The first, is my work place, though I've been taking the bus because I can read on the way and have a nice 20 minute walk each way, I do have the option to bike if I want and it would take me the same amount of time and I did this the first week I worked here. Now the problem is that there isn't really anywhere for me to put my bike when I get here. I work in an office in Beverly Hills, and so I can't really store my bike in the office because it would be sort of in the way and awkward and there isn't anywhere I can lock in the back of the building, so I was forced to lock it to a parking meter downstairs. OK great, a parking meter is a completely legit place to lock my bike, but that doesn't mean I feel totally awesome about it. Ideally, there could be a bike rack where the employees park and take their smoke breaks, it wouldn't take up much room and would make me feel much better.
The second, became apparent just this past Sunday as I went to church at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels here in Los Angeles. I live less than a mile from the Cathedral and obviously rode my bike there. I walked in the pedestrian entrance and asked the lady at the Visitor Information desk if there was somewhere I could put my bike, and she replied in completely serious manner, that bikes were in fact not allowed. Not allowed! What kind of policy is that? I ended up parking my bike to a handrail and I felt pretty crappy about it, but the doors that it led to were closed, so it made me feel a little better. This is a church in the middle a downtown Los Angeles, it's accessible by car, by foot, and public transit, it also has ramps and elevators for the handicapped, and somehow there are no bike racks. I think this is a serious failure on many points. 1. Church should be accessible to everyone, and if it's not there's a good chance you're losing some people. This is the biggest failure to me because there are so many Latino boys in LA that ride really cool bikes, Latino boys who are probably Catholic, and they are apparently not riding their bikes to church or not going to church at all 2. We should be encouraging people not to drive, I noticed first hand the line of traffic that is caused by people trying to get into the parking lot, and that could be a little shorter if a couple more people biked 3. You would be more likely to have people who don't usually, come to mass as they passed by.
I really love riding my bike places, and hopefully it will eventually become easier for me to ride places with new bike lanes/sharrows and more bike racks to encourage bike usage.
