More on the Bike Plan: Strength and Weaknesses
(As you may have noticed, Streetsblog is running a series gathering different people's opinions on the Bike Master Plan. You can read statements by a group of different bike activists from Monday, Dan Koepel on Tuesday, Kent Strumpell in the comments section yesterday and now LACBC Founder and Green L.A. Transportation Working Group Chair Joe Linton today.)
Photo: Green LA GirlPerhaps my standards aren’t high enough – perhaps I’ve been at this too long and my horizons have been lowered too much… but I think the most helpful context for critiquing the bike plan would be along the lines of “what’s doable in the next couple years?” and “does this take us in the right direction?” (as opposed to something like “does this have everything to make L.A. perfect for bikes?”) I see the bike plan as an opportunity for approving a few good next steps.
The plan does not limit what bike advocates can push for. There are no bike lanes designated for Vermont Avenue in the Bike Plan. If bicyclists and neighbors and businesses come together and push for bike lanes on Vermont, and a broad consensus forms around getting bike lanes on Vermont, and the City Council and the Mayor get behind bike lanes on Vermont, then it doesn’t matter what’s in the plan. We bike advocates don’t need to limit our advocacy to what’s in the plan. We should continue to push the political envelope, regardless of what the plan says.
There has been quite a bit of valid criticism of the bike plan process. I am not going to enumerate all the flaws in the process here, but I will list a couple that come to mind quickly. There weren’t enough community meetings. People who signed in at last year’s public meetings still haven’t received an email announcing that the maps have been made public. The initial email announcement was apparently only sent to Neighborhood Councils, not the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee, nor bicycle organizations, nor bike blogs, nor people who actually attended public meetings regarding the bike plan. If the city wants the plan to be successful, then they need to be more transparent and open and share information. It’s the 21st century! The internet has made it cheap and easy to distribute information… the city needs to use these tools to share information to make a plan that has meaningful input and broader support.
I think that the main deficiency in the plan is that it aims too low, and I think that this is a result of the scope. The Department of Transportation (LADOT) did not put out a scope saying that their consultant should come up with a plan to make Los Angeles a bicycle paradise. The LADOT’s scope set parameters that made it nearly impossible for a plan to be pushy or visionary. Facility-wise, LADOT’s bike plan scope tells their consultant to focus on just two things:
1) Look at the 1996 Bike Plan and see if the facilities listed in it still make sense.
2) Look at smaller secondary streets and see what might be done there.
The city then selected the Portland, Oregon-based Alta Planning + Design to be the consultant that would come up with the plan. Alta is an excellent firm, but they are consultants who need to do more-or-less what the city asks them to do, so they had to stay within the parameters of the city’s scope. Looking at the draft maps, it looks to me like Alta actually exceeded it in some small ways – for example, the new draft map for the Valley shows bike paths along additional stretches of the Tujunga Wash and the Pacoima Wash that weren’t in the 1996 plan. So, to Alta’s credit, it looks like they slipped in a few good things that may have been beyond the exact LADOT scope. I hope I haven’t gotten them in trouble yet… though I hope that by the time this plan is completed and adopted, it will have exceeded the LADOT’s scope even more.
I’ve been looking over the maps and I have yet to find any proposed bicycle facilities on them that I would actually oppose. I think that if the city would actually implement all the facilities shown on the maps, Los Angeles would take a step in the right direction toward being a bicycle-friendly city… only a step in the right direction, though, and there would still be a lot of work left to do. I support what’s proposed in the plan, even though I don’t think that plan goes far enough. I don’t think that the facilities in the plan are stupid, wrong, or undesirable. I just think that, for us to make bicycling safe and convenient in Los Angeles, we will need to do all these facilities and more.
Looking at some specific facilities:
Bike Routes: I think that this is the one really strong aspect of the proposed draft (which flows directly from it being what the LADOT scope was asking for.) Alta has done a good job of identifying plenty of very appropriate “bike friendly streets."
Some folks have commented that “bike friendly streets” is a little vague. It is… but I think that this vagueness is ok, and can actually serve us. These streets aren’t identified as Bicycle Boulevards or as locations for sharrows, or bike lanes, or even something we haven’t thought of. At this stage of the plan, I would assert that it’s good not to nail down which specific treatment will work best for each block of each street. This detail would be better to be worked out with cyclists and other stakeholders as these projects are implemented. Using a term like Bicycle Boulevard, which many L.A. bicyclists don’t even understand (and even fewer non-cyclists), is more likely to get resistance. The cautionary example of this was a Bicycle Boulevard proposed in Burbank was quashed by angry homeowners, most of whom seemed to perceive it as putting a bike-only path down the middle of their street. As we implement facilities that are unfamiliar in Los Angeles (such as Bike Boulevards and even sharrows) we’ll need to bring more stakeholders into the loop about what these facilities are and are not. All this to say that, in my opinion, it’s ok to just call these “bike friendly streets” for now.
I expect that some streets in some areas of the city have been overlooked, but, at least in my neighborhood (Koreatown), the draft plan shows quite a few excellent choices for “bike friendly streets.” There’s 4th Street Bike Boulevard, New Hampshire, Coronado, Heliotrope… all good useful bike streets today that could be enhanced by various bike boulevard treatments. The secondary street networks for the Valley, Boyle Heights, and mid-city all look pretty extensive.
Here’s a place where all of us bicyclists should look over the places where we ride, and send comments to the City Planning Department to propose additional streets that haven’t been designated yet on the draft plan.
Bike Lanes: This part of the plan appears pretty disgraceful. As far as I can tell, in terms of the arterial bike lane network, the new draft plan has taken a significant step backwards from the 1996 bike plan (and the 1996 plan wasn’t that great to begin with.) Lots of streets where the old plan designates bike lanes have now been declared “unfeasible.” These include streets that, to my eye, look pretty doable – examples of this would include portions of Olympic Boulevard (from downtown to Boyle Heights) and Mission Road in Lincoln Heights.
There are a few new streets designated for lanes here and there, including (in my area) portions of Rampart and Second Street. These new lanes are welcome, but they’re pretty few and far between.
One possible remedy for this deficiency would be to change some of the language in the current draft designations. Perhaps the “infeasible” category could be changed to something less defeatist. The 1996 plan included a number of “study corridors” – while very few of these study corridor facilities actually got implemented, they didn’t slam the door. I’d suggest that the “infeasible” language be changed to something more like “study corridors” or “potential bikeways.” Many of these projects are likely to require some removal of travel lanes or parking, which I understand is politically difficult. I’d like to see them stay in the plan, though, and we can work out the thorny issues on a case-by-case basis.
Bike Paths: Mercifully, I haven’t found any bike paths that have been declared “infeasible.” I (in the L.A. Creek Freak blog and my book) have advocated for river revitalization, and so it’s good to see that the L.A. River, Ballona Creek, and Dominguez Channel remain intact from the 1996 plan into the current draft. Additional portions of the Arroyo Seco, Tujunga Wash, Pacoima Wash, Aliso Creek, and some rail right-of-ways have been designated, all of which are steps in the right direction.
I would still suggest that the bike paths designated are incomplete. There are quite a few Los Angeles River tributaries that present opportunities for bike paths, including Caballero Creek, Bull Creek, portions of Brown’s Creek, and others.
It’s all a draft… and now is the time to improve the draft into something that many of us could support. I would encourage cyclists to review the draft plans, and to make your comments per the instructions at the city website. This bike plan, while imperfect, does represent an opportunity to move forward with some good facilities that can make Los Angeles bicycling safer and more convenient. It’s up to us advocates to shape draft plan into something that we can accept… and to keep on advocating!
