It’s December 2024. Spotify Wrapped and Reddit Recap are out, and while all the 2024 Year-End Mashup Megamixes compete to capture what this year was like musically, I thought I’d share the year in review for Bike Long Beach.
Bikes and Coffee is still going strong throughout 2024! This is the Bike LB monthly bike ride that usually takes place on the last Sunday of the month. It is typically less than 10 miles and the pace is very social: You can have a little conversation while you ride if conditions allow, and most importantly, you won’t get dropped. The destination is usually some type of coffee shop in LB, so it’s a really good ride to discover and support new businesses around the city and experience the bike routes we have at the moment.
This year, we combined a couple of our Bikes and Coffee rides with Mural Tours. February saw the Murals + Coffee ride in Downtown. May and June saw an Uptown Mural Tour each. In August we explored the Murals in West LB. Unfortunately, the turtles didn’t show up for the September Bikes and Coffee and Turtles ride (they don’t have an IG and aren’t subscribed to our newsletter, but the donuts were ridiculously good at Moonbridge this November. I think this year we ended up riding to lots of different parts of LB. Neato!
In case you don’t know, May is Bike Month and it was a busy, busy month. We helped coordinate the “Bike to Work Day”: LB to LA bike bus. We participated in the Ride of Silence to honor cyclists and pedestrians injured or taken by traffic violence. We had the 1st Uptown Mural Tour of the year and we also participated in the All-Crews LB Bike Loop that was probably the highlight of the month. The LB Bike Loop is a 30 mile loop that visits the LA River Bike Bath, the Beach Bike Path, the San Gabriel Bike Path, and the Heartwell Park Bike Path. Truly a fun ride that I look forward to next year.
But as great as it is to explore Long Beach, we also visited some neighboring cities. Bike Riding and Robot Fighting took place in March and we rode out to a robot fighting competition in Norwalk. One of our biggest rides took place in July, which was the gag-worthy Steelcraft to Steelcraft ride. We started at Steelcraft LB and rode over to Steelcraft Bellflower. Good weather, coffee, beer, food and most importantly good company made this one of the coolest rides of the year.
Speaking of good company, our last ride with BikeLB President Adam Stephenson took place in June for our feeder ride to Ciclavia South LA. It was a hot one, but as always, Ciclavia SLA was super fun. We wish Adam luck in his new home in Sacramento. Our feeder rides to Ciclavias throughout the year are good opportunities to ride in big groups with more experienced riders. Although the distance can definitely be daunting for beginners, I believe that one of the great benefits of these feeder rides is that it gives you the confidence to ride longer distances than usual.
Ultimately I think that is our goal: Bike LB gives people confidence in riding their bikes in Long Beach. We want to teach bike riders to be safe and confident riding in these streets. We know Long Beach’s bike infrastructure is lacking in lots of areas, and sometimes we have to ride on the sidewalk for personal safety (did y’all know that was illegal in Long Beach?), but we definitely deserve to be able to ride at our own speed on our public roads. Our new Bike LB president, Nico Gauthier-Pin, has given us a new goal for 2025: GET MORE BUTTS ON BIKES!
Besides doing our part in teaching safety and organizing rides, another component of getting more butts on bikes is to advocate for better bike infrastructure throughout Long Beach. We’ve partnered with Car-Lite LB on multiple occasions to support transportation advocacy. We helped with a Downtown Bike Infrastructure Ride Audit during the Shoreline Re-Imagining Community Charrette week. We recently held a ride down all of Orange Ave to attend the Orange Ave. Bike Lane Backbone Community Outreach meetings in November. Our bi-monthly bike lane clean ups with Car-Lite LB will now be a lot easier with the crowdfunded Bike Lane Sweeper that we premiered at Beach Streets in November. The Bike Lane sweeper, now known as “Clean Mary”, will be making the rounds on bike lanes around Long Beach. Join us for the next one!
So we are more than halfway through December and the year is almost over. Our last Bikes and Coffee ride of 2024 will be an exploration of the old Pacific Electric Railway Line, aka The Red Car Line. We’ll be starting at Colorado Lagoon a little later than our usual time, but we’ll finally get to see first-hand why some of the streets in Long Beach run in a diagonal direction. Keep an eye out on our calendar for any last minute Christmas Spirit rides where we ride through a neighborhood that has lots of Christmas lights up.
And finally, we’ll be having our End of Year celebration on Sunday, 12/29/24, from 3:00pm-7:00pm at Altar Society Brewing and Coffee Co., 230 Pine Ave, Long Beach, CA 90802. There’s plenty of Bike Parking and we’ll be handing out prizes for the winners of our CarrySh!t Olympics 2024. If you haven’t already submitted a photo of all the Crazy Sh!t you carry on your bike, please do so here. We may or may not still hold our final end of year virtual meeting the day after if we don’t go too hard at the Happy Hour, so join us for that too if you won’t be able to make it to the End of Year celebration. So with that, don’t forget your helmets and bike locks, and as always, ride safe!