Blades, Boards and Road-Blocking Babies

The Santa Monica bike path really needs a number. Like 205 or 143. Or make it the 310 for easy recall. The digits don’t matter so much as the symbolism. That bike path is a freeway and whatever legislative body is in charge of such things--Caltrans? The Department of Recreation?--needs to recognize it as such.

This was never clearer than on Memorial Day. While the 10 Freeway sang empty and wide from downtown to PCH, there was bike-path gridlock from Washington practically to Pico. Like any summertime crush, there were vehicles of all sorts and operators who vacillated widely in their degrees of expertise. The vacillation at times was quite literal, and as wild as it was wide.

Here were the novice roller-bladers, the slouching streams of skateboarders and, of course, the rental brigade--many of whose last two-wheeled adventure involved a banana seat and handlebar streamers. Among them zipped the streamlined professionals with their painted-on bike shorts and Ts, changing gears with every breath and cursing each grain of sand trekked across the cement by unthinking beachgoers.

There were bikes for two and three and four, bikes with baby seats and baby trailers, grown-up bikes with kid bikes attached and way too many tykes on trikes and training wheels. (For those parents new to the bike path on a summer weekend or holiday, this is not a place for kids to learn how to ride. The 10 might actually be safer, but really, this is why God invented sidewalks and empty parking lots.)

Me, I was one of the baby seaters, with my husband and our friend, stopping way too often (but always pulling over first) to adjust straps and hand out crackers. When I was young and had identifiable quads, I knew every crack and dip in this path from Manhattan Beach to the pier. Now I live inland, but it all came rushing back to me as a stream of cooler-toting teens stepped right in front of me on their way to the surf--how the only time you could make any time on the path is very early in the morning and late in the evening.

Just like driving the freeway.

And just like driving the freeway, the bike path arouses its own set of prejudices. There are no SUVs here to loathe, but there are roller-bladers and it is hard to beat the hatred cyclists feel for roller-bladers on the bike path (and probably vice versa). They take up so much room, with their wide-flung legs and their tendency to flail. The really good ones are just breathtaking to watch, the ones skating in a line especially, but so many of the rest travel in stuttering clots. They also have a higher proportion of cell-phone use than bicyclists, and like people who smoke while participating in a quasi-athletic activity, this just looks wrong.

On the bike path, you can overhear conversations only imagined on the freeway. There go the couple debating whether to visit Spain in August or October, here come two guys discussing interest rates, followed by two women brooding over someone’s divorce. Their words fly by in wind-swept tatters--”We already know he’s going to need braces,” “If you like her, call her”--just enough to remind you that behind the sunglasses, like behind the windshields, are people just like you.

And like on the freeway, just when the traffic is so bad you’re going to bail, suddenly the road opens up and it’s just you and the sun and the wind and the speed of your own creation. The bike path may just be a road by another name, but it’s still the only good reason to live on the Westside.

Mary McNamara can be reached at [email protected].