Streetsblog Los Angeles

Photo: Patrick Pascal

The poor Spring Street Green Buffered Bike Lane.  The first “outside the box” bike project in Los Angeles has come under fire from just about everyone for the peeling paint and tire tracks that dominate a portion of the lane.  Even Midnight Ridazz hosts a thread entitled, “Green Lanes Are a Joke,” although opinions ont eh lane are mixed.  In order to bring some balance to the story, Streetsblog went out and found some actual riders of the lane to see what they had to say.

The reaction was mixed.  While just about everyone loved that the lane was there, just about everyone wanted to say something about the application.  Here are some of the comments we received, all without any editing from me other than some “bolding” for emphasis.

First up is Valerie Watson, an architect and Chair of the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Complete Streets Committee rides the lane regularly:

As a Spring Street resident, I ride and walk down Spring several times a week.  It’s really remarkable how different it is.  Hard to describe, but it just feels like all traffic is flowing in a more calm, orderly way now.  The bike lane plus full time parking are a noticeable sidewalk buffer for the west side of Spring, and just walking down the street you can see how different that feels compared to the east side with cars zooming along the curb during rush hour where the parking is still under peak-hour restrictions.

Also, the 4′ bike lane buffer really makes a big difference for cyclist comfort – everyone is making a big deal about the green paint, but the 4′ buffer goes hand in hand with the 6′ of green to make this feel really different compared to a traditional 5′ bike lane.  Even though it’s still not the ideal – a separated cycletrack – it’s a step in the right direction. We should not forget that this is a 10′ bike lane - the width of a full vehicular travel lane – re-purposed roadway that is obviously benefiting all modes.

P was the first person to complain to Streetsblog about the paint condition.  Asked to follow-up on his experience, he writes:

I did re-ride the bike lane at the end of last week and much of the paint that was in the worst condition was reapplied.  I had intended to return again this weekend to give it a more thorough appraisal.

The quality of the repaint did not make me confident for the lane’s long term durability.  In addition, many of the potholes did remain (I will send you a picture of one such pothole between Temple & 1st which I took with my phone), particularly in the areas where new paint was not applied.  Most of the potholes were of a size that might fit an apple; some were the size of grapefruit.  Some of the surfaces surrounding bus stops were also unsafe.

None of these deficiencies are out of normal for most of Los Angeles’ streets, but I see these bike lanes as exactly the sort of infrastructure where bicyclists might expect better.  If you encourage bicycles to use a particular spaces, you take added responsibility for the outcomes that result.

Meanwhile, Allison Corona thinks the lanes would be better for the community if there were part of a network: Read more…

One week ago, LADOT and city politicians opened the Spring Street Green Buffered Bike Lane to a flock of media and the appreciative roar of the L.A.’s cycling community.  One week later, cheers have turned to grumbling as the green paint has dissolved in areas, gotten blotchy in others and basially looks like Long Beach’s Green Sharrowed Lane after a year of wear and tear from cars and bikes.

Ugh. Photo: Joe Anthony of Bike Commute News via Instagram

The culprit appears to be an overanxious LADOT who wanted to have the lanes ready for the Monday press conference, even though the weekend preceding the Monday event was a wet one.   In the week preceding the press event, officials warned that the conference could be moved if weather didn’t allow the painting to occur over the weekend.  Quality of paint shouldn’t have been an issue as L.A. spent $50,000 for the green paint job (according to the Times) which is ten times what Long Beach spent on its Green Sharrowed Lane.

Meanwhile other commuters are grumbling that the green paint, where it does remain, masks some large and deep potholes.   One reader, who I do not have permission to quote by name, wrote of the potholes and paint:

These conditions suggest that the creation of this lane is about a DOT that isn’t truly committed to better bike infrastructure, but instead is about political PR.  Otherwise, basic standards of construction and user safety would have been employed.  While the lane’s design is strong, the execution is exceptionally weak.

For its part, the LADOT is guaranteeing that lane will be repainted soon.  ”Rest assured LADOT crews will be back to touch up spots on Spring St,” writes Bruce Gillman, the LADOT spokesperson.  ”We are awaiting new paint to be delivered and a stint of dry weather to assure second application gets put down without too much moisture present.”

At this point, there is no timeline to repave the road.

Image via LADOT Bike Blog

Via the LADOT Bike Blog comes a first look at the Spring Street Buffered Bike Lanes planned for Downtown Los Angeles. Having spent some time this weekend on the “bike paths” on 3rd and Broadway in Downtown Long Beach this weekend, I can’t tell you what a difference a buffer makes.

Even though these lanes aren’t quite the same as the ones in Long Beach, there’s a lot of excitement for the lanes, which the city has promised will be open for business by the end of the year. The excitement has led to a lot of speculation on when in December the lanes are going to open, although I’m starting to hear buzz that they might be open even sooner than that.

Starting last July, food trucks were pushed into private lots for Art Walk. Now they won't be allowed at all during the monthly event. Photo:Apple Guy/Flickr

Last month, tragedy struck during the monthly Art Walk in Downtown Los Angeles when a dangerous driver jumped a curb, crashed into a parking meter and killed a seven week old infant.  The tragedy shocked not just the Downtown and Art Walk communities, but the entire city.  Advocates pointed out that when you have a situation where vehicular traffic is mixed with thirty thousand pedestrians in such a short space as the core of Art Walk, between 3rd and 7th on Spring Street.

Responding the to safety issues highlighted by the crash, Council Members Jan Perry and Jose Huizar appointed a task force to look at safety issues.  Immediately following the crash, Art Walk participants, and some gallery owners, called for the streets to be completely closed off to car traffic during the walk.  However, that option wasn’t seriously considered for this month’s walk.  Instead, the task force focused on removing food trucks from the core of the event in an effort to spread out, and even thin out, the walking crowd.

Yesterday the task force and the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council , already pushed food trucks, already cornered into private lots, out of the core of Art Walk and on to the periphery to the north and south and parallel streets such as Broadway.  The presence of food trucks had nothing to do with the crash that killed the young infant, and if these private lots are used for their original purpose it could make the driver v pedestrian conflict even worse.  However, last month’s tragedy is being used as an excuse to do something many Downtown denizens have wanted for a long time, begin to push back against the festival that temporarily takes over their neighborhood.

This isn’t an art blog, it’s a transportation and street life blog, so let’s avoid debate about the true meaning of Art Walk and focus instead on how to make a major Downtown event work for the people that want to attend, and everyone else.

There are three interests here, and the reason that Art Walk patrons are on the losing end of the debate thus far is that the other two interests are both more entrenched and in this instance are allied. Read more…

My favorite alternative connects the black line running down Broadway to the yellow line snaking through South Central Los Angeles and around the Staples Center. See all the alternatives here.

Tomorrow night, the L.A. Streetcar team and Metro will hold a public meeting to discuss what options will be studied for a new streetcar system for Downtown Los Angeles.  There are seven options on the table, all of them serve a different need, and all of them will bring something new, or rather something old, back to the Downtown.

There’s plenty of information about the project and meeting online.  You can get the meeting details, read a short briefing put together by Metro, or visit the official LA Streetcar homepage and comment on the alternatives.  Last but not least, the streetcar boosters have their own webpage at Go LA Streetcar.

Last week, the mapping blog Big Map Blog, released an old map of the streetcar system from 105 years ago.  The quality of the old streetcar system has become something of an urban legend among transportation reformers.  People talk about the system as though it provided a universal transit system that was unrivaled.

And looking at the map, it’s easy to say why.

Yup, the old streetcars went to Staples Center. You can see a lot more of the 1906 map at The Big Map Blog.

But as impressive as the old streetcars were, it’s time to look forward, at what’s being offered by the current proposals. None of the proposals can replace what used to exist, but each of them brings something new to the table.

Read more…

By this point, its becoming clear that for City Officials, the transportation planning for the AEG stadium is a secondary issue for the politicians who will approve a deal with AEG, possibly within the next 45 days.  While the Council is debating and discussing a lot of complicated issues, it’s taking its eyes off the ball when it comes to transportation planning.

It appears that the people making the decision on the stadium are most interested on the dollars and cents of the deal but that doesn’t mean they can afford to ignore the stadium’s impact on the community that surrounds the stadium site, a community where residents’ incomes are well below the national and city-wide averages.

Over the weekend, Councilman Bill Rosendahl published on Scribd a thirteen page letter from City Staff responding to thirty eight questions he had emailed them at different times.  Of those questions, one was about transportation, and it was about relocating car parking spaces.  Meanwhile, the clock continues to tick-down towards the AEG-created deadline of July 31 for the city and agency to reach an agreement.

One of the reasons the city should be demanding more details about the transportation plan now, before an agreement is reached, instead of during the environmental review process, is that AEG is still planning to push for state legislation that would disallow any lawsuits to be brought against its environmental documents, including a traffic and transportation study.  If the city moves forward with a deal with AEG before details of the transportation plan are known, it could be hard to fix a flawed plan later in the process.

In an editorial calling for a deal to be reached post-haste, the Los Angeles Times notes that AEG claims it could one day host the first Super Bowl where the majority of fans arrive via foot, but those dreams are just that without a plan.  After all, the Stadium will be located near the Staple Center, and while the Stadium will hold many more people than the arena, its worth noting that most attendees to these events get there by car. Read more…

(The above video was prepared by the L.A. City Bureau of Engineering to explain the project. There will be a public meeting on the North Spring Street Bridge Improvement project on Tuesday, May 10, at 6:00 P.M. at the Lincoln Heights Senior Citizen Center at 2323 Workman Avenue.  For more information, click on the advertisement on the right.  Many of the details that have led to this compromise can be found in our first article on this project.)

The L.A. Conservancy, one of the leading voices opposing the North Spring Street Bridge Improvement Project, has broken its silence on its view of the new designs for the project proposed by the City’s Bureau of Engineering (BoE.)  Despite its long-standing opposition to changing the design of the historic structure, it seems the Conservancy is pleased with the efforts the BoE has made to maintain the original design and make needed repairs and upgrades to the bridge.

“We’re encouraged by the direction the Bureau of Engineering is headed,” notes Adrian Scott Fine, the director of advocacy for the L.A. Conservancy.

As we noted last week, the bridge has been a fixture in Downtown Los Angeles since 1927, but in recent years the City has been trying to change the structure by widening it, adding new sidewalks, bike lanes, and extending the mixed-use travel lanes from 9.5 to eleven feet.  The Conservancy has opposed the widening because earlier designs of the bridge would have greatly altered the character of the structure.

After losing a political battle last year, the BoE went back to the drawing board to create two new designs for expanding the bridge.  The first design proposed design widens the south side of the bridge, restripe the lanes to include a bike lane in each direction, widen the sidewalk on the north side of the bridge and add a sidewalk to the south side.  The second design spreads the widening out but has the same basic impact.  The bridge will still have four mixed travel lanes, two new bike lanes, and sidewalks on both sides of the bridge. Read more…

Image via Farmer's Field

While the rest of the local media was busy going ga-ga over the press conference announcing that, if constructed, the Downtown NFL Stadium would be named after Farmers Bank, Patrick McGreevey and Jessica Harrison at the Los Angeles Times revealed that the developer’s for the Downtown Stadium are lobbying for the same exemption from state environmental lawsuits that rival developer Ed Roski earned for his proposed Stadium in the City of Industry.

As top executives from Anschutz’s firm roamed the Capitol to lobby for their project this week and a who’s who of power brokers in sports, business, labor and politics announced their backing for it in Los Angeles, dozens of activist groups were mobilizing against the billionaire builder, pressing legislators not to exempt AEG from provisions of the state’s environmental quality act.

In 2009, billionaire developer Ed Roski convinced the legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger to exempt their stadium plan from any legal challenge even as the neighboring City of Walnut tried to use a lawsuit to force a more complete traffic study for his stadium.  Roski turned to the legislature and Governor who changed the law, just for Roski, so that his project’s environmental documents could not be challenged in court. Read more…

For a copy of the flyer announcing their February meetings, click here.

I have to be honest.  If the My Figueroa project ends up fulfilling its mission of designing a people-friendly Figueroa Street from the southwest corner of Exposition Park to Downtown Los Angeles only by adding a couple of trees and repainting the crosswalks, I’ll be extremely disappointed.

The project team raised expectations by encouraging participants to last September’s community meetings to consider improvements to the corridor such as separated bike lanes and scramble crosswalks.  Then, in addition to partnering with Streetsblog Board Member Deborah Murphy, they announced that the architects for the project were the world renowned Gehl Architects out of Copenhagen.

Now, via a flier announcing February’s outreach meetings, they’ve released their first proposed sketches for the corridor.  Instead of five through traffic lanes, a planted median and some street parking, let’s look at the street that’s proposed in the picture above.  Instead of five lanes of yuck and some trees, I see two lanes of through traffic, a dedicated transit lane, a pedestrian plaza, a lane for local and bicycle traffic and then restaurant seating.  What a change that would be… Read more…