Bicycles Are Not Popular in West Hollywood – But Bike Lanes Are Sacred

After giveaways, rentals, and free rides all flopped, the Erickson-Hang-Byers council majority pivots to unfalsifiable dogma dressed as infrastructure.

And so, Blake Ackerman was martyred by the faithful, not because safer streets were impossible, but because immediate, common-sense measures would have shown that salvation doesn’t come from bike lanes alone.

In West Hollywood, bicycling isn’t a policy anymore. It’s a faith. And like any faith, it has its rituals, its martyrs, and its altar. The altar is the ghost bike chained to Fountain Avenue, the white frame commemorating the death of 27-year-old cyclist Blake Ackerman, the martyr.

What was meant as a solemn roadside memorial has become something else entirely: a shrine where the cycling faithful genuflect, reciting their creed of “fewer cars, more bikes” regardless of evidence, usage, or cost.

The irony is rich. For more than a decade, the City of West Hollywood has tried everything to turn residents into cyclists. It has showered them with free rides, free bikes, and subsidized schemes. The results? Flat tires and flat numbers.

Take WeHo Pedals, the city’s docked bike-share experiment launched in 2016. It started with 150 smart bikes and 21 stations. By the end of its first year, there were 1,656 active users — but only 98 annual members. Almost everyone else was a one-time rider. Revenue covered just 33 percent of the $344,750 annual operating cost, leaving taxpayers with a six-figure hole. In total, the system generated only 13 percent of projected ride revenue. After three years, the city pulled the plug. The bikes went away not because they were stolen, but because they were ignored.

Then came the Dockless Mobility Pilot in 2021, designed to give the “new tech” a shot. It included Bird and Lime scooters and a fleet of Wheels electric bicycles. By 2023, scooter ridership had exploded: 512,000 trips covering 707,200 miles. But the bikes?

The sole bike vendor, Wheels, never attracted riders — scooter trips dominated from the start. By 2023, Wheels’ usage numbers were so weak that the company pulled most of its bikes off the street, and when it also failed to meet the City’s sidewalk-detection requirements, its permit was suspended. From that point forward, West Hollywood’s so-called ‘mobility program’ was effectively scooters only.

The lesson was unmistakable: residents liked scooters; they didn’t want bikes, even when battery-powered.

Still unconvinced, the Council doubled down with the Bicycle Giveaway Pilot in 2022. Fifty Schwinns were handed out to lucky residents chosen by lottery. Each giveaway winner promised to ride 20 miles per month, 240 miles a year. In reality, the 50 bikes combined for just 7,595 miles in the first year, averaging only 150 miles per bike, or about 12 miles per month. That’s barely half of what participants had committed to, and a fraction of what car owners rack up in a single week.

Even the winners gave up: some returned their bikes, others skipped the required reporting. In the end, the city quietly let participants keep the bicycles and closed the program.

Three programs, three failures. Free rentals, free-floating fleets, and free giveaways. Each demonstrated the same truth: when given the option, West Hollywood residents don’t want to bike.

And so the religion pivots. Having lost the argument on actual bike use, the council has shifted doctrine to bike lanes. Lanes are clever, unlike bikes themselves; you can’t measure their popularity until they’re built, and even then, emptiness can be excused away. Empty bike lanes are not evidence of failure, we are told, but proof of “safety,” or a city “waiting to change.” In this way, bike lanes have become the perfect unfalsifiable article of faith.

That faith was on full display on August 4th, when the City Council met to discuss safety on Fountain Avenue after Ackerman’s death. City Manager David Wilson calmly offered three pragmatic measures: end peak-hour parking restrictions so curb lanes stop becoming speedways; retime signals to auto-cycle instead of waiting for car sensors; and add leading pedestrian intervals at every Fountain signal. These were immediate, low-cost steps that could have made a measurable difference.

But instead, Councilmember John Erickson erupted in a sermon. “I walk by Blake’s ghost bike every day… I pass that bike and it haunts me,” he intoned. He ignored the City Manager’s enforcement and signal-timing fixes, instead preaching, “You need permanent structural infrastructure change. I hope this council unanimously approves the Fountain Avenue streetscape plan… I no longer want a freeway in my backyard. Period. End of story.”

In other words, Erickson ignored the city manager’s concrete, testable remedies in favor of a sweeping, permanent redesign whose effectiveness cannot be proved or disproved in advance, exactly the kind of policy religion prefers.

Thus the altar on Fountain Avenue does its work. The ghost bike is no longer just a memorial; it is a liturgical prop in the litany for bike lanes. Each councilmember who passes it is reminded that to question the creed is to risk heresy. Never mind that every attempt to get residents on bicycles has failed.

The sacrament is now the lane itself, built at great cost, whether anyone pedals on it or not.

And why? Because behind the altar there is a priesthood. Groups like Streets for All have learned to weaponize grief, symbolism, and the language of inevitability into raw political capital. They can fail at bike-shares, giveaways, and ridership but still win at council, because they have turned empty bike lanes into a moral test. The real constituency is not the riders (there aren’t many), but the politicians who benefit from the election season activism of the Streets for All disciples.

That is the quiet power in West Hollywood today: policy as religion, enforced not by data but by ritual.

And all for who? Not for the residents who gave back their free Schwinns, not for the commuters still stuck in traffic. No, it’s for the whims of Michael Schneider, the founder of Streets for All, a wealthy tech entrepreneur who prefers to bike and has built a political machine around that privileged preference.

His group doesn’t just push lanes, it pushes candidates. It’s the quiet force helping people like John Erickson polish their brand for a run at the State Senate and Lindsey Horvath consolidate her power on the Board of Supervisors.

That is the true altar on Fountain Avenue: not just a ghost bike, but a symbol of how one man’s hobby has been sanctified into policy, with the Erickson-Hang-Byers Council Majority as the congregation.

SOURCES:

City of West Hollywood, News Release – Bike Giveaway Pilot Program (Dec. 1, 2022)(weho.org) (weho.org)

City of West Hollywood, Staff Report: Bicycle Giveaway Pilot Program Evaluation (Feb. 3, 2025) (weho.granicus.com) (weho.granicus.com)

City of West Hollywood, Staff Report: Dockless Bike Share Pilot Program Update (Dec. 21, 2020)(weho.granicus.com) (weho.granicus.com)

City of West Hollywood, Staff Report: Dockless Micro-Mobility Pilot Update (Oct. 16, 2023)(weho.granicus.com)(weho.granicus.com)

WeHo Pedals Annual Report Highlights (via WEHOville/WehoOnline, Jan. 2018)(wehoonline.com)(wehoonline.com)

West Hollywood Bicycle Coalition statement on bike-share (2020)betterbike.org (via City of Beverly Hills report)