Karen O’Keefe

1) When did you start riding a bicycle in West Hollywood, and why?

Immediately after I moved to West Hollywood in December 2011. However, it took some time for me to become comfortable biking on major city streets here (especially Santa Monica Boulevard). I haven’t owned a car since 2000. I prefer biking because it is healthy, fun (at least when motorists don’t stress me out with bad behavior), and environmentally friendly. It doesn’t hurt that it saves a lot of money.  

2) Do you use your bike for special purposes such as exercise, recreation, going to the gym, etc.? Or do you use it pretty much all the time?

It is my preferred mode of transportation. If we had an off-road bike path, I would probably bike for recreation, but given that there’s no nearby scenic bikeway, I use it solely for transportation. That said, it is a bit of a pain to store — as we have to carry it upstairs to avoid it getting stolen. My husband doesn’t bike, so when we’re together we walk or take transit. On rare occasions, we use rideshare or rental cars for places that are difficult to get to by walking or public transit.

I work from home, so most of my biking is either to the Rent Stabilization Commission I serve on, to various city meetings, to my cousin’s in Culver City, sometimes to stores, and to Santa Monica. For several years I volunteered about five miles away as a tutor once per week, and I’d always bike there, too.

3) Are there special times (after dark, for example) when you don’t ride your bike?

Not at this time. I particularly enjoy biking at night. 

4) What do you do if you’re traveling outside the city limits? Do you still bike?  Or do you take the bus or use Uber or Lyft?

Yes, I bike to Culver City, L.A., and Santa Monica. When I bike somewhere farther away, it takes a bit of time to figure out a route I’m comfortable on, though Google Maps street vision helps.

For a couple of years, I was biking to Culver City once or twice per week, and to Santa Monica about once per month. However, when I’m with my husband we often take the bus (though sometimes I meet him places by bike).

When we travel out of the area, such as to Topanga, Joshua Tree, Sequoia or Yosemite, we use a rental car. It’s rather sad that we use an environmentally unfriendly mode of transit when we go enjoy our national parks, but they are difficult to impossible to reach with trains and busses.

5) What are the pluses of experiencing West Hollywood on a bicycle?

Being on a bike makes one much more present in the world around you. You can feel the sun, interact with others, and are almost never are “stuck in traffic.” Also, then transportation and exercise can be combined into one. I’m not a fan of exercising for the sake of exercising, so it works well for me.

6) What are the negatives of trying to negotiate the city on a bicycle?

That impatient and inattentive drivers could kill me with one false move, and that our city’s bike infrastructure is sadly lacking, thus increasing the risk.

My uncle was killed by a motorist while biking in 2012, and I was pretty shaken up after that happened.

Our city has devoted vast amounts of public land to cars — including both moving cars and car storage, but it has not carved out any space for a protected, interconnected bike lane network. Even the few bike lanes we have are not protected from vehicles: There is no buffer between bikes and cars in most places and no barriers anywhere. The bike lanes we have are designed so cars cut them to park. Some motorists even drive in the bike lanes on Fairfax. Drivers and passengers also carelessly open doors (risking knocking bicyclists off bikes). For all the professed concern about climate change, there is fierce opposition to removing street parking and using the public space protect environmentally friendly modes of transit.

7) What do you think the city needs to do to encourage more people to ride bikes rather than drive cars?

West Hollywood needs to carve out safe spaces for people on bikes. It needs a network of bike lanes that are physically separated from traffic and to calm some neighborhood streets by designing them to prevent cut-throughs and to slow traffic.

Personal vehicles are the largest source of greenhouse gasses in our state. That transportation choice is a key part of what is devastating the livability of our planet for humans. Car collisions are taking more lives than gun violence — more than 40,000 lives per year in the U.S.  — but are not treated as a crisis that deserves concerted action. The right to travel conveniently and relatively quickly by a single-occupant car is as sacrosanct in this progressive enclave as gun rights are in other parts of our country.  We need to take the issue of traffic violence and the harm caused by motor vehicles seriously.

Our city should make it as easy as possible to bike and otherwise use green transportation. This includes requiring people to pay to park and repurposing our streets. As it stands, non-drivers (who tend to have lower incomes) have to subsidize drivers.