Life Can Be So Car-Free

This evening we attended part of the Life Can Be So Car-Free event at the new Los Angeles State Historic Park which is just north of the Chinatown station on the Gold Line. Ideally I would have ridden my bike or taken the bus to this event, but I had to attend a wedding all day today in La Mirada, and the only way I could get there on time was to drive! I figured going by car was better than not going at all.

I got there at around 8 PM after they had just started to show various movies on car-free and car-lite living. There weren't quite as many people there as I thought there would be, but I saw a lot of familiar faces - people that I see on Critical Mass rides.

I found a display at one of the booths pretty interesting. It was a booth for a new program called Roll With It which pairs up people that bike to work and people that want to learn to bike to work. They had a map of LA with pushpins marking the start and end of various peoples' bicycle commutes. Each pair of pushpins was connected by a string of yarn. It was a nice visual display of where the bicycle commuting traffic was concentrated in LA. This gave me the idea that an online application could be written for people to input their commute paths and the aggregate commuting routes could be depicted on Google Maps. Something like this could really give the city of LA an idea about where they should try to improve bicycle conditions. I told one of the Roll With It organizers that I'd see if I could figure out how to do something like this.

A little hungry, I left the event early and headed to Little Tokyo to have dinner at one of my favorite restaurants there, Sohoju. Dolsot Bibimbop - yum.