Shared by our friend Bill Pollock and his Los Angeles Times. http://latimes.com
Los Angeles is on a program to spend billions on improving bicycling commuting. Here is an idea from a reader of the LA Times, The Ray Bradbury Bike Ferry, THE MARVIN BRAUDE Bike Trail along the beach, aka “the bike path,” is the secret freeway of Los Angeles. How else can you get anywhere between Pacific Palisades and the South Bay at rush hour — all without stopping, except for Small World Books and fish tacos. There’s just one hitch: A yacht channel, one you could sail a Frisbee across without half trying, bisects the path at Marina del Rey and sends riders on a detour away from the beach, back onto surface streets.
A bicycle ferry across the “Del Rey Straits” would make possible an unbroken 20-mile oceanfront bike ride between Will Rogers State Beach and Palos Verdes. All it would take is an experiment that coastal towns like Martha’s Vineyard have helpfully piloted for years: a simple, Evinrude bike ferry. Even with liability insurance and dock construction costs, if you charged a dollar at peak hours, this one would surely pay for itself by Labor Day. Why not name it after Ray Bradbury, whose “Fahrenheit 451” is L.A.’s citywide Big Read pick this spring, by the way, and who went carless in L.A. long before it became a fashion statement?
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