How Bikeable is LA?

Beyond the waving palm trees and the iconic Hollywood sign lies one of the most recognizable features of L.A.’s urban landscape: its notorious traffic. In a city heavily reliant on cars, congestion leads to wasted hours on the road and increased vehicle emissions. Addressing these challenges requires not only reducing the number of cars but also promoting alternatives—like biking.

Biking offers a variety of benefits, including, but not limited to, reducing GHG emissions, increasing flexibility of mobility, saving transportation time and expenses, alleviating traffic congestion, engaging in physical fitness, and promoting multimodal public transportation access (Kou et al. 2020).

As of 2019, L.A.’s transportation sector accounted for approximately one-fifth of GHG emissions. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) proposed the  Green New Deal  in 2019 to tackle pressing climate challenges, and among their key targets is increasing “the percentage of all trips made by walking, biking, and micro-mobility (e.g. electric scooters, skateboards) to 50% by 2035” (“Green New Deal”). 

With temperate weather year round, Los Angeles seems like an ideal candidate for these greener forms of travelling. Despite this, Los Angeles was named the “Worst Bike City” by Bicycling magazine in 2018, largely as a result of major two deterrents—danger from automobile traffic and insufficient bike lanes and paths (Flax; Pimentel and Lowry).

Biking infrastructure is essential for ensuring multimodal access to public transportation, especially as Los Angeles continues expanding its public transit system. 

Multimodal access to public transportation, or multiple modes of transportation to, from, and between centers of public transportation, is a crucial component when discussing cycling as an alternative to driving cars. Rather than considering bikes as a one-to-one replacement for cars directly, the utility of bikes is twofold: a form of transportation and a means to connect to other forms of transportation.

Without sufficient infrastructure in place connecting cyclists to their desired locations and other public transit stations, cycling cannot become a reliable alternative to driving. The integration of biking infrastructure includes multi-use paths, the capacity to carry bikes on public transportation, parking and storage of bicycles at public transportation centers and stops, and the availability of shared bike services (“Multimodal”).

Biking infrastructure isn’t only necessary for cyclists to get from Point A to Point B; it is also vital for protecting cyclists from potential road hazards (Pimentel and Lowry). 

Road safety remains a critical concern for Los Angeles cyclists. In his  2018 article for Bicycling magazine , Flax, an experienced cyclist, highlights the city’s hazardous road conditions and reckless driving, noting the millions spent on cyclist accident lawsuits in recent years. BikeLA, a non-profit organization advocating to make L.A. a safer place to bike, released the  Bike Safety Report  in 2023 analyzing the factors, such as missing bike lanes and multi-lane roads, that overlapped with collisions and cyclist fatalities in 2022. 

Various studies have found a reduction in cyclist injury after improvements were made to cycling infrastructure. A study by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler examined ten U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, that successfully encouraged cycling and enhanced safety through expanded infrastructure. All ten cities saw declines in cyclist collisions, injuries, and fatalities relative to the total number of bike trips, supporting findings from Boston’s infrastructure expansion from 2009 to 2012, which resulted in increased cycling use and safety (Pucher and Buehler; Pedroso et al.).

In addition to bikeways, access to bikes themselves is vital, achievable through bike share programs. Bike sharing has become an increasingly popular method of transportation in large metropolitan areas in the U.S., such as New York and San Francisco. New York’s Citi Bike Share (the largest bike share system in the U.S.) saved 13,370 tons of oil equivalent and decreased 30,070 tons of CO2 from 2014 to 2017 (Chen et al.). Additionally, bike share stations can play a major role in addressing the "first and last mile" problem of public transportation, which refers to the gaps in connectivity where commuters are unable to easily travel to and/or from the public transit stop. 

Research by Fuller et al. found that there is a higher likelihood of cycling for people who live in areas where bike share is available, compared to people who have privately owned bicycles but have no access to bike share programs (Fuller et al.). Another study reveals that bike share reduced the usage of personal automobiles among about 50% of the bike share users in five cities: Twin Cities, Salt Lake City, Montreal, Toronto, and Mexico City (Shaheen et al.).

In Los Angeles, Metro currently operates a bike share system. Since its launch in July 2016, there have been over 2 million bike share trips and nearly 7 million estimated pounds of emission reduced. However, when compared to other major U.S. cities, L.A.'s bike share system lags behind in its environmental impact. It has the lowest ratio of emission reductions to total transportation sector GHG emissions among seven large cities (New York, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., and San Francisco), primarily due to a smaller bike share system and high overall GHG emissions (Kou et al.).

This  metric , created by Front Seat with public input and advice from various university professors, measures whether a location is good for biking on a scale from 0-100 based on four equally weighted components based on 4 criteria:

• Bike lanes
• Hills
• Destinations and road connectivity
• Bike commuting mode share

This  map layer  shows the city boundaries of all 88 cities in the Los Angeles area.

This  map layer  shows all bike lanes in Los Angeles.

This  map layer  provided information about each bike share station in L.A. and their status (active vs. inactive).

The L.A. Almanac provided data from the U.S. Census (within the past 2 years) regarding  race/ethnicity  of the 88 L.A. cities' residents. To clean the data, I removed the data pertaining to unincorporated communities. Additionally, I consolidated the categories into five groups: White (Not Hispanic), Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian, and Other (modelled after the population density categories of  this 538 article on redlining ).

Despite the implementation of a large number of Metro bike share stations through Pasadena, the service was severely underutilized, contrary to existing research suggesting that bike share systems would encourage more people to bike,  especially around universities  (Scott and Ciuro).

The lack of success from the Pasadena bike share program can be attributed several factors. A major challenge is the competition from more convenient micro-mobility services like Lime and Bird, which offer dockless e-scooters instead of a docked bike system. This flexibility could make e-scooters a more attractive option for many users. Additionally, Metro's bike share system heavily relies on public funds, contrasting other cities' successful bike share programs (i.e. New York and San Francisco) which are primarily funded by private sponsorships and community grants (Nelson).

The availability and placement of bike share stations plays a critical role in improving access and mobility, but these stations are just one aspect of a city’s bikeability. To better understand the broader landscape, the map below illustrates the bike and walk scores of all 88 cities across L.A. These scores highlight not only the infrastructure in place but also how conducive each city is to active transportation options like biking and walking."

Unsurprisingly, Los Angeles is much more walkable than it is bikeable, with much higher walk scores (in dark red) than bike scores across most of the Los Angeles area. The dark red areas on the Bike Score map (bike scores >70, a.k.a. ranging from Very Bikeable to Biker's Paradise) are consistent with the areas with more biking infrastructure—primarily in Santa Monica, Long Beach, and Pasadena.

Interestingly, surveys reveal that Latino and Black communities, as well as individuals with lower educational attainment, show stronger support for reallocating transportation funds toward active transportation investments like biking (Gase et al.). Yet, despite this support, these same communities are often underserved when it comes to actual infrastructure. This disparity underscores the need for more equitable distribution of bike infrastructure in neighborhoods that stand to benefit most from increased access. 

Despite knowing the various obstacles to cycling, the reality is that there is not an easy solution to increase usage of cycling and other micro-mobility. Improving cycling infrastructure as outlined in the  L.A. Mobility Plan 2035  involves “maximizing the efficiency of existing and proposed transportation infrastructure through advanced transportation technology, through reduction of vehicle trips, and through focusing growth in proximity to public transit.” This means the Mobility Plan seeks to increase sidewalks widths, add bike lanes, and dedicate transit only road lanes. While these measures are likely to improve cyclist safety and road connectivity, they may also exacerbate traffic congestion by limiting space for moving or parked cars (Hernandez-Lopez).

To make biking a more accessible, equitable, and safe mode of transportation in the future, Los Angeles must focus on improving road safety, connectivity, and the convenience of bike share programs. Despite the failed bike share program in Pasadena, surveys of Los Angeles residents suggest that the public is "strongly supportive of infrastructure aimed at improving residents' ability to walk and bike" (Gase et al.).

One program has already started addressing some of these concerns.  Civic Bicycle Commuting  (CiBiC) is a pilot transportation research project to encourage people to try commuting to work on bicycles in groups, similar to carpooling but on bikes. The goal is to create a community-driven group bicycling system, making it safer to bike on roads with cars (CiBiC).

With the right investment in infrastructure and resources, Los Angeles has the potential to become a more bike-friendly city for everyone—from seasoned cyclists who rely on biking as their main mode of transport, to commuters looking to bridge the last mile between public transit and their destinations. Increasing the feasibility of biking can offer a sustainable alternative to car-based travel, playing a crucial role in addressing the city's notorious issues of traffic congestion and vehicular emissions.