Streetsblog Los Angeles

The LADOT is proposing to install bike lanes on both sides of Reseda Boulevard for a half mile, between Roscoe Boulevard and Parthenia Street. This gap closure project will connect existing bicycle lanes to the north and south on Reseda and is the last remaining gap in bicycle infrastructure.

The Northridge South Neighborhood Council will meet tomorrow, March 24, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. to view and comment on this project  The meeting will be held at Northridge Middle School library, 17960 Chase Street, Northridge 91325.

The new lanes will not require any changes in existing vehicular travel lanes.  However, some car parking will be removed on the east side of Reseda Boulevard between Chase and Napa streets where the road narrows.

Bicycle lanes for the entire length of Reseda Boulevard were designated in the City of Los Angeles’ 1996 Bicycle Master Plan and remain in the current, newly approved plan.  These lanes serve the business districts of Northridge, Reseda, and Tarzana as well as California State University, Northridge.

Given the high tensions surrounding the debate on the Wilbur Avenue Bike Lanes by the Northridge West Neighborhood Council and the hostile tone of Councilman-Elect Mitch Englander, this relatively benign project could end up being a hot topic both in the community and the bike community.  We’ll keep you up to date on any news, and the result of the Northridge South Neighborhood Council vote.

For eight months now, the LADOT has been taking shots in the Valley over the a two mile road diet on Wilbur Avenue.  Between Nordhoff and Chatsworth, Wilbur went from two lanes in both directions to one lane in each direction, a left turn lane, and bike lanes on both sides.  Last night, representatives of the Northridge and Porter Ranch Neighborhood Councils, in an official and deciding vote, voted to leave the current road configuration as it was instead of repainting the road to a compromise plan created by the LADOT and a Wilbur Working Group.  There’s a lot of potential headlines from this meeting, so I’ll do my best to give each of them their due.

Roughly 450 people packed in to the auditorium at Noble Middle School.  A guess as to the allegiance of the audience would be a 65/35 split in favor of ending the entire diet at the peak of the meeting.  When the audience shrunk by the end to about a third of the original audience, it was probably a 65/35 split the other way.  While emotions ran high throughout the evening, a hand tally on my computer showed that speakers in favor of the Diet were four times as likely to be interrupted by booing, catcalls, and shouting than those opposed.  Let’s be clear, the majority of the audience was well behaved, whether they agreed or disagreed with the diet.  However, the hottest of the hotheads seemed to be on one side of the debate.

There was also a clear geographical divide in the audience.  Most of those in attendance lived in the Porter Ranch Neighborhood, located North of the diet, with a minority from the area effected by the diet.  At one point a commented asked for a show of hands for who lived South of Chatsworth, where the Road Diet started.  I would estimate 15-20% of the audience, and two or three Neighborhood Council Members raised their hands.  To their credit, the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council worked hard to pump up attendance with multiple-emails on the meeting going out daily and robo-calls reaching those without email addresses on file.

You can read about the LADOT’s compromise plan here or see a rendering of it here.  Basically, the compromise plan would have restored the four lane configuration north of Devonshire and have the diet return 650 feet south of the Devoshire/Wilbur intersection.

Headline #1 Strange Public Process Leads to Strange Result

While it’s certainly true that the joint Council meeting voted to preserve the diet instead of the LADOT’s plan, it’s equally true that given a chance to vote straight up or down on preserving the diet or to go back to its original unsafe and speedy four lane configuration, they would have chosen speed over safety in a heartbeat.  As Tom Johnson, president of the Northridge Neighborhood Council stated before the public comment period, “We have a major consensus that the road should go back to four lanes.” Read more…

City Councilman Dennis Zine served as master of ceremonies at the groundbreaking for the West Valley Los Angeles River Bike Path yesterday.  Construction has begun on this first phase of the path, a 2.2 mile stretch that extends from Vanalden Avenue to Corbin Avenue.  The path won’t just be a stretch of concrete, but will also have some landscaping, access some mini-parks and have overhead lighting.

The total cost of the 2.2 mile path?  $7 million.

But, as Joe Linton points out at Creek Freak, because of all the amenities the path is more like a 2.2 mile linear park than a bike path.  Over $5 million of the budget comes from federal stimulus funds and the rest comes from a state grant program programmed for the expansion of open space.

There are 32 miles of L.A. River embankments in the City of Los Angeles, and currently only eight miles have adjacent bike paths, so this is a significant investment by the city in improving access to the river.  Future phases of the River Path are funded, but the construction timelines are unclear. Read more…

Late last year, Councilman Greig Smith and the LADOT convened a four-part Wilbur Working Group to address the concerns created when the LADOT re-striped Wilbur Avenue last August.  The “new” Wilbur features two mixed-use traffic lanes, two bike lanes, and a turning lane.  The “old” Wilbur had four mixed-use traffic lanes.

After three meetings of the working group, a compromise proposal was shown to the working group earlier this month.  While the Neighborhood Councils will be voting on the plan later this spring, the final plan is being withheld until the Northridge and Porter Ranch Neighborhood Councils can convene a joint meeting where LADOT will present the proposal and the Councils will vote.

The process for “approving” the plan is a little confused.  At this point, no meeting has been scheduled as the Councils don’t want the politics of the race for an open City Council seat in the area to play in to the vote.  Once the meeting is scheduled, with both Neighborhood Council’s in attendance, what vote decides whether the diet goes or stays?  Is it a majority of the present Council Members?  What happens if each Council has a different vote?

As for the proposal itself, a rendering [PDF] based on photos taken of the plan at a meeting of the working group show that the compromise cuts a half mile out of the diet, from Chatsworth to Devonshire, which should alleviate some of the automobile congestion concerns. Basically, for this half mile, the road returns to a four-lane road, but the bike lanes remained which was a “ground rule” for the working group and a promise to the bike community from Smith.  Read more…

Yesterday, the LADOT Bike Blog announced two new bike lane projects that were completed in the Valley this weekend.

On Rinaldi Street 1.3 miles of bike lanes were added over the weeked that closed a gap between two existing sets of lanes were completed for a continuous eight miles from Laurel Canyon Road to Mason Avenue.  Reseda Boulevard still has a .9 mile gap in its bike lane, but that gap was over halved with the painting of a 1.1 mile stretch from Valerio Street in the south to Roscoe Boulevard in the north.

While its certainly good news that the Valley is getting a better bike network, it’s also good to see the LADOT keeping its promise to paint the lanes on Reseda and Rinaldi.  Back in April of 2009, the Department had a bit of a public relations problem when plans surfaced that existing bike lanes on Reseda Boulevard would be removed to create more peak hour car capacity. Read more…

This past weekend, the city of Los Angeles striped two additional miles of bike lanes on Reseda Boulevard. The new 2-mile stretch of lane, reported in-progress here last week, extends from Devonshire Street to Parthenia Street. This stretch is nearly complete with lines fully striped, bike symbols added, but directional arrows missing and hopefully coming soon. It’s great to see relatively rapid progress on this formerly-controversial project.

Looking at the numbers: this past weekend’s striping brings the total Reseda Boulevard bike lanes completed to 8.2 miles of the 10.8 miles approved in 1996. In the north San Fernando Valley, there are now 4.9 miles from Sesnon Blvd. to Parthenia St., and in the south Valley, 3.3 miles from Vanowen St. to Reseda Blvd.’s southerly terminus. A 2.4 mile central gap remains from Parthenia to Vanowen. In this gap, the city recently installed 0.75 miles of sharrows, some of
which may be removed as the approved bike lane is implemented. Cyclists look to the city to continue progress southward, implementing the remaining 1.6 miles from Valerio to Parthenia, listed as a Year 2010 priority project in the city’s draft 5-Year Implementation Plan.

Unfortunately, bike lanes partially striped on nearby Wilbur Avenue are not proceeding quite as smoothly. Reported here last week, the city began implementing a “road diet” on Wilbur, reducing 4 travel lanes to 2 travel lanes, and adding a continuous turn lane and bicycle lanes. U.S Federal agency research shows that  the “road diet” reconfiguration reduces crashes, thus generally creates a safer street for all users.

Read more…

This past weekend, city of Los Angeles work crews were out scraping and putting down preliminary bike lane striping on Reseda Boulevard. The final thermoplastic striping isn’t there yet, but the preliminary lines are down. The lanes extend from Devonshire Street to Parthenia Street – a total of 2 miles. Streetsblog readers will recall that these lanes were
approved in 1996, but remained unimplemented until bicyclists caught city staff lying about planned peak-hour parking lanes, which would have precluded the approved bike lanes.

This weekend wasn't just a good one for cyclists.  On Saturday, while I was still sleeping off Critical Mass, groundbreaking occurred for the Gold Line Foothill Extension in the San Gabriel Valley.  The rail line was always a popular project with Valley residents, but until Measure R was passed, a measure opposed by several prominent politicians in the area, funding for the project was not approved.  Now, with cash in hand and shovels in the ground, officials are predicting the extension will open in 2014, before the Expo Line will be completed all the way in to Santa Monica. 

Anyone who wants to know more about the specifics of the project should read this excellent "Q and A" written for The Source by Steve Hymon.

Reports on the ground breaking describe an event that was equal part celebration and pep rally.  The Source quotes Metro Board Chair Ara Najarian proclaiming that, "This whole county is going to change."  Later, Congressman Adam Schiff put in a plug for the a third extension (as in the one after the next one,) promising, "None of us will rest until this line goes to Ontario Airport."

But of course, it's not just transit hungry residents that are the winners.  While it's great that residents of Azusa can take a train to Mariachi Plaza if they want to; the creation and construction of this line will also determine how the San Gabriel Valley will grow.  On Saturday, The Times wrote an article all about the T.O.D. plans for line, including details of an ambitious project already on the "drawing board" in Azusa:

Monrovia's proposed Station Square project would rise next to the future site of its Gold Line station, just south of the 210 Freeway. Monrovia has already invested $30 million into the project and is negotiating public-private partnerships with multiple commercial real estate developers, Monrovia Mayor Mary Ann Lutz said...

...The project's first phase will include approximately 700 apartment units, 450,000 square feet of office space, and 30,000 square feet of retail space, according to Blaine Fetter, the Principal/Organizer at Samuelson & Fetter. Some of those apartments and offices will be completed by the time the train begins operation in 2014, he said.

Read more...

On March 24, the City Council Transportation Committee, partially at the urging of Councilman Paul Krekorian, tabled three proposals to increase speed limits for three streets in the San Ferndando Valley.  The increases for Arleta Avenue, Sheldon Street and Hollywood Way were previously discussed in this Streetsblog article.  There's nothing new to report on these proposals, they're the same as they were three months ago, another limit proposal has found its way onto the Council agenda for this Wednesday's meeting.  This proposal would set the speed limit for Hatteras Street., between Hazeltine and Sepulveda, at thirty miles per hour.

It's a curious proposal, because the speed limit along this stretch of road is already at thirty miles per hour, and there is no change proposed for the road.  Instead, the proposal serves as a justification of why the limit should stay at thirty miles per hour and illustrates how stacked the deck is against setting speed limits for maximum safety instead of speed.  Before we go on, just a reminder that state law requires that speed limits be set within the nearest five miles per hour of the eighty-fifth percentile of drivers unless there's a compelling reason to keep the speed 5 miles per hour lower than the "85th percentile."  In this proposal, we can see how hard it is to convince traffic engineers that there's a compelling reason to reduce speeds.

Read more...

Yesterday, the city of L.A. Department of Transportation (LADOT) made good on their pledge to stripe the first new mile of Reseda Boulevard bike lanes. The lanes were approved in 1996, but languished for various reasons detailed earlier, until bicyclists and community members rallied. It's one mile of a five mile gap closure.

LADOT pledged September implementation of a mile of new bike lanes from Devonshire Street to San Fernando Mission Road. Two weeks ago the upper half was done; yesterday the lower half completed the mile. The new lanes actually extend a bit a above San Fernando Mission Road nearly to the 118 Freeway, and a block below Devonshire to Lemarsh Street.