Art That Lets Them Stop Spinning Their Wheels

Despite their model behavior as nonpolluting commuters, bicycle riders in downtown Los Angeles are a beleaguered lot. When they’re riding, they can’t rely on bike paths for safety, and when they get off the bike, they can’t find a place to park.

“They just don’t get much respect,” says Michelle Mowery, bicycle coordinator for the city’s Department of Transportation.

Her department is addressing the second dilemma stylishly with the installation of 10 sets of bike racks, each tailored for a specific downtown site by students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Their metal artwork for the Bike Stops Here project is being installed this month. Already a cactus rack has sprouted in Grand-Hope Park and a purple and yellow abstract sculpture adorns Pershing Square. Other designs include an oversize bicycle chain for MOCA and parking meter-type poles with banners for the Arco Plaza, where many bike messengers wait between trips.

Some projects are determinedly site specific: A pair of pig heads, the centerpiece for a Central Market bike rack, was cast in steel from a head purchased at the market. And a low concrete wall “incarcerates” bikes for the LAPD Central Division station. “If all works well, chimes will ring as you lock in your bike,” says Victoria Liptak, projects director at SCI-Arc. With shop master Randall Wilson, she has overseen the work since it started last summer.

Because the institute focuses on bringing real-world solutions to the community, Liptak says this project is a natural. “We want to be part of the city, not just sitting here but exploring and understanding.”

City officials seem equally happy. “It’s one of these things that has a lot of overtones everybody likes a lot,” says Mickey Gustin, director of the public art program for the Community Redevelopment Agency, which funded the Bike Stops Here with a $18,000 cultural trust fund grant.

Not only is the city starting to think more about promoting alternative transportation downtown, she says, the functional art project satisfies a host of other CRA guidelines. “We want to engage creative individuals in one way or another to help in the total transformation of a place. We are heavily into place-making.” Students in the project toured the downtown by bike, maps in hand, to check out possible sites before making their choices. Second-year graduate student Arlene Lee loved the look of Grand Hope Park.

“It was so urban and arty--it’s been redeveloped with a lot of attention given to functional art, but the bike racks were these boring tubes.” She designed a playful cactus rack with some desert lizards crawling on it in the hopes of giving context to the city and the entire West. “It’s nice that it is permanent,” she says. “It’s not for me, it’s for the community, and whether or not they use it, they can still enjoy it.”

Graduate student Patrick Bambrough used “abstracted versions of old bicycles” for a nostalgic rack in front of the Los Angeles Times. “I’ve done tons of projects in college, but they were all on paper,” he says. “This is the first one that’s been installed and used, and that’s the exciting part.”

The Bike Stops Here also fits in with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s plan to woo bicycle riders into downtown. “We are looking seriously at the bicycle as an alternative transportation mode,” says Mowery, who coordinated the project. “I think we are seeing the consequences of putting all our eggs in one transportation basket.”

Nothing is more environmentally friendly than the bicycle, and it’s also the most efficient in terms of time for trips under a mile, she says. The transportation department has a group of engineers designing new bike lanes and bike paths for the city--which currently has close to 300 miles of bikeways, compared to 6,000 miles of street ways. “I sometimes feel overwhelmed, but I like a challenge,” says Mowery, who lives in Long Beach and frequently commutes downtown by bike. “It’s a mixed route, first a bike path from Long Beach, then I get off at Imperial and take Alameda straight into downtown. It takes an hour and a half. The car is an hour and the train is an hour and 15 minutes.”

She has no estimate of the current number of downtown bike riders, which includes messengers and delivery bikers and a fledgling group of commuters. “Some companies are encouraging bike commuting. DWP has a bicycle club with more than 100 members,” says Mowery, who sees Westside and Valley commuters as a big untapped pool of bike commuters. “We do know that just under 1% of all the commuters in the L.A. basin are commuting by bicycle.”

She takes her message to ride share fairs and has talked to many people about bikes. “We need to do this in baby steps,” she says. “I tell them to first start with little trips. Don’t start your car, just to go to the post office or the grocery store. Use the bike. Then graduate to multimodal by riding the bike to the train station and leaving it there for your commute.”

SCI-Arc’s Liptak, who took her own bike tour of the bike rack sites on a recent Saturday, says biking is a great way to take in the scenery. “You’re going slower and you can see the public art. There is beautiful architecture downtown and some great festivals on the weekends.” She thinks weekend biking could be a natural for tourists, if the city were more rider-friendly.

Mowery envisions bike racks all over, including on city buses, so that people will be able to get anywhere at any time, and thinks Los Angeles is on the cusp of a breakthrough. “We have the opportunity, because there is a huge recreational boom in bicycles here,” she says. “We need to make that transition to thinking of the bike as transportation, not just recreation.”