L.A.'s Bicycle Love Affair: Enduring Relationship or Passing Fancy?

Over the past few years, we've noted the emergence of a growing bicycling culture in Los Angeles from the top-down and bottom-up. 

"Still, the new street thinking — road diets, bike lanes, bike trains (companion bike commuters), bike libraries (check out a bike, ride to your destination and check your bike in),CicLAvia — strikes many Angelenos as shockingly new and subversive in a city that just four years ago was still arguing over how best to turn parking lanes into commuter traffic lanes and which streets — Pico? Olympic? — should be remade as virtual freeways by adding as many lanes as could fit to get as many motorists from the Westside to downtown and back again as quickly and seamlessly as possible," say the Times' editors. 

In launching their "Roadshare" initiative, the Times seeks to examine whether the city's "romance with the bicycle" can or should last.  

"Is cycling a major shift in L.A.'s urban lifestyle, analogous to the resurgence of downtowns and the reversal of the commuter flow between the dense urban core and the single-family suburbs? Or is it a passing fancy, with barely more staying power than the Segway, or the formerly green bike lane that marked several blocks of downtown's Spring Street before the paint was stripped off this month?"