Riding in the dark….need a light!!!!

How often have you been out in the early morning or in the evening and encountered someone bicycling without a light.  Or maybe you have done it.  You know it’s not safe, but people do it anyway. Some do it because they just haven’t gone out to buy lights.  Some do it because the ones they have is broken. And for some it is financial.

Our friends at the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC) don’t care why people don’t have lights…they just want to make sure they get them.

The LACBC’s Operation Firefly is a program funded by the Laemmle Foundation to distribute lights throughout LA County.  Several evenings each week a crew of LACBC volunteers is somewhere in LA County handing out lights.

Operation Firefly comes to Long Beach

Working with the City of Long Beach Operation Firefly is distributing lights on ten nights in early 2015- one night each week for ten weeks. There will be one location in each of the nine council districts and  an additional tenth location along the beach path.

So far Operation firefly has set up at two locations in Long Beach and distributed over 100 sets of lights.  The first in central part of the city at Long Beach Boulevard and Anaheim and the second on the west side of the city at PCH and Harbor.  Both of these locations have some of the bike counts in the city during our annual bike count.

The location of each event is never announced in advance. The team wants to find the bicyclists who are riding in the dark and clearly need the lights.  But what is very cool as soon as people hear about the event they go home tell their neighbors and others start showing up with their bikes.

The LACBC team is in need of volunteers for each of the light give aways.  If you would like to help please go to the LACBC Operation Firefly website where you can easily sign up to volunteer for any of the events. Just a hint…if you live near the shore…this would be a good week to sign up for the next giveaway, which will be on Tuesday night from 5:00 to 7:00.

For more details on the operation firefly program in Long Beach see the excellent article in the Long Beach Post by Asia Morris.