L.A.'s Bike Lane Blues

The city of Los Angeles recently followed the lead of cities like San Francisco and New York by altering two of its streets and adding new bike lanes, part of a pilot program that included painting the entire width of the lanes bright green. These new lanes have been welcomed by the bicycle community and by ribbon-cutting local politicians as a bold green sign of the city’s efforts to become a safer and friendlier place to bike. Riding down one of these new lanes, a 1.5-mile section of Spring Street downtown, it’s easy to feel the difference from other streets in the car-dominated city, with the neon green lane practically impossible to miss. But after a few blocks of riding, that bright green starts to dim, with sometimes huge splotches chipped off and eaten away, revealing the black pavement and gray concrete beneath. And that’s after a second coat of paint had been added. In a month.

“By the first rainstorm they were compromised,” says Tim Fremaux, a traffic engineer and bikeways project manager at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.