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Comment by andersco | Hacker News Reader

There is no mention of traditionally car-centric sprawling cities such as LA or Phoenix and their biking infrastructure or lack thereof. Anyone living in such a city seeing progress on biking infrastructure?

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I lived in LA from 2016 to 2021. There were improvements made, but as far as I could tell, most of it was in Downtown LA, which is already fairly walkable and the place with the most transit. Outside of Downtown, it's mostly a nightmare. Even within Downtown, I would say progress was fairly slow, but the changes were typically much more involved than simply painting the road. The biggest change was probably on Figueroa Street, though the infrastructure doesn't span much distance, as is the case with most of the improvements.

If you're interested in keeping up with this kind of stuff, Streetsblog is a good resource: https://la.streetsblog.org/

I grew up in LA and OC and the bike situation is very uneven. It is certainly wrong to say "its a nightmare outside of Downtown". There is substantial, protected bike infrastructure along all the major waterways. You can ride from downtown to Newport Beach without touching a street. Venice beach and in general the beach cities are quite bike friendly. The places that could use some bike TLC are places like Echo Park or Silverlake, where there's a lot of demand but no infra.

I lived in Venice Beach a few years ago and it definitely did start up open up and become more bike friendly. The rest of LA outside of downtown is a mix of non-existent to horrendous cycling infrastructure.

Well, there's no one L.A.. right? Until I had to move in 2019, I used to ride long commutes from the Valley and Santa Clarita to Pasadena, Burbank, and Westlake Village. I was able to ride very bike-friendly routes most of the way. Of course, riding longer distances is often easier to route than shorter distances so there you go. Didn't do much riding south of the 101 so I'm just a data point.

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