Streetsblog Los Angeles

In recent weeks, regional transportation agencies in Southern California have made some slow moves towards embracing a more sustainable transportation network throughout the Southland.  Local “Metropolitan Planning Organization” the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) is poised to pass a long term plan that would dramatically increase bicycle and pedestrian funding while its sister agency in San Diego passed the first regional funding plan complying with the state’s ground breaking greenhouse gas emissions law SB 375 which mandates improvements in air quality with reductions in vehicles miles traveled.

Last week, SCAG’s Joint Meeting of the Regional Council and Planning Committees met to vote on a proposed long-term plan for the SCAG region which covers Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and Imperial counties, passed a measure that nearly tripled the regional investment in bicycle and pedestrian projects.

Walking and driving account for 21% of trips, but 1.3% of funding. To see a county-by-county breakdown or a larger version of this graphic, visit the Safe Routes to School California Blog.

Over thirty people testified in favor of the proposal including representatives of the Safe Routes to Schools California, Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, National Resources Defense Council, and San Bernadino Council of Public Health.   At the Safe Routes to Schools blog site, Jessica Meaney lists some of the more powerful testimonies.

So bicycle and pedestrian planning is on the mark in Greater Los Angeles County.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is the near-tripling of funding is less impressive when put in a larger framework.  SCAG updates its long-term plan every four years.  In 2008, it allocated less than half of one percent to bicycle and pedestrian funding.  This year’s draft plan increases that percentage all the way to 1.3% of the future funds or about $6 billion of a $450 billion spending plan.

The Safe Routes to Schools California explains why even the higher number is alarmingly low:

And given that 21 percent of all trips are conducted via walking or biking (2009 National Household Travel Survey) and 25 percent of all roadway injuries and fatalities in this region affect bicyclist and pedestrians (2008 SWITRS data), we continue to urge SCAG’s Regional Council to invest a significant percentage of resources toward walkable and bikeable communities and neighborhoods.

But even alarmingly low is better than the status quo.  At NRDC’s Switchboard, Amanda Eaken casts a positive light on this modest victory but still calls for a more equitable funding scheme:

We couldn’t agree more.  But is funding a paltry 1.3% enough to do that?  We don’t think so.  Equity, safety and the environment demand more than that.

Fortunately, there’s time to improve the plan. The next milestone is the December 1, 2011 vote of the full Regional Council to release the preferred alternative to the public for review.

Read more…

It's official. Southland residents are sick of sprawl and massive highway projects. Source: Key Findings from Recent Southern California Survey on Transportation and Land Use Planning

Even as Los Angeles embraces an expanded transit and bicycle program, the rest of Southern California is still pictured as a sprawling wasteland of highways and subdivisions.  However, that’s not what the people that live in the Southland want according to a new survey released by Move L.A., the American Lung Association and the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Instead, Southlanders want the kind of dense mixed use development and short commutes over McMansions and sprawlways.

The survey, completed by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates, shows that voters in the six county region served by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) overwhelmingly support expanding and investing in transit over investing in highways.  Even when voters backed highway spending, there was more support for a “Fix It First” approach than funneling more money into mammoth road expansion projects.

“If Southern California voters were in charge of our transportation plans, the region would look very different,”Amanda Eaken, NRDC’s deputy director of sustainable communities, added. that “Voters understand what so many studies have told us: widening roads will not solve traffic congestion. Instead, designing communities that increase our mobility and freedom — helping us to get out of our cars — is what will ultimately solve the problem.”

The survey was released just days before SCAG is scheduled to vote on the region’s Long Range Transportation Plan this Thursday.  The SCAG Region encompasses six counties: Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and Imperial, 18 million people and 38,000 square miles.  Organizations such as the three who commissioned this report and the Safe Routes to Schools National Partnership have lobbied SCAG officials and testified at public hearings helping to create a far more progressive transportation plan than SCAG has passed in the past. Read more…

The walk, from the Healthy El Monte website.

As Streetsblog has learned about and written about the 5 PLACE Grant Communities, one thing has become clear. When you’re talking about smaller areas, and not sprawling metropolis’ such as Los Angeles, it’s the little things that make a big difference. In El Monte, they created a Health and Wellness Plan that centers around providing healthier food choices and creating more safe opportunities for people to be outside.

To demonstrate what El Monte’s streets should look like, the city created a two new walking routes starting and ending at the northeast corner of Arceo Park that encircle the park and part of the surrounding community. The longer 1.1 mile route route heads all the way over to Santa Ana Boulevard where stores, pre-schools and even some small medical facilities exist. The shorter three quarter mile route connects the community to the park and only runs to Gage Avenue.

“When the city was applying for the grant, they picked Arceo Walk because it had the elements that make it walkable,” explains Arpine Shakhbandaryan, the PLACE Coordinator for the City of El Monte. “It had a residential component. It had the retail component. It had a health care component. It had a lot of schools. All within a mile of Arceo Walk. It was a great example of a walk project and how it could be replicated.”

View Arceo Walk in a larger map

Even a simple google map shows Shakhbandaryan’s point. The Arceo Walk travels directly past health food stores, middle schools and other retail places along Santa Anita Avenue on the western end of the longer route. Along the eastern route are a senior center, library, swimming pool and community center…to say nothing of Arceo Park itself.

“We’ve done a similar map for Mountain View Park and Lambert Park and you can’t find the diversity of resources within a mile as we could with Arceo,” finishes Shakhbandaryan. Read more…

A view of Bodger Street during a visit to Arceo Walk on July 7 of this year.

Martha Sera likes walking.  A former high school track star, Sera regularly goes for mile-long walks with her husband, father and children, ages two and five.  That Sera has found a way to walk for a living is just a bonus.

Sera is one of a handful of organizers for the City of El Monte Walking Club, an innovative attempt by the city to increase the physical activity of its residents.  Participants in the club show up at an assigned location, either a public park or school, stretch and go for a walk.  Upon completion of the mile walk, they receive a ticket that can be turned in for a prize.  Five tickets earns a pedometer; 15 tickets, a t-shirt.

“You should try and take 10,000 steps a day to have a healthy lifestyle,” Sera notes.  According to her pedometer, Sera takes 1,400 steps per mile.

It's ok to tread on me. Messages on the sidewalk encourage people to walk...

When I met Sera, she was sitting under a tree with a sign-in sheet for the first of two walking club meetings last Saturday morning at 8:30 at Arceo Park.  After a brief introduction, the two of us took off on a walk around the park, looking for more club members than the handful who had shown up.  An hour later, we were at Columbia Middle School, less than a half mile away for the second meeting.

Every community that’s taken part in the PLACE program, a 2008 public health grant program sponsored by L.A. County to improve communities’ overall health through better transportation planning,  benefits from unintended consequences.  Creating a walking club for adults wasn’t part of the initial PLACE grant from the City of El Monte, but the hundreds of adults and their children who have taken to walking to improve their health because of the program is an unintended, but happy, consequence of their new transportation vision.

The idea for the club is simple.  El Monte residents have a higher-than-average rate of obesity and asthma, and the easiest solution to these related issues is to increase their activity.  More than two-thirds (66.8%) of adults in El Monte were either obese or overweight in 2007, more than that of adults in LA County (58.1%) and the state as a whole (61.3%.)  Nearly half (47.7%) of El Monte’s children are either obese or overweight.  On top of that, 9.8% of adults in El Monte were diagnosed with asthma compared to 6.5% of adults in Los Angeles County. In that same year, 4.1% of adults and children in both the El Monte Health District and LA County as a whole had been diagnosed with chronic respiratory conditions.

While attendance at the park was sparse this particular weekend, Sera had more success at Columbia Middle School.  More than 60 participants, many of them parents with their children, attended one of the three “meetings” over the course of the week.  Saturdays tend to be more lightly attended, so we had two parent-child combos, both of whom first heard about the program through the school.  At the park, walkers could walk around the park or on the Arceo Walk route (more on that later) that stretches east from the Park to Santa Anita Boulevard and back.  At Columbia, they walk on a track. Read more…

A pair of students walk home from summer school over the Haddon Bridge.

Safe Routes to School?

Last year, literally hundreds of students had to cross the Haddon Bridg everyday to get to class at San Fernando High School.  Locatee on the north west side of Ritchie Valens Park crossing the pedestrian bridge was literally the worst part of the day as it was both somewhat secluded and a complete eyesoar.  The paint was chipped and non-existent, the side nearest the park was used as an illegal dumping ground for electronic and hazardous household waste, and the other side often featured a gang member either harassing or recruiting the students.

That’s a pretty crappy way to start the school day.

“This area was covered in trash, graffiti covered the walls, the lights were knocked over.”  Max Podemski was the People for Livable Active Communities and the Environment (PLACE) Coordintor for Pacoima Beautiful and oversaw efforts to improve the bridge and create a new vision for the Wash (more on the plan later this week.)

And at least one student who needed the bridge more than others couldn’t access the bridge because of the poorly placed bollards.  Without help of family of friends to lift her wheelchair over the bollards, she had to travel over a mile around the Wash to get to school or visit her grandparents.  They live one mile, and a world, away.

It did sort of look like a bridge that would eat children from a bad horror movie. Photo via Pacoima Beautiful

In an effort to improve the community, and provide a micro-example of what can be done with the Wash, Pacoima Beautiful used $20,000 from its PLACE Grant and a heaping of community involvement to re-imagine the bridge.  To support their efforts, the Pacoima Neighborhood Council donated $5,000 to maintain and clean the bridge and Scotts Miracle Grow donated mulch and soil.

What a difference some paint, some plants, a minor investment in physical improvements and some public will can make.  The gang members are gone, and so are the piles of trash.  The bollards are now in compliance with the American with Disabilities Act and a wheelchair can glide across as easily as a bicycle or skateboard.

“When we talked with the kids, a lot of them thought the bridge was a scary place,” explains Ken Frederick with the Mountains, Recreation and Conservation Authority, a close ally of Pacoima Beautiful on this project.  ”By cleaning it up, you sort of de-mystify it.  If you clean places up you’re going to clean up some of the crime and that element.” Read more…

, 

For a larger image of the Greenway, and more information about the project, click here.

As part of every Policies for Livable Active Communities and the Environment (PLACE) Grants awarded by L.A. County Department of Public Health in 2008, each community had to complete a sample project that demonstrated the types of street improvements that could spread throughout their city as a result of improved planning.  The City of Culver City completed the Downtown Connector project that provides a Sharrowed street connection between the Downtown and the future Expo Station while linking residents to local schools.  Long Beach spent their money on the Green Sharrowed Lane in Belmont Shore.

Glendale’s project is completed yet, the contractor just got approval to begin construction, but it is similar to the other two projects we’ve reviewed.  The Riverdale-Maple Greenway will connect three parks in Glendale: Pacific Park and School, Maple Park and Community Center and Carr Park.  When completed the Greenway will have 124 new trees along the corridor, repaired and widened sidewalks, wayfinding and promotional signage and bike lanes on Riverdale (the western portion of the Greenway) and Sharrows along the rest of the route on Maple Street, Rock Glen Avenue and Lincoln Avenue.

PLACE Coordinator Colin Bogart explains the thinking behind the project.  ”By making it easier to access the park and the areas around the park, you’re going to get more people in the park and more people walking and biking in the neighborhoods.”

While none of the treatments considered for the Greenway are new to Glendale, this is the first time the city is coordinating a group of different designs and additions to create a special corridor friendly to all road users.  “The idea of consolidating it in one place, and to use all these funding sources to create a corridor, that was the leap,” explains Marc Stirdivant with the city’s Parks Department and one of the authors of the PLACE Grant.

Many of the new trees are already in, and what a difference they make for pedestrians. Image via the Los Angeles County Bike Coalition's special webpage for this project.

From a public health standpoint, PLACE is a public health grant after all, it’s a great low-cost investment to provide bicycle and pedestrian access to parks.  Not only does the project, spanning almost the entire east-west portion of the city, connect neighborhoods but it makes it easier for people to get to their local park without having to get into a car.  This will actually increase the physical activity of adults more than kids, as personal experience has taught me that kids have no trouble exercising at parks, and parents can get into the action mostly by exercising on the way to and from the park.

The project is a strong example of the city’s commitment to creating a walkable and bikable transportation grid.  Only $20,000 of the $320,000 from the PLACE Grant is going to cover the physical projects.  The total cost of the Greenway is roughly $500,000.  Also, the original proposal didn’t include the last two segments of the Greenway that connect to Carr Park in the Northeast corner of the map on Rock Glen and Lincoln.  After Alta Planning and Design reviewed the city’s initial plan, they urged Glendale to consider adding the spur to include the third park, and the city embraced the additional project.

At first, it seemed the main barrier to completing the project would be the intersection of Central and Maple.  The intersection was one of the most dangerous crossings, especially for pedestrians, and required Greenway users (riders and walkers) to make a pair of turns to stay on the Greenway.

“If you were a pedestrian and you wanted to cross here, you were essentially out of luck,” Bogart remarked of the road configuration.

Fixing the intersection was going to be a daunting and expensive task, until city staff noted that there was an improvement project already on the books.  Using federal stimulus funds, the city not only added new crossings to the street, but also a series of bump outs to both slow traffic and decrease the length of the crossing for pedestrians.  In addition, the city put in bike detectors connected to the traffic signal and marked their location on the street to make bike crossings easier.

Gunpowder and I rest at the intersection of Riverdale and Central and admire the new bump out.

Glendale was actually a somewhat controversial selection when the PLACE grants were first announced.  According to the census, the city is white (over 71%), middle class (median household income approaches $70,000) and suburban.  Yet, the Greenway demonstrates not just a commitment to creating livable streets where people can walk and bike where they’re going or just be outside without being harassed by traffic, but also a commitment to equity.

Read more…