Can you guess what this is? It is a map, a map of the bike paths in Los Angeles county. What is it missing? A central connection. There are 4 main arteries that come towards downtown Los Angeles from Northeast, northwest, southwest and southeast. They all stop short of being functional beyond a recreational element. Downtown Los Angeles is a broken bottleneck of freeways, choking on it's own excess concrete and smog, failing to yield to new ideas beyond the realm of the automobile. Investing billions into a subway that barely puts a dent in traffic, the only other viable options are walking and bicycling more. Investments put into human scale infrastructure are much more valuable and pay back more rapidly, but to whom? The payback goes to the community, in the form of higher quality of life, which is usually the sacrificial lamb in the name of construction jobs, car jobs, and maintenance crews. So how do we make a lucrative situation for the city businesses and governments to consider more bike paths and safe bike lanes? If industry is the only answer they will accept, should we put huge banner billboards up along the bike paths to fund them? Line it with ATMs, vending machines and hot dog carts? Make people pay a toll to ride their bikes? How about tax gasoline to fund bikeways? Hmm doesn't seem like a popular idea right now. But people ride bikes anyways on the street, so is it really dangerous? Yes, a drunk driver hit 6 people at once about 2 weeks ago less than a mile from my house. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Cars hit bikes all the time, Some even do it intentionally. I have been hit, i have seen people being hit and the driver running off, luckily I've never been witness to a really bad accident, many people walk away, but the fact is, bikes and cars were not particularly designed to coexist on small streets with fast speed limits as is the case in Los Angeles. While there are 527 miles of bike lanes, it scarcely compares to over 22,000 miles of streets in Los Angeles County. Many of these bike lanes have been nick named "death lanes" due to cars being parked on one side, while traffic zooms by on the other. With people pulling in and out of parallel parking spaces and opening their doors right into the bike lane, there is often not enough room or time to react, and it is one of the most common types of bicycle accidents.