Los Angeles News Papers Ask Whether City Can Ever Be Bike Metropolis, Reveal Their Own Bias

The wildly disappointing “Summer of Cycling” series sadly pedals on in the pages of The Daily News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Long Beach Press-Telegram and other papers that are part of the group. The series seems to be as much about painting cyclists as a bunch of weirdos, different than the normal people of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, than it is exploring bicycling or bike culture.

Today, after publishing some critiques of their most recent disaster in the series, an op/ed by “futurist” Syd Mead that rolled out every tired cliche against building bicycling networks; the Series continued by asking their readers if “Will Southern California ever really bike to work?”

Of course, the editors who wrote the piece then went on to justify their own decisions to not bicycle to work, which apparently stops them from bicycling anywhere by noting that many of “us” choose to live really far away from where we work.

So, I decided to help them out by giving them a much longer answer than I usually do in newspaper comments sections. I hope they decide to publish part or all of it. But if not, I’m including it after the jump.