Bike jacking trend continues on the San Gabriel River

Well it has happened again. Another attempted bike jacking. From LBreport.com: "At about 7:15 p.m. (while the sun was still up) on Friday June 6, a rider headed northbound on the eastside of the San Gabriel River bikepath says he was allegedly jumped, physically attacked, punched and robbed in the underpass at Carson St. near El Dorado Park and the LB Town Center. Read more on LB Report here. The last one was in November 2007. Read our report on that incident here. We feel this threat is going to continue during the summer as more people ride due to the summertime hours and the gas prices. The San Gabriel river is a good car free link to Orange County from the mid cities area. We know a number of people that use it to commute by bike. The problem of course is that when you are on the path you are virtually invisible to motorists and police, unless they happen to be flying over, which is rare.

We are now advising rider to carry pepper spray and a cell phone (turned on) at all times while on the river path. They should also have all the local law enforcement agencies non 9-1-1 numbers programmed into their phone as all cell phone 9-1-1 calls go to CHP and are then are routed to the local agency.

We have also been asking for bike patrols for months but this falls on deaf ears outside of a few elected officials.

We have complained that the Carson street overpass (for some reason) is especially a target for vandals and graffiti and other hoodlums that like to just "hang around" and see what they can snare in their net (like unsuspecting bike riders).

We have proposed bike path video cameras like the intersection and freeway cameras.

We also proposed trying to clear up the jurisdictional "alphabet soup" that exists on the river. This is not as much of a problem in responding to events as it is a way to shrug off responsibility for day to day patrolling to "other law enforcement agencies". Government people love ambiguity in patrol jurisdictions as this makes it easy to deny responsibility when something really bad ends up happening, which eventually it will. We would also like to see signs posted on the path telling riders which law enforcement jurisdiction they are in when they change from one to another, sort of in line with the chart below.

We also proposed a chart like the one below [click on image below for full size image] to the entire "bike path task force" back on Feb. 20, 2008 shortly after attending the first and only meeting of the "task force". We never received one response one way or the other from any agency or government entity. So in the meantime we wait for the next attack like unsuspecting sheep traveling down the path.



Lakewood Accountability Action Group™ LAAG | www.LAAG.us | Lakewood, CA
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