Little BPZ's Sprouting Across Los Angeles County?

What do you think? Sounds good, doesn't it? Citing the City of Claremont's Bicycle Priority Zone (BPZ), the California non-profit organization, Sustainable Streets, would like to see similar BPZ's created around college and university campuses across the breadth of Los Angeles County. The idea for this was passed along via a comment relating to a recent post on this blog. If you visit said post and comment you will notice a link to a Powerpoint presentation given by Ron Durgin, President of Sustainable Streets. I have taken the liberty of reproducing one of the slides from the presentation below, a map, showing the BPZ locations around campuses in the county. 

PP presentations, of course, only tell a portion of the story, and I would loved to have heard the verbal portion as well. Hopefully the idea will take off and I will have the chance. I must confess to being only vaguely aware of the organization prior to this, but will be paying greater attention in the future. The idea is fantastic, and would be a beneficial match to both City and County Bicycle Master Plans. It does not take much imagination to see BPZ's being applied to the downtown areas of the various municipalities within the County of Los Angeles as well. Faced with cut-backs and forced to raise student fees, colleges and universities, should see this as a winning situation. Surface parking, and expensive parking structures are an incredible waste of land and money, which could be better used and spent in other ways. The creation of BPZ's as proposed, would aid any efforts at encouraging students to commute by bike, and relieving pressure for parking. Sounds like something we could all get behind. A link to the Sustainable Streets website is here; I don't notice anything there about the proposal at this time, but will keep looking. As the comment suggests, there may be more information forthcoming in the City Manager's report - when it is made available I shall let you know here.


Alright, so here is the link for the City Manager's weekly report, for 21 July (if you follow the link, scroll down to page 3 of the report for the part about the BPZ). If you are already familiar with what Claremont's Bicycle Priority Zone is all about, you may not find anything new at the link. It is basically an overview of what the BPZ is, some of it's features. The report notes Ron Durgin and the Sustainable Streets proposal to create BPZs around college campuses. I have mentioned the Claremont Bicycle Priority Zone on several occasions in the past; I believe the most comprehensive was here.