The City has the green light to stripe approved Bike Plan projects, which will add more than 200 miles of new bikeways across Los Angeles every five years. This equates to 40 miles of new bikeways a year! These projects are rapidly adding up and creating connections all across the City. This unprecedented number of bike lanes is the result of effective LACBC advocacy and countless hours of grassroots organizing by the diverse Los Angeles cycling community and our committed members, volunteers, and staff. To view the status of current bikeway projects, visit the LADOT Bike Blog. 

Even with the passage of the Bike Plan, our work is not done yet. The key to creating an effective bike network in LA includes thorough connectivity of major arterial streets and locations. Campaigns like creating a connected Downtown LA Bike Network, 4th Street Neighborhood Greenway, and 7th Street Bike Lane are integral for a safe, vibrant urban core for all Angelenos. Community support is also fundamental for getting projects implemented. We need your help to successfully get the many miles of projects included in the bike plan implemented!  Contact Alexis@la-bike(dot)org if you would like to help out with any of our campaigns, or find out how to get more involved with LACBC and your local community.

About the 2010 LA Bike Plan
In 2009, bicyclists in Los Angeles were presented with a draft of the Bicycle Master Plan that carried few provisions for transforming LA into the bike friendly community. We rallied and successfully lobbied LA City Councilmembers, Mayoral staff, LADOT, and City Planning to address cyclists’ concerns, build political support, and gain commitments for a stronger LA City Bike Plan. In March 2011, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition rejoiced the passing of the 2010 LA Bicycle Plan. This plan promises to build out a total of 1,684 miles of bikeways from the existing 334 miles over the course of the 35-year plan.

After the passage of the bike plan, residents of the City of LA and LA County witnessed positive changes around the City. The plan includes a 5-Year Implementation Plan with a Bike Plan Implementation Team that meets on the first Tuesday of every month at 2pm at LA City Hall room 721, to ensure that the Plan's many projects, programs and policies are implemented. 

LACBC is now working to ensure that the plan is implemented in an efficient and equitable manner. While the tireless efforts of the local bicycle movement has made massive strides in winning safer streets, less attention has been focused on the needs of the large numbers of marginalized, low-income people of color who bicycle. LACBC believes that in order to create a more inclusive community, engaging, organizing, working with and advocating for these communities' is key. Integral to this work is our 7th Street Bicycle Lane Campaign, to learn more about this campaign or to get involved click here. In this campaign, bike lanes were striped along 7th Street from Koreatown to Downtown LA, which was one of the first bike lanes implemented as a result of our advocacy for a stronger Bike Plan.

To inform our work we have created maps to help visualize the relationship between collisions, population density, and income. There are many high density urban areas in Los Angeles County with large numbers of transit dependent residents and high rates of walking and bicycle usage, yet they tend to contain few, if any bicycle facilities.  To read more about LACBC's strategy and research prioritizing low-income communities of color, click here.

In addition to infrastructure LACBC is focused on seeing many of the policies and programs outlined in the plan implemented. One of the first policies LACBC is focused on seeing addressed is a new bicycle parking ordinance to provide both short and long term bicycle parking for all new development, everything from multifamily units to commercial and industrial uses. To learn more about this effort check out the following blog post and view the ordinance here. We are also interested in addressing both short and long term bicycle parking at existing buildings and are researching how NYC and other cities have addressed bicycle parking at existing buildings. We have also partnered with the Safe Routes to School National Partnership to advocate for a comprehensive Citywide Safe Routes to School Plan, learn more about this effort here.

For an FAQ on the Bike Plan, click here.