Council can’t agree on whether bikes should be banned in Palisades Park
CITY HALL — The wheels fell off of a discussion between elected leaders this week over whether bicyclists should share Santa Monica’s largest park with walkers and joggers.
While some members of the City Council said bicycle riders intimidate senior citizens and others who frequent Palisades Park, others said putting the brakes on bicycles would make for a more sterile environment. Posted signs currently ban biking in the bluff-top park, but no law exists to enforce them.
“What I see us doing here with a lot of wheeled forms of transportation like this in the community is continuing to push people out of a social and community environment, and only looking at it as a way of getting from one place to another, instead of a way of just being somewhere,” City Councilman Mike Feinstein said.
“And when we do that, I think we move away from being a much cooler, live-and-let-live beach community and (towards being) a much more antiseptic sort of sterile, gentrified community,” he added.
Supporters of the proposed law cited the dense throngs of people who gather in the park, especially on weekends and in the southern portion of the park, between Wilshire Boulevard and Colorado Avenue. Thousands of tourists, locals and homeless people regularly gather in that area of the park, where buses and taxis also stop, and demonstrations are often held.
“I guess when you’re on a bike and you know what you’re going to do, and how you’re riding, you just don’t understand the apprehension a pedestrian has when you’re coming straight for them,” City Councilman Bob Holbrook said. “They don’t know if they’re supposed to move or you’re going to go around them. Are you going to slow down by 10 miles an hour, or five miles an hour?
“I was nearly knocked down Sunday night in front of Il Fornaio restaurant by a guy that came down the sidewalk at about 30 miles an hour — and finally he had to bail out of the bike, because he was gonna just kill 10 people at the corner, because nobody could move,” Holbrook added. “I tell you honestly, council members … a lot of people using the park that are in their late 70s and early 80s are really intimidated by a vehicle coming towards them.”
Siding with Holbrook was Mayor Richard Bloom, who said special considerations ought to be made for children learning to ride tricycles or small bikes with training wheels, both of which would be banned under the proposed law. Siding with Feinstein were City Councilmen Herb Katz, Kevin McKeown and Ken Genser, though each had slightly different opinion of how to proceed.
In the end, council members realized they wouldn’t reach a consensus and continued the matter to a future meeting. The issue was brought to the council after residents who use the park to jog and walk in the weekday mornings complained to park officials that the bicyclists were unsafe, staffers said.
Genser said in the northern portion of the park, where he often spends Sunday afternoons, families with small children were the only ones who seemed to bike in the park, and they didn’t appear to interfere with anyone else.
“I have mobility impairment and sometimes am concerned when things come fast at me, particularly skateboards and such, or skaters, and I don’t get exercise, and I’m decidedly uncool and I’ve been accused on this dais of being a fuddy-duddy... but I just don’t see the reason for this, at least for this ordinance. I think part of living in an urban area is people having to try to find ways to get along,” Genser told his colleagues.
Katz wondered aloud what might follow the proposed biking ban.
“I just think we’re getting too stringent,” he said. “The next thing we’re going to do is stop people from jogging, taking their dogs to the park, because they too can be dangerous — if walking on a leash with a child or a small person next to them,” he said. “I think we’re just overdoing it.”
“The next thing we’re going to do is stop people from jog-ging, taking their dogs to the park, because they too can be dangerous — if walking on a leash with a child or a small person next to them.” — – HERB KATZ City Councilman
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 29, 2004. Read the original PDF.