Leave the Gas at the Pump and Pedal Away

Dick Riordan was the last Los Angeles mayor to preach the joy of bike riding, so when the price of gas soared north of $3 a gallon and oil company profits finally gave us a clear definition of obscenity, I thought about giving him a call.

People tell me I’m off my rocker, but it seems to me that since L.A. is mostly flat and the weather is good year-round, thousands of people could get out of their cars and onto bicycles.

It would take vision, if not wild imagination. I say we shut down a lane of Arroyo Parkway now and then and open it to bikes. You can’t get anywhere on Wilshire Boulevard in a car, so let’s get them out of there altogether.

We’d need the right kind of role model to make it happen, though. And as my colleague Steve Hymon noted in Monday’s paper, Jaime de la Vega, L.A.’s deputy mayor in charge of transportation and mass transit, drives a Hummer.

De la Vega was a Riordan transit advisor, too, back when. But Riordan doesn’t remember him driving a Hummer. If I were Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who calls himself green and wants to remake Los Angeles as some kind of enviro-friendly utopia, I’d tell De la Vega to make a choice by the end of the week: Keep the Hummer, or keep the job.

Riordan, it turns out, was game for a bike ride even though he had quadruple bypass surgery less than two months ago. In fact, he’d already done a 30-mile ride since going under the knife.

Some of you may recall that the last time I did any serious bike riding I ended up in the hospital with a banged-up head and no idea what had happened. Still, I figured I ought to be able to keep up with a 76-year-old guy with a fresh zipper down the middle of his chest. But there were two very important things I failed to consider.

First, Riordan is athletic and competitive.

Second, he’s had a few issues with my columns over the years.

“I think he’s trying to kill me,” I said to actor Ed Begley Jr. as we pumped down San Vicente Boulevard with Riordan a half-mile in front of us, acting like Lance Armstrong.

Riordan had invited Begley, a good chum of his who funnels money to charities from the sale of an organic household cleanser (www.begleysbest.com) and also happens to be Mr. Alternative Energy.

He’s the kind of guy who recycles pocket lint and knows how to power a lawn mower on granola flakes and refrigerator magnets. Begley left his Prius home and drove to Riordan’s house in what he called a sun-powered car. Actually, it’s an electric car, but he charges it at his Studio City house, which, of course, is solar-powered.

Riordan also invited two other bike-riding pals -- Rick Guerin, a movie producer (“Wedding Crashers”) and former airline executive, and Maurice Suh, Villaraigosa’s deputy mayor for homeland security and public safety.

Everyone but me had a serious road bike and was bent over like a question mark, cutting the wind as we took a left on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. I sat a mile high on a hybrid with squeaky brakes and cruiser-type handlebars, looking a little too much like Pee-wee Herman in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”

Later, when we all bunched up at a traffic signal, Riordan told me I was going about it all wrong. He ordered me off the bike and had me adjust the seat higher, telling me to start pedaling on the balls of my feet. If he would have had the nerve to talk to Gov. Schwarzenegger like that while working as his education czar, maybe Arnold wouldn’t have gotten everything so screwed up.

Our destination, 15 miles away, was a diner in Playa del Rey, and when I wasn’t gasping for breath, the experience was altogether lovely. So what about it? Could Los Angeles and other Southern California cities lay down more bike lanes that don’t force you to put your life on the line and pry more people out of their cars?

It’s a tricky challenge, Riordan said, because a lot of major byways just don’t have the width to accommodate bikes. He said he used to cycle along Olympic to downtown Los Angeles but gave it up because it was downright dangerous and about as enjoyable as a City Council meeting.

But sure, Riordan went on, a smart mayor could redo the landscape, pedal to work on occasion and encourage others to do the same, if not take the bus or train, telecommute or carpool.

We made it to Playa in about 40 minutes, which isn’t bad by L.A. standards for a 15-mile commute. Riordan said he stumbled upon Cafe Milan on an earlier bike ride, and all the regulars at the funky little joint knew him.

“There’s a lot the public transit system doesn’t do here, but there’s a lot it does do,” Begley said over a bowl of oatmeal. The actor said he often runs errands along Ventura Boulevard on an MTA bus powered by swamp gas or mashed yeast or something, I forget, buying tokens in bulk to get the $1.10 rate.

If you go that way, Begley said, or ride a bike or drive a fuel-efficient car, you’ve got three reasons to feel good about yourself. You help clean the environment and ease traffic. You save money. And you prevent war.

“Fifteen of the 19 hijackers had Saudi passports,” Begley said, so limiting dependence on Middle East oil -- a concept that only recently occurred to the White House and Congress -- could make a difference.

“I’ve got an idea,” Riordan said. “What if we started a club today where each of us agrees once every two weeks, or once every month, we’re not going to use our cars” for a day.

Begley was in at once a month. Guerin was in. Riordan and I were in.

Suh hemmed and hawed, arguing that a deputy mayor for homeland security can’t give up his car. He came around when I threatened to call Villaraigosa and ask what’s up with his deputy mayors.

On the ride back, we watched surfers ride the swells in Venice and hooked up with a bike rider named David Maul. The Manhattan Beach resident works in the finance department at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica and pedals to work three days a week, driving the other two.

It keeps him in shape, Maul said. It keeps him from sitting helplessly in a Lincoln Boulevard traffic jam every day while his blood pressure rises and his life slowly ticks away. And it keeps him from burning up his paycheck on gas.

I’ve got a feeling this could be the start of something. I told Riordan I was nominating him for city bike czar. It worked. He went easy on me the rest of the way home.

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com.