Streetsblog Los Angeles

View 2 7 12 speed limits in a larger map

A trio of speed limit proposals head to the City Council Transportation Committee tomorrow.  The proposals total 5.4 miles of city streets that would see a limit increase. Half of those miles would see a dramatic increase from 35 miles per hour to 45 miles per hour. The areas due for an increase are:

• Kester Avenue between Saticoy Street and Victory Boulevard (35 mph increased to 40 mph for 1.5 miles),
• Kester Avenue between Magnolia and Ventura Boulevards (35 mph increased to 40 mph for .9 miles),
• Chandler Boulevard between Lankershim Boulevard and Coldwater Canyon Avenue (35 mph increased to 45 mph for 2.1 miles)
• Chandler Boulevard between Lankershim Boulevard and Vineland Avenue (35 mph increased to 40 mph for .3 miles),
• Clybourn Avenue between Strathern and Cohasset Street (35 mph increased to 45 mph for .6 miles)

A team of advocates including representatives from Los Angeles Walks, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition and Ridazz, an online general assembly of concerned cyclists, is planning to lobby the Committee to hold back the limit increases.  Councilmen have begrudgingly passed similar increases in the past in an effort to support LAPD traffic enforcement.

Read more…

Beverly Hills Civic Center

(Note, the Beverly Hills Courier points out that they had the story first on Thursday evening despite my call that Patch broke the news. You can read their coverage, here. – DN)

Last Friday, word broke on Patch that a review of the geological studies on the Westside Subway commissioned by the city government of Beverly Hills came to different conclusions than the conclusions authored by Metro’s team of experts.  Exponent-Failure Analysis Associates concludes in the executive summary that:

Streetsblog will feature ads for the Regional Connector Final EIS/EIR throughout the public comment period.

In summary, it is Exponent’s opinion that additional effort is needed to accurately identify,  quantify, rank and mitigate the potential hazards posed by the proposed Westside Subway  Extension Project before one of the two presented alternatives, or a third alternative, are selected  for implementation.

A more detailed analysis of the 70 page study (available here) can be heard at tomorrow’s “Study Session” of the Beverly Hills City Council.  Those that don’t want to wait for tomorrow’s presentation can seemingly engage with City Councilman John Mirisch on the validity of the study by commenting on the Patch article.

Predictably, any action by either side in the on-going grudge match between advocates of the Westside Subway and government representatives in Beverly Hills was met with praise from one side and scorn from the other.  As both sides attempt to work through the other sides’ writings here are a few suggestions.

First: Let’s Agree That Neither Metro’s Experts nor Exponent Consulting Are on the Take Read more…

This evening, eight street vendors will be open for business to raise funds so they can sell legally at a future evening farmers market in Boyle Heights. While the public munches on food like tacos dorados, and pupusas, their spent money will go toward helping the street vendors buy equipment and cover other overhead costs.  The vendors will be open from 5:00 to 10:00 P.M. in front of the offices of the East Los Angeles Community Corporation,  530 South Boyle Avenue.

To see a full sized copy of the poster, click on the image. For the Spanish language version, click here.

The street vendors sold food at the informal Breed Street Food Fair until the police forced them out in 2009.

“It actually created a safe market. People were more vigilant when they were in mass numbers. And then they weren’t prey to negative sources,”said Mike Dennis, ELACC’s director of community organizing. If enough money is raised – the goal is $15,000 – the evening farmers market could bring back a Breed Street style of community interaction, Dennis said.

The equipment most street vendors currently use don’t adhere to local codes for food vendors because they are makeshift.  These carts and stands are cost effective, they only cost a couple hundred dollars.  In comparison, the more expensive equipment that adheres to health and safety codes cost nearly $1,500 in most cases.

Boyle Heights resident Jessica Perez highlights the event  on her Mis Neighbors blog and gives her local take on the situation:   Read more…

Eddie Solis leaves the Metro Red Line, which serves as one part of his hour-long commute from his day job in Hollywood to his home in Boyle Heights. Much of the inspiration for his band It's Casual comes from his observations from being car-free, a bus and subway rider, and a skateboarder. Photo courtesy of Eddie Solis.

A few weeks ago, the hardcore band It’s Casual posted “The Red Line” music video on Youtube and quickly caught the attention of local and national blogs for it’s simple yet creative critique of Los Angeles freeways. A current resident of Boyle Heights, guitarist and vocalist Eddie Solis sat down with Eastside Streetsblog to talk about how his car-free lifestyle inspires his music and how he encounters on his morning walks the smell of Boyle Heights tortilla factories.

You do a lot of music that’s very transit oriented; can you explain why you went that route?

Sometimes I think there’s a lot of content out there that’s too, I want to say, too fiction. Kind of make believe. And I notice all my favorite music that hits home to me in my heart and that I kind of step back and see these bands still going  . . . are bands that write timeless music with timeless contact that basically come from the truth of actual events and someone’s perspective. So I said I really want to find an avenue and report on it. And I go, wait you know what, my daily commute. I see LA different because  . . . I take the bus and subway everywhere. And the freeways are just sitting there, and people are in their cars just frustrated about it, but I’m just like sightseeing everyday. So I took that concept and said, “You know what, I’m basically going to report on what I see and interpret it.”

What kind of message were you trying to evoke when you were making “The Red Line” and then making the video? Read more…

The goal of the Road Diet, a street that works for all users. Off to a good start. All Pics by Joe Linton

The first time I biked down Main Street in Santa Monica and then into the Venice Neighborhood of Los Angeles was the summer of 2008.  I was following Santa Monica Critical Mass and part of the comically over-aggressive antics of the SMPD included herding cyclists into the lane by buzzing groups of cyclists on motorcycles and cruisers until we passed into Los Angeles.  When we crossed the border two things vanished, the police presence and the bike lane.

Fast-forward three and a half years and the situation has changed.  While Santa Monica has sporadic Critical Mass rides, they don’t draw near the number of riders or police presence their predecessors dud.  And as of Friday night, the transition from Santa Monica to Los Angeles on Main Street is seamless for bicyclists.

At long last, the Main Street Road Diet is in place.  The former five lane configuration has been re-striped to have three through travel lanes, including a turn lane, two bicycle lanes and two lanes of car parking.  The road diet connects Windward Circle at the south end to the Santa Monica border, just North of Rose Avenue.  The diet is .8 miles long.

There are many reasons to consider “putting a road on a diet” by reducing the capacity for cars and increasing capacity for everyone else.  Usually, diets are completed on streets with lower traffic volumes and higher than average bicycle and pedestrian use.  By giving more space to bicyclists, diets don’t just benefit cyclists but also pedestrians who benefit from a better walking environment and car drivers who get to drive in a safer environment.

After other road diets drew opposition from neighborhood groups and ABC 7, LADOT met twice with the Venice Neighborhood Council.   The feedback they received was requests that the Diet either give more space to cyclists or abandon the diet for a series of traffic calming and Sharrows.  In response, LADOT increased the width of the bike lanes by six inches so that the bike lane and adjacent parking weren’t both the minimum widths.  The “compromise” plan didn’t leave critics happy, but at least made the project better than “minimum width for bikes, maximum space for cars.”

Joe Linton reviewed the lanes over the weekend for the Eco-Village Blog.  Some more of his pictures are available after the jump. Read more…

When the San Diego Association of Governments passed its regional transportation plan, which will direct transportation spending in the region for decades, the agency hailed the plan as a national model.  This was the first plan passed that followed the standards of SB 375, the California environmental law that set greenhouse gas reduction targets based on transportation and development planning.

Kamala Harris

The agency declared victory, but many local advocates weren’t convinced.

“If this is a national and regional model, we’re in bad shape,” Dough McFetridge of the Cleveland National Forest Foundation grumbled to Streetsblog last November.  ”We have a need — a tremendous need — for transit right now, today. This proposal puts funding transit off into so far in to the future that many of us won’t be around anymore.”

McFetridge and other environmental groups pressed forward with a lawsuit claiming that the EIR for the plan was flawed because it didn’t take into account the impact new highway construction would have on vehicles miles traveled.  This week their lawsuit received a major boost when California Attorney General Kamala Harris joined their efforts.

“The 3.2 million residents of the San Diego region already suffer from the seventh worst ozone pollution in the country,” said Harris in a press release. “Spending our transit dollars in the right way today will improve the economy, create sustainable jobs and ensure that future generations do not continue to suffer from heavily polluted air.”

The lawsuit argues that the environmental review of the transit plan did not adequately analyze the public health impacts of the increased air pollution. The San Diego region already has a very high risk of cancer from particulate matter emitted by diesel engines and vehicles and there is no analysis as to whether this risk will increase.  By prioritizing highway expansion in the first years of the plan, SANDAG claims more pedestrian, bicycle and transit expansion in the plan even though those plans may never happen.  The bulk of the investment in transit and active transportation begins decades from now.

“The attorney general’s intervention in this case supports our argument that SANDAG’s plan is deeply flawed,” said Kathryn Phillips of the Sierra Club.  ”We’re encouraged that the State of California is serious about limiting air pollution and climate change pollution created by transportation in the region.”

Read more…

In 2009, the gap between Long Beach and Los Angeles when it came to transportation planning was non-existent. While great data isn't available for the time since then, Long Beach has made great "leaps towards livability" starting with the famous Green Sharrowed Bike Lane. Photo: Russ Roca Photography/Flickr

“Los Angeles isn’t Long Beach.”

The previous sentence isn’t just completely obvious, for years it was a common excuse as to why Los Angeles wasn’t embracing bicycle and pedestrian friendly projects as quickly as its neighbor to the south.  A recent report by the Alliance for Walking and Bicycling shows that as recently as 2009, the sustainable transportation gap between the two cities wasn’t so great.  After all, it was the summer of 2009 that Long Beach installed the green sharrowed bike lane in Belmont Shores, kicking off an impressive  run of building progressive bicycle infrastructure and embracing other innovative programs such as the Bicycle Friendly Business Districts.

In 2009, a higher percentage of commuters were “people powered” in Los Angeles and the twenty year growth rate for bicycling was much hire in L.A. than in L.B.  Meanwhile, Long Beach was lost over one quarter of its pedestrians, while L.A.’s pedestrian decline was in the mid single digits.  Anecdotally speaking, Long Beach has probably reversed those numbers in the last two years.

As benchmark reports and other data come in future years, it will be interesting to see what gap, if any, opens between the two cities.  In the meantime, a quick comparison of Long Beach and Los Angeles from the “Bicycling and Walking in the United States: 2012 Benchmarking Report.”  Remember, all these numbers are from 2009. Read more…

Table view. Photo: Joe Linton See more of Joe's Parklet Pictures at the end of the post.

Last Friday, January 20th 2012, Long Beach opened its, and Southern California’s, very first parklet. It’s located in Long Beach’s Retro Row district, on Fourth Street just east of Cherry, directly across from the Art Theater. It’s right in front of Lola’s Mexican Cuisine at 2030 East Fourth Street, LB 90814 (map.)

The way parklets work is that a curb parking space is replaced by a platform that serves as a mini-park. It’s a bit like a Park(ing) Day temporary park becoming a longer term mini-park. Parkets are fairly common in San Francisco, and now spreading all over, including, soon hopefully, Downtown Los Angeles.

Long Beach’s Bicycle-Friendly Business District program was initially working with Retro Row businesses to look at more extensive, more permanent traffic-calming and place-making solutions, such as bulb-outs. The cost was prohibitive and the time frame long, so they settled on cheaper and more immediate measures. Read more…

The efforts that Long Beach has made to become a “bike friendly city” have earned the city praise from sources both near and far. Joining the chorus is Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky who recently completed a bike tour of the city with a film crew from his award winning “Zev Web” news blog.

The film features a lot of familiar faces, including the Bike Coalition’s executive director Jennifer Klausner, assorted members of the City of Long Beach’s bicycle team, Vice Mayor Suja Lowenthal and eventually the Supervisor himself. “There’s a lot we can learn from Long Beach,” he asserts.

But most of the video is footage from the bike tour with narration provided directly from mini-talks given by Long Beach’s mobility coordinator Charlie Gandy. The charismatic Texan proves a good tour guide as he weaves the team through Bike Station, Downtown Long Beach, the Vista Street Bike Boulevard and the Long Beach Bike Path.

The video feels so much like a Streetfilm that it provides a smooth update to Long Beach Shifts Cycling into High Gear, 2010 Long Beach tour completed by Clarence Eckerson Jr. The most dramatic difference has to be the Vista Street Bike Boulevard. In 2010, Gandy was able to provide plans and renderings. Less than two years later, city staff is already touting the safety difference of their road treatments.

Safety data does a world of good when arguing for more infrastructure. Not mentioned in the film is that the success of Vista Street has led to Long Beach planning six already-funded Bike Boulevards around the city.

Bruce Chan, second to the right, explains his group's model of Glendale Boulevard as a culturally rich roadway. Photo: Kris Fortin

While Jose Sigala, president of the Greater Echo Park Elysian Neighborhood Council, and architect Peter Lassen helped construct their group’s model of Glendale Boulevard from plastic eggshells and hair curlers, imagination came into conflict with reality. Lassen wanted to see a park sprout near the Glendale Boulevard exit of the 2 Freeway, but Sigala explained an affordable housing complex would already be placed in that same area.

“We’re going to do things ideally, and that means a park,” Lassen said.

Whether people struggled or found it easy to realize the future of a major thoroughfare in Echo Park, Saturday’s “Rethinking Glendale Boulevard,” sponsored by Echo Park Patch and the Latino Urban Forum, at the Echo Country Outpost allowed them to show their dreams of what the street could be.

Led by urban planner, and Los Angeles Streetsblog board member, James Rojas, participants were asked to create their ideal city out of toys and found objects, and then condense it with other members’ ideas to fit Glendale Boulevard. Middle-aged, children, and senior participants came up with big ideas such as closing the 2 Freeway to make it recreational space, and having streetcars run the length of the street.  Simpler ideas such as making a skate parks and petting zoos were also well received by the audience which included representatives from the L.A. City Planning Department and Eric Garcetti, the City Councilman for the area.

Here were some other notable ideas from the workshop: Read more…