The phone rang at 9:30p.m. in late September, it was a call from my former husband and my son’s father. He’d been hit by a car while biking home from dinner in Ocean Park, he said. He was calling from the intersection at 14th and Pico. The police were there. He didn’t know if he was okay.
"We’re coming right now," I said. I was already in the car with our 15-year-old son, driving home from a different dinner. We turned around and headed north.
We saw dozens of emergency lights flashing in the dark as we drove up. "Those aren’t for Daddy?" my son asked. They were. He’d been moved out of the intersection to the sidewalk and was sitting on the ground. Nearby, we saw his mangled bike, his helmet shattered in three parts, and a massive team of emergency vehicles and police officers lighting up the night.
The EMTs and police officers were fast and efficient, concerned, and polite. They decided to take him to UCLA Ronald Reagan, a Tier 1 trauma hospital, out of fear of spinal cord injury. We put the bike and helmet in my car and followed.
We found him lying flat on his back on a hospital cot in the hallway of the crowded emergency room at midnight. He had strict instructions not to sit up to avoid spinal cord damage. He was in too much pain to sit up if he wanted to, he told us. And he felt responsible for getting hit; why hadn’t he just taken 17th Street north, a route he knew was safe?
Santa Monica has many well-marked, freshly painted, green bike lanes, including on 16th Street, north of Ocean Park, where he’d been. Unfortunately, as he learned that night, 16th Street dead-ends at Pico, where the cemetery lines the street, and there is no bike lane heading west on that stretch of Pico, and no shoulder.
He’d had just two blocks of shared lane to go, he’d reasoned, before he could pick up the bike lane again on 14th and continue north. But in those two blocks, a driver plowed into him from behind. He flew over the hood, cracked the windshield with his body, and slammed into the pavement in the middle of the intersection.
The guy who hit him called. He also felt responsible. He’d helped my former husband to the curb, he told me, stayed until the police arrived, filled out a police report, took a breathalyzer test and passed. But why hadn’t he seen the bike?
Because it was dark? Because the lights there are dim? Because it was late and maybe he was tired?
Because accidents happen. No one need be at fault. And yet, the city bears some responsibility for promoting biking before it’s truly safe, for making it ever-more-maddening to drive a car, and for absolutely refusing to create any realistic public transportation options.
I’ve been horrified to since read about two more recent bike accidents, one fatal. The city council’s solutions are all about increasing safety and visibility — and adding more fines. Safety is a good thing, certainly. But better biking is not a full-scale transportation option. And the current practice of incessantly writing parking tickets is already anti-resident, punitive, and un-Santa Monican. The real problem is that it is nearly impossible to drive a car peaceably anywhere in Santa Monica and it is only getting worse. The city has not invested in public transportation. We need safe, reliable, cheap public transportation, not more rules and more fines.
Driving is maddening in Santa Monica
My son’s dad had been commuting by bike to be a good Santa Monica citizen, one who cares about the environment and works to reduce cars on the street. Later on the night of his accident, he learned he would need spine surgery to fuse together two vertebrae that had been cracked as part of this lifestyle choice. My son and I were at the hospital Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, when he finally had the surgery. The surgery was a success. He’d also broken a hand bone and his tibia, we learned, but it looked like he’d be okay.
Tuesday morning after his surgery, I awoke late to a brilliant, sunny day. After what had been another late night at the hospital, I failed to get outside to move my car by 10 am for weekly street cleaning. My home lacks parking so I am always circling the block, looking for space at night, then setting an alarm to move it twice a week in the morning for street cleaning — in an area that was plenty clean during COVID’s reduced cleaning protocol. But that morning, I’d failed. There was another parking ticket on my windshield—the second in one month.
A parking ticket is a minor irritant, obviously, in light of these biking accidents. But in addition to the incessant, hyper-vigilant ticketing, which I’ve written about before, red lights stop traffic at every block, even when there is no cross traffic, even at night, on totally empty streets. How many motorists gun the engine to make the next light, risking other people’s fathers commuting by bike? Is this bad technology or a policy decision designed to drive drivers to distraction — exactly opposite the mental state you want anyone behind a wheel to have?
The narrowing of roads further complicates commuting and creates delays, as does the endless construction of more apartments with more parking garages for more cars — and no accommodations for the existing drivers. My son turns 16 on Friday, and he’s been practicing his driving skills. Trying to head east on Washington is a like a double black diamond version of driving, we’ve realized. Bikes pass on the right. Scooters pass on the left. Pedestrians cut in front of cars, eyes on their iPhones. Little pink Coco boxes roll out from the sidewalk. Dog walkers wander in front of cars. There are stop signs at almost every intersection. Great for practicing how to drive without hitting a pedestrian. Absolutely maddening if you need to use your car to get somewhere on time.
Other cities, like Tucson, turn all traffic lights to blinking yellow in near-silent areas at night. Not here. Other cities have responsive lights to promote flow. Not ours. Some places, like Seoul, have underground pedestrian crosswalks so drivers can turn, unimpeded. We don’t. All major cities that function have underground metro systems that work. We don’t. What do we have? Encouragement to bike.
Obviously, as we’ve all now seen, biking is not totally safe. Just today, the back tire on my son’s bike got punctured by a nail, and I had to drive it to the city’s excellent Bike Shop for repair. The guy who works at the bike shop showed me the stitches running across his head from a biking accident on the beach; a dog had darted in front of his bike and he fell. More rules won’t fully change the fact that biking involves some risk. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bike. But if a viable form of public transportation existed, perhaps my son’s dad would have used that, instead of biking at night. Perhaps the guy who hit him would have, too.
Also, it can be hard to keep a bike in Santa Monica. I, too, had been regularly biking until my electric bike got stolen from behind my house, and then my beach cruiser. And a biking-first policy isn’t inclusive. Plenty of people can’t rely on a bike — like parents of young children, the elderly or disabled, grocery shoppers, those needing to take important meetings free of sweat and errant hair, anyone who has to get anywhere else in LA.
Give us public transportation that works and a city that cares about residents
The Big Blue bus is not a public transportation panacea. It’s too big and too slow. It doesn’t circulate freely or frequently enough. Nor does it feel safe at all times. Also, none of us wants huge buses barreling down quiet side streets, as high as a house, turning this city into Manhattan. We need another option, a different form of transportation, something better, smaller, cuter than the bus.
We have one: the Circuit system. The Circuit is cute and goes right to your doorstop. It’s like Coco; friendly and appropriately scaled, but transporting people, not pizza. Here’s an idea: expand its route so it serves not only tourists and residents who live west of Lincoln and shop on Montana, but everyone in the city. Pay for it by returning to monthly street cleaning, rather than weekly, at least for these streets north of Wilshire that are very clean already. Or, if the city is resolutely anti-Circuit, create a fleet of Small Blue Buses that operate essentially like the Circuit, but city-wide. Let people call a Small Blue Bus on the phone, get picked up and dropped off at their destination. Let them be flaggable, like a taxi. Hire some of the former parking-ticket-writers as Small Blue Bus drivers, a job that will bring them more satisfaction than this endless chalking and ticketing they are consigned to now.
Yes, we should continue to improve the bike lane system and check the streetlights at all intersections. But we should also give residents a real way to leave their cars at home at all times. We need real public transportation, not more fliers and more rules. We also need to give residents one get-out-of-parking-hell-free pass every single month, one ticket erased. Give residents like me the feeling that there is a little slack in the system, that taking my car to the hospital to care for family won’t cost me $65 in parking tickets, that the city we love also loves us back. In my family’s case, after a week in the hospital, my former husband spent a week in rehab and then five weeks wearing a back brace whenever he needed to sit or stand. Now, he can drive himself to PT on his own and we all have a new appreciation for the simple things, like being alive.
Wendy Paris
