Streetsblog Los Angeles

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.

For more images of the diaroma, visit the Latino Urban Forum Flickr Page.

Architect Giacomo Gastagnola and I created the world’s largest interactive city diorama right here in the City of Long Beach. This interactive diorama taps into the mental and physical ways people understand the city and transfer information through their body. The diorama is designed to make participants physically interact with it through various positions and break the normal way which people  interface with the built environment.

The diorama measures 40 feet by 30 feet and 10 feet high and takes up the entire gallery.  The diorama celebrates this city by copying it its topography and captures the many perspectives and physical activities you can have here. You can dive under the harbor without getting wet, you can lie down under the city, you can explore and graffiti inside Signal Hill, and you can view the city from its highest point.

The installation is designed in three parts:  the Long Beach Harbor/beach, the street patterns, and Signal Hill.  These parts are separated by walkways.  Long Beach Harbor and beach is located along the window wall of the gallery. The city streets are located in the center of the gallery, while the back wall of the gallery locates Signal Hill.  This design embraces the architecture elements of the gallery and transforms them to urban elements of the diorama. Read more…

The SCIG would certainly improve air quality for the region, but those living near the proposed yard worry the impacts on their lives would be disastrous.

New environmental documents for a freight rail project near the Port of Los Angeles known as the Southern California International Gateway could reduce truck traffic on the Long Beach to Los Angeles portion of the 710 Freeway.  But the SCIG Project faces strong opposition from the communities that will live adjacent to the 153 acre SCIG rail yard who fear the new rail yard endangers their very lives.

The Port of Los Angeles paid for an environmental study of SCIG, a freight rail depot and project that would allow containers to be loaded onto rail just four miles from the docks, rather than traveling 24 miles on local roads and the 710 freeway to rail facilities near Downtown Los Angeles.  If fully utilized, the SCIG project would reduce truck trips by 1.5 million trips per year, a reduction in 300 million truck miles traveled.

While that 300 million miles per year number sounds staggering, the cost to Long Beach residents can be staggering as well.  Communities in West Long Beach literally abut the gigantic rail compound without any real buffer.  The local Long Beach City Councilman is pitching a plan for 100% emissions free trucks to be the only ones that can access the port, while community groups are wondering how the benefits to the air county-wide can come at the expense of the air of the residents near the project.

A letter by East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice that was circulated last April calls for the expansion of on-dock rail facilities instead of opening a new facility near a residential area.

For its part, the DEIR claims the SCIG yard would actually make air quality better.  Much of the land just west of West Long Beach is already industrial and replacing the truck-based repair depots and other mixed industrial with a “green” rail transfer yard could improve the air quality in the area and reduce the cancer risk to even those people living near the SCIG transfer yard.  To better understand how the Port’s study claims how a rail yard will provide clean air benefits, take a moment to watch this video.

The recently released Draft Environmental Impact Report for the project concludes that “The truck trips (to SCIG) would replace truck trips that would otherwise go to the  Hobart Yard in East Los Angeles, a journey of 24 miles each way.  The contracts would specify that all trucks would be powered by engines that meet or exceed the 2007 EPA on-road standards, thereby ensuring compliance with the ports’ 2010 Clean Air Action Plan’s engine emissions requirements.”

Trade unions, construction unions, and the shipping industry is backing the SCIG.

An article in the Long Beach Press-Telegram announcing the DEIR’s availability notes that Diesel particulates near rail yards are traditionally dangerously high. Read more…

Hello, my name is Damien.

<Hi, Damien.>

And I occasionally ride my bicycle on the sidewalk, and have been since 2008.

One of these things is not like the other. Both Pics: Waltaar/Flickr

It’s true.  It’s not an uncommon site to see me in the Streetsblog Baby Mover hiking up Barrington Blvd. or back and forth on National Boulevard riding on the sidewalk.   I don’t ride my road bike on the sidewalks, just the extra-slow and extra-wide Baby Mover.  Yes, I take extra care at intersections.  We don’t sidewalk ride on quiet residential streets and we don’t on streets with bike lanes.  It’s a safety choice for both of us and a comfort choice for his ears.

Earlier this week, the City of Long Beach launched a public information campaign to encourage cyclists to ride on the road, and not the sidewalk in its popular Bike Business Districts.  The campaign was launched last week and it’s a great campaign.  If I lived in Long Beach and had access to their infrastructure on major roads, the baby mover would never be seen anywhere but on the street.

The campaign itself is pretty impressive.  Instead of relying on free media and fancy television ads, Long Beach is reaching out to the media, local businesses, the LBPD and other cyclists to spread the word.  All the city has to pay for is the publicity, planning, and printing materials which is a heck of a lot more cost effective than creating television commercials.

The Walk It or Lock It campaign (those being the two things you can legally do with a bike on the sidewalk) is part of the Share Our Streets (S.O.S.) Campaign the city is introducing to spread safe bicycling messages.  Given the success of their infrastructure campaign, it’s great to see an education campaign to help cyclists follow the law and arrive safely.  The press release announcing their information campaign can be found at the end of the article. Read more…

For more information on Long Beach's bicycling efforts, visit Bike Long Beach.

(If you’re not familiar with the infrastructure innovations in Long Beach, you should read this article first.  In 2009, Joe Linton wrote a two part series on Long Beach’s “Leap Towards Livability.”  Today and tomorrow’s stories are both part of our Annenberg School of Journalism Public Health Fellowship and a continuation of that series.)

Sometimes, the politician in Charlie Gandy still comes out.  ”Hi, I’m the bike guy,” he introduced himself to other cyclists, pedestrians, people at cafes or whoever happened to be at hand while I was taking pictures or doing an interview during my visits to Long Beach this summer.

“The bike guy” was hired by the City of Long Beach’s transportation program manager Sumire Gant in early 2009, with funds from a Los Angeles County Public Health Grant known as the Policies for Livable and Active Communities and the Environment (PLACE) Grants that Long Beach won in 2008.  The grants were given to five cities to improve their planning documents to make the connection between promoting active transportation options and the health of the surrounding communities.

To give you an idea how much things are changing, this 2010 Bike Map is considered outdated 14 months after publication. Advocates keep track with their own map on Google.

Most of the grantees used their funds to create long and impressive planning documents.  While Long Beach has produced its own planning documents as part of the grant (more on that tomorrow), the major impact of the city’s grant is the addition of the “bike guy” who sells the city’s bike projects to residents, visitors, reporters and the state and federal officials who fund the projects with a steady demeanor and seeming ease.

“Long Beach is what happens when middle-aged athletes are put in charge,” Gandy joked when asked about the changes the city’s infrastructure was undergoing.

In 2009, the city needed all the athletic help it could get.  Census figures from 2005-2009 show that nearly one quarter of school age children (22.4%) in Long Beach were obese and the number of people commuting by bicycle (.9%), walking (2.7%) or by public transit (7.2%) were in line with the city’s sprawling neighbor to the north.

There are many reasons why using census data to look at transportation usage can be misleading, minorities are under-represented, and the statistics look only at commuting trips and not recreational trips, trips to the store, or church, or the dry cleaners, etc.  But for comparison purposes, Portland’s commuting mode share for active transportation options were much higher for the same period.  12.4% of respondents commuted by transit, 5.1% walked and 5.9% rode their bicycles.

Enter Charlie Gandy, and things began to change.  By October of 2009, Long Beach had moved aggressively on some ground-breaking bicycle projects, high profile traffic calming, and even some road diets.  Writing for Streetsblog, former Long Beach resident Joe Linton, who co-founded the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition two years after moving to Los Angeles in 1998, wrote approvingly about what was already happening in Long Beach.

This is not to say that everything that’s happening is one man’s doing. Gant was responsible for the city’s grant writing for transportation, and she’s brought in an impressive $12 million for active transportation projects. Allan Crawford is the program manager for the bike program, April Economides is working on the Bicycle Friendly Business District Program and Georgria Case is working on the “Share our Streets” Campaign. While Gant may have moved on, her team continues to push the envelope on Long Beach.

But, for better or worse, Charlie Gandy has become the face of Long Beach’s Livability efforts, and it was Gandy who took me for a pair of bike rides throughout the city.

The day before Streetsblog published Linton’s article in 2009, a traffic calming plan in the downtown business district was put into place.  The plan made it easier for pedestrians to cross the street with better crosswalks, dramatically increased the bike parking in the area through a bike corral (where a car parking space is converted to hold 12-14 bicycles) and, by “bumping out” the curb, slowed traffic down and created patio space for the local cafe, aptly named Utopia. Read more…

Bicycle advocates from Copenhagen to Bogota to Northeast Los Angeles have all made the case that what’s good for bicycles is good for business.  Nowhere in America is that statement being put to the test more than in Long Beach.

During my two bike tours of Long Beach, I talked with business owners along the popular bicycle infrastructure that’s making the city the bicycling capital of Southern California.  I encountered near universal approval of the city’s bike-friendly efforts, which has led city officials and leaders to expand their bike plans to other parts of the city.  Streetsblog will have more on those planning efforts tomorrow.

Bike Friendly Business Districts

The jewel of Long Beach’s efforts to use bicycling to promote business is it’s Bike Friendly Business District (BFBD) Program.  Funded by a $72,000 investment by the L.A. County Public Health Department’s RENEW program, Long Beach designated four BFBD corridors; Bixby Knolls, the East Village Arts District, Cambodia Town and the 4th Street/Retro Row area.  When the program launched earlier this year, it drew national attention because it was the first time a city anywhere in America had launched a BFBD program.

At the time, the Long Beach Business Journal covered the launch with pictures of Mayor Bob Foster and other politicians smiling on a bike ride through the districts and happy business owners extolling the virtues of mixing bike infrastructure with business plans.  Long Beach’s Mobility Coordinator, Charlie Gandy, reports that the Business Journal story was the most downloaded story in the paper’s history.

But what does the program actually do, and has it made a difference?

April Economides, a Long Beach native who returned to the city from San Francisco and is the principle at Green Octopus Consulting, serves as the coordinator of the BFBD Program.  She explained to Streetsblog how Long Beach is spending its funds and what it means for the businesses and public health.

“When I talk to businesses, and business improvement districts, I don’t talk about it in environmental or health terms,”  She explains. “I talk about how biking local ties in with shopping and dining.  People that are taking their bikes to go out, are more likely to be going out in their community or the next community and not getting in their car to drive out of town.” Read more…