Seriously? New DTLA Bike Lanes Won't Be Green...Because They're Ruining Filming!

Have any of you ever been to Canada?  There are plenty of bike lanes, bike boxes, coloured lanes, yellow zebra crossings, attractive blue and yellow traffic lights, colorful rigid temporary fences used instead of chain link, much more attractive sidewalks, traffic calming, bulbouts etc.  Lots of freshly painted blue and yellow in places where an American city would have concrete and brown.  Any one of those things could in theory detract from the anytown USA look.  Is Toronto avoided because of its streetcars? Vancouver doesn't feel to me anything like an American city, more of a cross between an asian and australian city and it has a very definite aesthethic and colour scheme that sets it apart from anything I've seen in this country.  Yet they film all sorts of things there.  Vancouver has not had to sacrifice the quality of its public spaces to make life easier for a few editors.  
Why should LA refrain from improving its dangerous "anytown USA" streets?  Oh right, because you have a problem with cyclists but won't come out and say it.  Instead you try to turn this into a jobs vs. elite cyclists argument, in the hopes of arousing opposition from people in the industry and perhaps a few willing to spend money fighting bicycle infrastructure.    Perhaps the tea party will pick up on this and take it nationally.  Imagine this city took some interest in pedestrians for once and started building the sort of well design crosswalks and mid-block crossing you might find in Canada.  This might involve yellow paint?  Would we then be told that yellow cannot be edited out?  

"Is Toronto avoided because of its streetcars? "

Yes, actually. Generally Toronto sometimes fills in for NY on film and they don't shoot in areas that reek "Canada". Same for Vancouver 

If you like - you can research filming locations - they are on file for permits etc .

I'm just curious:  Why is it bad to show a bright green bike lane in a street scene?

It instantly identifies that street scene as set in LA. Which is fine, unless the story isn't. The reason so many shoots take place in Canadian cities (besides the tax breaks) is that aesthetically, they're "Generic Metropolis, USA". A bright green bike lane is far from generic, ruins the illusion and potentially pulls viewers out of the story.

Good. The bright green color is too much. It looks tacky and crappy. Just put a bloody bike lane, that's all, keep it simple idiots! :o) 

yes, seriously. here we are cause the city got all cute with bike lane colors. How excessive. You can take the movie business part out and ask, do we the people seriously need the city to spend all the extra time and labor painting a bike lane a solid green color? Why don't you paint the carpool lanes red and the left turn and right turn only lanes blue? the city can barely keep up with lane lines, potholes and sidewalks as it is. Such a waste of resources.

Hollywood built this city. Deal with it. Productions make the city a LOT of money in terms of film permits, taxes and employment—we need to do what we can to keep filming in the studio zone, especially with all the tax breaks that other states (not to mention Canada) now offer production companies. The city only "bowed to the bucks and the pressure from the film community" in that without the film industry a lot of us would still be fruit farmers (and a lot of you probably wouldn't even be here in the first place).

You left out the important bit: It has to be the right shade of green to be fixed (removed) in post. The bike lane green is not the right shade of green and is therefore not digitally erasable. Making the street useless as a film location.

Well this might have answered one of my questions re: removing lanes in post.

LA has taken the film industry for granted for many years. The city needs to do whatever it can, within reason, to keep filming here. Leaving the lanes, but not painting them green seems to make the most sense.

east/west bike lanes would be useful for me to get to Ralphs. I can manage going north/south, no problem, without bike lanes. it's the number streets, 6th, 7th, 8th, that scare me.

Laist is making me almost anti-bike with the ridic amount of pro bike stuff on here. And I am one of those Angelenos who doesn't even have a car.

The bike lanes will look like crap no matter what solid color they are painted, much like those medians and road dividers that they paint green to simulate grass. The paint wears off and it looks terrible, not to mention also needing constant touch ups and maintenance. They can just be normal street color. Just like crosswalks don't need to be solid. Iget the visibility point, but honestly, does anyone really think that is the only thing keeping people out of the bike lanes?

BTW Filming also makes money, pays taxes into the city, which results in roads getting maintained, which makes a better ride for use bikers. So lets not chase more filming out of town, okay? Okay. 

I pretty much do all my commuting by bike these days. It's huge progress that we have the new lanes downtown. They're needed. However, we also need the film industry. It might be "easy" to remove the green in post, but if they want authentic looking street scenes wouldn't they also want the lanes gone? Wouldn't they also need to remove those in post anyway? Would this just be a huge additional cost to filmmakers?

I'm no expert in filmmaking so these just seem like obvious questions to ask.

Compromise:
As much as we need and have advocated for bike lanes, we've also watched filming dwindle to almost nothing in the recent past (lost jobs). We have made it so costly to film here that much of the shooting went out of state. LA has seen recent growth in filming again (jobs) and have been trying to undo all the policies that drove filming away in the first place.

So as much as I love the green bike lanes, as long as they don't remove the lanes entirely, I think there might need to be a compromise for all our sakes, for now anyway.