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By Johnny, January 11, 2010 3:43 pm

Great video featuring a Critical Mass-like ride through LA. I think bicycling is getting it’s mainstream recognition now! Hopefully this video will get more people to ride.

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By Johnny, November 15, 2009 2:17 am

As of yesterday, I have officially finished my 8 weeks trial period without a car. Through this time I have expressed some displeasure in the process but now it’s finally done! I would be lying if I told you I did not drive my car during this time period. I had to drive it in 3 separate occasions. The first incident was for 2 doctors visit in one day. I would have taken public transportation but even though the appointments were 2 hours apart, I was not going to be able to make it considering I wouldn’t know when I’ll be out after the first appointment. I suppose I could have considered that incident a “rental” incident but I think I can prevent something like that from happening either by scheduling them on different days or scheduling earlier. The second incident was a drive down to Orange County. I was heading down to our friends’ place so that I can leave the car for a weekend trip to San Diego. That would have been considered a legitimate “rental” opportunity. I would have even driven the rental down to SD. The final incident was because I had to bring my car in to get it tuned up and fixed maintenance issues. That actually has nothing to do with needing a car since the reason alone is enough to justify why I needed to drive. It was this last trip where it finally sealed the deal in my decision to give up my car permanently. I am tired of throwing my money away maintaining this proverbial ball and chain.

Here are some highlights of my 2 months experience.

• Bought rain gear, but did not bring it when it did drizzle. Still had fun riding in the wet.
• Rode 855 miles during this time which included commuting, some group rides, and my Santa Monica excursion.
• Had 4 people ask about the Xtracycle.
• Had motorcyclist compliment on my Xtracycle.
• Realized that LA still has a long way in becoming a bicycle friendly city and there are dedicated individuals who are out there fighting for a better LA as we speak.
• Los Angeles have so much things to experience outside of a car.
• I could go practically anywhere in LA if I planned it right.
• People generally are surprised and doubtful when you tell them that you’re giving up your car. They’re almost sympathetic for the cause and some do offer rides.
• Some people don’t think it’s possible to be car-free in LA. Some think it’s social suicide.
• Your iPod is your best friend on public transportation.
• My friends are realizing that I’m not messing around.
• Using the bike rack on a bus is easy.

For the next step, I am going to get my car washed and detailed and will be putting it on Craigslist for sale hopefully by today. It is going to be good to lose this 3,000 lbs from my life. The revolution has begun!

Photo provided by nyoin on Flickr.

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By Johnny, November 6, 2009 1:59 am

I saw this story floating around Twitter last week and was in complete awe. Here I am complaining on how tired I was on my 55 miles jaunt around LA when Lan Yin Tsai aka Eiko who is 84 years old and rides 150 miles in one day every year for the past 26 years! She’s not dressed in any kind of exercise uniform but rather a dress, tweed jacket, and high heels. When asked why she rides in high heels, she humbly responds that was what she normally rides in. In addition to her dedication, she is doing this for a good cause. The ride benefits MS patients in the New Jersey area. Her persistence is envious and I can only wish I will live that long and still be on a bike. Find a photo of her below. She should be the forth photo in.

Photo provided by theskepticaloptimist on Flickr

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By Johnny, October 31, 2009 4:36 pm

Today marks the one year anniversary of when my escrow closed for my home purchase. I remembered how nervous I was. “How am I going to pay this mortgage?”, was what I had thought that day. It was tough at first but here I am 12 payments later. I am able to pay my mortgage without a hitch.

I also knew that I wouldn’t be going out too much but I think I still enjoyed myself this year. Tax benefits certainly made it easier. I know I haven’t been hanging out with friends too much. Not sure why. Perhaps I like staying at home whenever I can. There’s nothing like having no where to go and enjoying whatever is on tv or Hulu.

The place still looks pretty much the same as I had it sine I’ve moved in. I’ve only added a bed, washer, dryer, tv and a tv stand. Everything else was given to me by friends and family. Still using those furniture. Perhaps I’ll get to buy some bedroom furniture and then some living room furniture. Definitely no rush since I don’t need anything at this point. Besides, I’m trying not to add more clutter in my life. I’m trying not to over consume.

To kick off this momentous occasion I decided to do my planned ride to Santa Monica this morning. I rode out around 8:30 am after I made a PBJ sandwich and loaded up with some energy drink and water. It was a chilly morning so I brought a light riding jacket. I rode east on Burbank Blvd to Sepulveda Blvd. A Harley rider pulls up to me on one of the stop and asks if I wanted to race for pinks. I laughed and said my bike don’t have pinks. He smiled and we went our separate ways.

I road the unfamiliar road down Sepulveda until I reached Wilshire. On Wilshire I went Northwest onto San Vicente into Brentwood. Brentwood was a scarier place to ride than any other neighborhood I’ve been today. People don’t know how to react with a bicycle on the road. I was able to signal a car to slow down on a right turn because a man was making his way slowly across the sidewalk. That was my good deed.

I followed San Vicente until it turned into Ocean. That was my destination and I pulled off into the park lined street to catch my breathe and eat my sandwich and rest up. After a few minutes of relaxing, I proceeded home. Going up Arizona. They closed the street on Second for a farmers market. I walked through the market and got back on my bike and road all the way to Barry Ave and turned right. I made my way to end of the street on Ohio and road up until that street ended. It brought me to Thayer and I made a right and ended up on Santa Monica Blvd. From SM Blvd I was on the bike lane until Avenue of the Stars. I then took the ramp down to Olympic Blvd. Took Olympic all the way to Rimpau. Turned left and the right onto 4th St. I took 4th all the way until it ended on Hoover. That was where I got lost. I somehow ended up on Sunset. I overshot where I wanted to be. I then rode back down Sunset towards Hollywood. Looked for Griffith Park Blvd. I was again held up a bit by another farmers market. Walked through that and proceeded to ride up to Los Feliz on GP Blvd. From there I took Los Feliz Blvd till the LA River Bike Path. I was finally at a place I had rode before. Went north on the path until I reached the end at Victory. I decided to take a more scenic path on Riverside Drive. I also decided to take a series of Bike Routes of Burbank. Until I couldn’t go further North. That lead me out to Buena Vista Blvd one block before the railroad track south of Empire Blvd.

All that took about 3 and a half hours and stretched out to about 55 miles. LA streets are pretty bad. Cracks and holes line almost all the streets that jarred the heck out of my poor bike as well as doing a number on my body. I’m a exhausted now but I’m glad I finally did this ride. Planned it for quite some time. Now I know what the journey looks like visually.

Happy Halloween!

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By Johnny, October 22, 2009 10:56 pm

Last night I decided to go over to the Bike Oven to see if I could help out with some building up of bikes. Unfortunately, after 45 minutes of waiting, nobody showed up so I decided to ride back home. I cruised through Cypress Park, Eagle Rock, and then Glendale. It was there on Verdugo riding north uphill when a Honda Accord honks at me. The person switches lane and speeds off like many drivers these days would do. Funny part was that I caught up to him on a bike while he was waiting at the light. People are just so impatient when they’re driving. And why would you honk at a bicyclist pedaling along? What am I going to do? Where am I going to go? I have the right to be on the road and I wasn’t going snail pace. Probably a good 18 mph when I looked down at my cyclometer. I guess some people still don’t get it. Why the hell is this bicyclist blocking my right lane? As slow as I was going, folks can still get around me by changing lane. Why can’t you just move over and not honk? What does honking accomplish? In my opinion absolutely nothing!

Unfortunately, I’m not the only one facing this recent rash of semi-road rage. Josef, the owner of The Flying Pigeon LA bicycle shop posted up a scarier story where he was literally run off the road on his bakfiet loaded with a bicycle. He was able to maintain balance but his bicycle on top was knocked off the bakfiet and slid across the road. I’m glad he’s okay but to add insult to injury the passenger flips him off! Another story came from a tweet @ActOut who was riding today and a “sophisticated” business man flips her off while driving off in his SUV. The last example came from @SoapBoxLA who was on a bus while the bus driver honks at a bicyclists and explains that the cyclists shouldn’t be there! What is going on here? Why so much anger from drivers of Los Angeles? Oh well, we live another day to ride.

Photo provided by samsstuff’s on Flickr.

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By Johnny, October 15, 2009 11:39 pm

When I’m on my bicycle I get a lot of time to myself to think about “things”. Many of these “things” is my own self-reflection on my feelings and my state of mind. More than once, I found myself blissfully happy. Even when I’m tired and exhausted, I am able to enjoy the silence while I pedal down a quiet dark road home. I am at peace with myself when I’m on my bike. I am happy that I consciously made this decision to not burn fossil fuel to propel myself home from whatever short-sighted event that I may have been attending. I don’t need gasoline to take me home. I can do it on my own free will and burn calories not oil in the process. It is up to my body and myself to navigate up the last hill towards home.

Bicycling has taught me to be more patient. Riding a bicycle to places gave me a reason to plan and structure my day but ironically at the same time, riding the bicycle doesn’t require me to structure my day. I know that if I leave 1 hour before the start time of work I would have plenty of time to coast into work and not break a sweat. I take my time and enjoy the environment around me. I can hear, smell, and feel every cough, breeze, and sprinkle. The concept of being in traffic has been removed from my life. I am no longer bounded by the inconsistencies of getting to a place either 20 minutes or 1 hour just because of a car accident or road construction. I am free from the vast waste of land called parking lots or parking structures which is erected to help house our cars. I don’t have to pay the parking tax either at these wasteland or leaving my car with a complete stranger eager to take my car for a quick spin around the block while he’s digging for loose change. I am no longer mad when a person cuts me off or speeds off in front of me. Why are they in such a rush? Why can’t they just slow down to listen, hear, and smell the things I’m experiencing? That’s right. They’re in a car with their noise insulated windows and cabins bumping the latest tunes on their thousand dollar stereo system. They are busy letting the rest of the world know how better they are because they’re driving a fast and powerful beast of a car. They scoff and laugh at me as they pass, but they don’t know how sorry I feel for them for they are the ones missing out in life. They don’t realize that by driving these monolithic SUVs they are just making things worse. People in their hybrids often think that they are doing something to help our problems when all they’ve done is reduced their consumption on gasoline. They still need gasoline to power their smug bug. They’re still occupying the same space as before on the roads and highways. We still have traffic. We still have accidents.

I remember day-dreaming in college about how cool it would be to commute by bicycle to work. Honestly, I never thought I would be the bicycle commuter let alone get back on a bike after I got into the working world. I’m living the dream! A true dream that I didn’t think was possible. My bicycle(s) changed my life again. It’s taught me that it’s never to late to try something different. I was able to learn how to work on my bikes in a matter of months. I am self-reliant and don’t need to pay a mechanic to service my bikes now. Even after 30+ years, I am able to pick this up with no problem. I am also paying this forward when I go help people with their bicycle problems over at the Bike Oven co-op. What’s a better way to make an impact on someone’s life than to help them get their bike up and running? Maybe they’ll have that chance to feel the way I feel. They have this opportunity to feel some of things I’m feeling. Maybe something they never felt before.

Whatever it is, whenever I am with other bicyclists, I see the same burn. The same drive I see in myself. However different we are I am able to connect with bicyclists just because I am one of them. I’m not talking about your weekend warriors in spandex and fluorescent jersey. I do train with those types but they are not as cool as the people who genuinely love bicycles not because it’s got the latest and hottest component but because the bicycle had a story behind it. Every bike has a story that is associated with it. I remember some of those stories. About someone picking it up from a yard sale and spray painting it. About someone who saw it lying on the street and decided to adapt it and rebuild it from the ground up. Some great stories behind how each other’s rig was pieced together and how long they’ve been riding their trusty steed is what I enjoy listening to.

I’ll have people telling me that I’m the one who’s crazy to go without a car. They tell me I’ll be missing out and that I can’t live without a car. They tell me that riding a bike fully loaded is silly. They make fun of my helmet. Bicycling has also taught me to be courageous and trust in something whole-heartedly to a point whenever I have naysayers telling me it won’t work, I don’t have self-doubt. I can confidently brush it off or better yet show them that it is possible to live a car-free life and still be happy with overwhelming amount of experience to share. The proof is in the pudding. I’ve never blogged as much I have for the past 2 months. I just have so much to share and the words are coming out much easier than ever before. I’m not the one missing out. I’m living it up and enjoying every minute of it.

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By Johnny, October 14, 2009 1:58 am

I reached the half-way point of my 2 month trial period of being car-free. The first month wasn’t too bad. I actually traveled more than I thought I would. I rode about 500+ miles so far. There were days I felt that I was struggling to stay on the bike. Most of the time I’ve been happy riding to and from work. I realize I can’t stay out during school nights too long. Riding home at 11PM or 12AM really sucks when you’re exhausted. I also don’t like to bring my Xtracycle on a train. This limits my mobility since the bike is much longer than normal and I feel like a jerk for blocking people’s way. Plus, I can’t throw it on the bus since their bike racks are built for normal length bikes. Those are pretty much the major challenges for the first month of being car-free.

Now that I just finished the 2nd day into my second month, I was presented some new challenges. I visit my folks weekly and when I got there this week, I did not have the keys to their place. I was locked out in the cold and couldn’t get a hold of them and friends. If I had a car, I would have the keys with my car keys. No, that did not discourage me but made me realize that I need to be more conscious about having keys with me or perhaps stashed away somewhere in case I forget again. Another challenge comes from the weather. Early in the week I saw rain in my forecast. Since I haven’t purchased rain gear for riding, I’m not going to ride the bike home. Instead I’ve planned it out so that I got a ride from a co-worker after my CERT training at work. The rain has raised more awareness as far as going to destinations like the library. Luckily I bribed a friend at work to take me in exchange for joining him for a lunch out. Otherwise, that would have been coming into work later than normal and taking 2 bus rides and a train stop to the library and then work, in the rain. The last but least significant thing I am experience is that I may be socially out casted from my friends who are planning to have monthly / bi-monthly poker games during the week. There’s no way in hell I’m riding over to Culver City on a school night for a poker game. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy so I’m glad I have these challenges. But this is definitely something I’m willing to live with. My spirits are high and I can’t wait till November 14th when the 8 week is done. Hopefully, nothing will change from now until then. I’ll be glad to announce that the car is for sale!

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By Johnny, October 6, 2009 2:27 pm

I’m floating around at various parts. Video compliments of Stephen Box.

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By Johnny, October 4, 2009 11:11 pm

I heard about the “Pedouins” a few weeks ago from a tweet by @qbike on Twitter. It explained that the Harrison family is planning on traveling from Kentucky to Alaska on a 5 person tandem bike. Most people would probably think that it’s crazy of them to be traveling with 3 young kids on a bicycle. I would like to commend them on their bravery and their sense of adventure. It appears that they are teaching the kids many different values on this trip. They are shooting to be the first quint bicyclists to ride 7,000 miles to Alaska. Their journey started on August 1st this year. What speaks to me most about them is their desire to achieve their dream of traveling. On an interview Bill was explaining that they’ve heard so many people wanting to do something they’ve always dreamed of and they didn’t want to be those people regretting never to live out their dream.

What was most interesting part that I found was their story about how the couple met at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Seems more like a script straight out from a short film. A southern gentleman who used to live in Alaska buys a red Toyota pick-up truck. Drives it down to the Grand Canyon. He hikes down to the canyon and finds one camping spot. It so happens that he meets his wife there and they hike back up and spend 2 more months on the road. They eventually got married and have several children who are born in various places ranging from Florida to the Netherlands.

This story as well as the past summer’s real life story of 2 geeks riding across America from Pennsylvania to Oregon are a true inspiration to me. I too am looking to do something similar in my life time. I’ve already taken steps to learn more about camping as well as prepare for a potential trip up the coast from south of California to San Francisco. I may even continue year to year up north until maybe even to Alaska. People like this keeps my hope and spirit alive that this feat can be accomplished. Living car free should make this more easy for me to do it physically.

By-the-way, I’m done with my 3rd week of my car-free trial. I had to start my car and get some gas since I was running on fumes. Even though I didn’t use my car, I had to make sure it wasn’t going to be in worse condition than before I started this. I still have to keep it maintained so people would buy it from me in a few weeks from now.

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By Johnny, September 30, 2009 12:42 pm

As mentioned earlier, I was planning on attending the first Crenshaw Crush ride on September 27, 2009. I got up early Sunday morning to prep for the ride. Had to pump my tires and get my stuff together for the journey down to Leimert Park. Rode out to the North Hollywood station and took the train down to Hollywood / Vine stop. Got on the 210 bus line with the bike. It was the first time I ever used the front bicycle racks on a bus. Fairly straight forward and easy to use. The bus driver was patient. I’m think it’s because of the fact that it was a Sunday and not alot of people was using mass transit.

As soon as I get on, we pass Sunset and Vine, we see 2 guys getting into a fist fight on the sidewalk. They were still arguing and just as the bus started to leave, the fists started to fly. Obviously, I didn’t know how that was resolved. Interesting start to the morning to say the least.

The bus made it to Vernon and Crenshaw and I made my way to meet with the group. Finally had a chance to meet Jeremy and Ron who are LA Greensters who was going to lead our ride. I’ve been following Jeremy’s blog for a few months now and realized I’ve been following Ron’s blog as well. I also met Stephen who runs the SoapBoxLA blog as well as Enci who is an actress and director of the upcoming film, “At What Cost”.

For the sake of not being repetitive I am not going to do a ride report. A more comprehensive ride report can be found here on the LA Streets Blog. This covers all our stops and activities as well as historical background is detailed in the ride report. I can say I had a fantastic time riding through the neighborhood and experiencing it at a different point of view. Met very interesting people and was treated to some snacks on the way.

After the 21 mile ride, we made our way back to Leimert Park to take pictures and celebrate. I actually head back up towards Venice Blvd and San Vicente with Jeff (don’t know his last name). He was helpful in pointing me out on where to go since I was heading to a friend’s place.

Click on the picture above to see the photos of the ride.