Streetsblog Los Angeles

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…

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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…

A.B. 529 seeks to counter the trend of rising speed limits throughout California and has sailed through both houses of the legislature. Image:Auto in the Know

While most California cyclists are thrilled that the Senate and Assembly agree that car drivers should give cyclists a three foot berth when speeding past them, the legislative session in Sacramento was mostly positive, but still somewhat mixed.  As the Senate and Assembly prepare to go into recess, here’s where many important pieces of legislation that pertain to traffic safety, and livable and complete streets stand.

On the Governor’s Desk

A.B. 529 – Assembly Bill 529 was introduced to bring California into compliance with federal standards by giving municipalities greater say on setting local speed limits.  The legislation still requires municipalities to set speed limits based on the 85th percentile of drivers, but allows them to “round down” if conditions allow.  In short, if the 85th percentile of drivers is clocked at 44 miles per hour, the city could set the speed limit at 40 m.p.h. in certain conditions.  The bill wasn’t opposed by any special interest groups and had unanimous support in both legislatures.

A.B. 650 – Assemblyman Bob Blumenfeld wrote a powerful op/ed for Streetsblog about the role that transit should spend in the state’s future.  The next step for California would be passing of his legislation, A.B. 650 which will create a panel to propose solutions to improve buses, light rail, and other public transit options throughout California. It was passed by both houses on the legislature, and the League of Conservation Voters has created an action alert to urge the governor to sign the legislation.

A.B. 147 – A.B. 147 is one of those pieces of legislation that few people understand but could have a huge impact.  Basically, the Subdivision Map Act allows municipalities to charge developers fees to defray the cost of building  thoroughfares bridges to serve their project.  A.B. 147 would allow them to include fees for constructing bicycle, transit, pedestrian or traffic calming measures as well.  That could be a lot of new funds for local projects. Read more…

After the unanimous passage of Safe and Healthy Streets, Bogart celebrates with staff and supporters. All pics via the LACBC's Glendae website.

There’s always a risk when an advocate is hired by a government agency.  Will the advocate “go native” and be an ineffective agent of change?  Will the advocate ever be able to shake his reputation of being “just” an advocate?

When the City of Glendale and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition submitted a joint application for a Policies for Livable Active Communities and Environments (PLACE) Grant, they decided to go in a different direction then the other PLACE Communities.  While the end product of their grant is the Safe and Healthy Streets Document, perhaps the best case study for other cities is how the city, LACBC and the PLACE Grant Coordinator they both hired all worked together.

The team proposed that the PLACE Coordinator would work for the LACBC as an employee, but would be embedded full-time with city staff.  When Colin Bogart was hired to be the PLACE Coordinator, he worked out of an office in the Glendale Civic Center, not in Downtown Los Angeles in the LACBC offices.

“Even though he was physically removed from the office, it still didn’t feel like he was that far away,” remarked LACBC Executive Director Jennifer Klausner.  “Having a full time employee, dedicated to a particular place that isn’t the headquarters, can be hard for an organization.  But it never felt like he was that far away.”

It was a unique situation, even the grant makers in the L.A. County Public Health Department weren’t sure how it was going to work out.  But, three years later, the experiment was such a success that everyone I spoke with in Glendale to prepare for this series, from advocates, to city staff, all the way up to Mayor Laura Friedman were devastated to see Bogart go back to the LACBC’s Downtown offices when the grant expired on July 1 of this year.  I met with Glendale Mayor Laura Friedman two days before the grant expired and she claimed she was “in denial” that Bogart would be leaving soon.

One thing that made the PLACE Grant such a success in Glendale was that Bogart understood the advantages and limits of his somewhat unique position.  Unlike PLACE Coordinators in other cities, Bogart had direct access to the decision makers in Glendale’s government but could speak to advocates throughout the city as “one of them” and not a member of the city government.

There are several lessons that other cities, and advocacy groups can learn from Glendale, Bogart’s and the LACBC’s experience.  Here are some things to consider if you work for a city or non-profit that’s considering the embedded activist model for their city.

Lesson 1: Go with Someone You Can Trust Read more…

Stephanie Hopp is a fourth year student at Union College studying Biology, Environmental Science and Spanish. She is actively involved in biking, health, and environmental protection and plans to pursue a Masters in Public Health following her undergraduate education.   

With gas prices reaching nearly five dollars per gallon and university tuitions on the rise, getting to and around school seems to be the easiest way to make a college student go broke fast. Since I plan to pursue a Masters in Public Heath after this year, and an online public health program is not an option for me, I need to save where I can. As a college intern spending my summer conducting public health research at UCLA, I am left with little choice when it comes to my commute each day—either spend too much money on gas and parking, or find an alternative, such as biking, walking, or using public transportation.

UCLA has a walking club that programs the annual I <heart> walking week. Photo:UCLA Today

With Los Angeles’ largely sprawled out development patterns, it is not feasible for me to walk places in a timely manner, and public transportation in my neighborhood is infrequent. The built environment of Los Angeles has made any mode of transportation other than utilizing one’s own vehicle very difficult; most daily commuters are left with only one practical alternative: bicycling. So I began biking the 45-minute commute to work each day, happily saving money and getting daily exercise in a zero-emission fashion. Through my daily journey, I began to notice things I would have never otherwise perceived—the intense warmth of the Southern California summer, the aroma of freshly cut grass on nearby lawns I cycle past, and the many bike racks scattered throughout the city, which I never before knew existed.

While cycling on busy roads such as Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Glen is the fastest route to UCLA, it is far too dangerous with hundreds of cars speeding through each hour. Large potholes forced me to circumnavigate my way into traffic, and the lighting under bridges and overpasses was scarce, making me nearly invisible to rapidly approaching cars. While the road ought to be shared equally, without a designated area for cyclists, I felt as though I was intruding on the cars’ road.

This summer, my friend, Debbie Schrimmer, an avid cyclist and student at the University of California Davis reminded me, “bicycling in itself is not inherently dangerous—it’s when cyclists are forced to interact with cars that it becomes dangerous.” So I searched to find more alternatives to avoid traffic. Luckily for me, side streets were easily accessible from my neighborhood that I am now able to get around the bustling boulevards and whizzing cars and make it to UCLA safely, with only a few “almost accidents”.

But what about the countless other students in large cities who have jobs, internships, and attend classes, and who must commute on a daily basis? Those who do not have access to back roads or public transportation are left with only one choice–to use their cars. Stuck in their own “boxes” each day, each single-rider contributing to daily freeway traffic and air pollution, getting limited exercise, and spending preposterous amounts of money on gasoline. Being in a car for several hours each day robs people of precious time to exercise. Physical inactivity is associated with serious health problems such as coronary heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. Read more…

Glendale PLACE Grant Coordinator Colin Bogart shows off the new tri-lingual pedestrian safety markings at an intersection adjacent to Glendale City Hall.

This week’s series on the grants from the L.A. County Department of Public Health’s Policies for Livable and Active Communities and Environments (PLACE) Grants focuses on Glendale and their groundbreaking Safe and Healthy Streets Plan.

Glendale’s grant was different than most because it wasn’t the city that was actually awarded the grant, but the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC). The LACBC and the city worked together on the grant application. We’ll discuss the unique collaboration between the LACBC and Glendale tomorrow. On Friday we’ll discuss some of the physical changes that have happened over the last three years and that are currently underway.

Today, we’ll focus on Safe and Healthy Streets, the planning document passed unanimously by the city in June and how their plan sets a new bar for clean and green transportation planning in Los Angeles County.

For their part, the City of Glendale professes confidence and optimism that Safe and Healthy Streets will bring a change to the city’s transportation grid.

“People in Glendale are really frustrated by our record on traffic safety,” provides Mayor Laura Friedman. “It’s a way to get a grip on traffic safety in the city, and it’s probably the most cohesive effort we’ve ever had.”

The Baseline: Glendale knew it had a problem and was open to change.

When she first joined the City Council, Laura Friedman (pictured above) pushed for bike parking at City Hall. Now the City's racks are partially filled everyday by staff with a few spots held for visitors. The LACBC's Jen Klausner calls the racks "beautiful."

By its own admission, Glendale was in desperate need for a new approach to transportation planning. The unintended consequences of a transportation network that emphasized moving cars can be seen in the statistics. In Glendale, approximately 17.4% of adults (age 18+) are obese as are approximately 15.8% of children. An additional 46. 2% of adults and 17.9% of children are overweight. Many of Glendale’s health problems could be solved by a transportation system that emphasizes “people powered” transportation, but for years they weren’t ready to make the change. In 2008, almost 40% of adults in Glendale engage in minimal to no physical activity and 66.4% of adults drive to go on an errand less than one mile from their home. Read more…

When two Streetsblog sponsors get together, the world is our oyster. For more on the meeting, read this first hand review at g4do-g4do

Earlier this year, when the designs for South Figueroa’s My Figueroa project were released, Josef Bray-Ali wasn’t happy.  While many advocates celebrated designs that would, if implemented, result in segregated bike paths, transit-only lanes, pedestrian plazas (at a minimum), Bray-Ali saw another major investment in the Downtown and area around L.A. Live. Meanwhile, the portion of Figueroa where he worked and that he loved remained a traffic sewer, with five lanes of concrete and curbside parking blighting the area.

Now, with the city considering bike improvements for North Figueroa, Bray-Ali sees an opportunity to bring My Figueroa to North Figueroa.  Last week, a group of thirty community activists gathered in the Flying Pigeon Bike Shop to create an organization to do just that.  At the Flying Pigeon blog, Bray-Ali notes that the event expanded beyond the usual suspects with local businesses sponsoring the meeting by donating the chairs, tables, food, and other supplies.

“The city sees North Figueroa as a cut through for people that don’t want to drive on the 110,” Bray-Ali explains.  ”As a result, cars cut through the neighborhood without stopping, businesses suffer and the middle-class moves farther away.”

In other words, this is about more than a bike lane.

Read more…