Streetsblog Los Angeles

Potentially prominent new additions that would add to Downtown Santa Monica's modest skyline remain contentious.

Following last Friday’s horrific tragedy, the national media spotlight that followed, and another unrelated shooting soon after, some semblance of normalcy returned to Santa Monica last week with a council session punctuated by contentious land use agenda items and familiar debates about development.

To be perfectly honest, it felt a little surreal to slip back into listening to disputes about things like appropriate building heights downtown after the past week’s events, but the process of shaping the city’s future continues on.

Our Santa Monica weekly column is supported by Bike Center in Santa Monica.

The first major item for discussion included a first reading of an amendment to adopt tweaked language to the interim zoning ordinance, the ordinance that has temporary changed a few things in our zoning code, in accordance with the land use and circulation plan, but preceding the complete overhaul of the zoning code that is underway.

The amendment extends  the interim ordinance to February 2014 to allow more time for the new zoning code expected to be adopted by the end of this year. Also tweaked is an outdoor dining exemption from floor area ratio calculations of developments so that outdoor dining would not be penalized in the allowable FAR (but would still be calculated for parking). This will act as an incentive to create outdoor dining, encouraging more permeable and engaged interfaces with the street and more open spaces, which are all goals in the Land Use and Circulation Element (LUCE.)

Next up, was the first reading for an ordinance to update the language of the city’s affordable housing production program. The new ordinance is based on recommendations from the housing commission and includes a new category for “extremely low-income”, or 30% of the average median income. With Santa Monica having a higher median income than the region as a whole, the absence of this category meant the policy directed affordable housing being created before was still out of reach for those who have the hardest time affording to live here. New rent limits were also created to ensure “moderate income” restricted housing is below market rates.

Tweaks to the affordable housing program formula were overdue, but the accessibility of Santa Monica is going to remain difficult if we do not keep pace with housing construction or conversions that include housing. New housing units enable us to set aside proportions to low income designations and helps address the market rate supply and demand, and housing to jobs imbalances, which are significant forces driving up rents. Read more…

This Wednesday,  the Santa Monica Planning Commission was presented with and spoke on the latest draft proposals for the Transportation Demand Management (TDM) portion of the pending zoning code .  The zoning code is currently being overhauled to meet goals and guidelines in the Land Use & Circulation Element. In short, TDM measures are polices that act as deliberate carrots and sticks to reduce car trips, or average vehicle ridership (AVR).

Our Santa Monica weekly column is supported by Bike Center in Santa Monica.

As someone approaching transportation subjects from outside a formal degree in transportation planning, I sympathize with people who have a tough time following this typically acronym heavy area of public and private policy. I watched remotely via the City TV website and it was tempting to go sleep at a few moments.

The staff report begins with background on some of existing TDM policies adopted in 1991. A number of businesses in the city currently participate in these programs, including my own employer in the Bergamot district. The current measures are fairly week. During Wednesday’s meeting commissioner Richard McKinnon commented several times that they are too easy to opt out of. McKinnon also called into question the model for producing the ridership value, which exempts electric vehicles, done in part to encourage their use and goals toward local air quality improvement.

For Santa Monica to reach the traffic reduction goals, including “No Net New Evening Peak Period Vehicle Trips” in the LUCE plan; whether or not a car is running an internal combustion engine or drawing power from the grid for an electric motor is irrelevant. Electric vehicles still cause traffic, along with most of the other ills outside tailpipe emissions caused by cars and engineering for cars in urban areas.

The really big change being considered is that the city is finally considering requiring transportation demand measures for residential development and units. This could include things like unbundling of residential parking rates in apartments and mixed use, transit passes, additional bike provisions.

My own favorite TDM policy is parking cash-out, a concept that was championed by Donald Shoup, and which is required by the state of California (but without a state level enforcement mechanism) for certain businesses which lease parking. Read more…

Fostering a culture and built environment that embraces walking is at the very core of sustainable urbanism, and frankly, the human experience as the endurance adapted bipeds that we are. However I must admit looking back over my Santa Monica columns thus far, I haven’t given pedestrian issues a lot of specific attention yet. In many ways Santa Monica is a ahead of the curve on walkability. That so many travel from elsewhere in the region to come walk around in Santa Monica is evidence of this fact. However some areas of the city are better served than others, and safety remains a significant concern. Pedestrians being killed or seriously injured by collisions involving vehicles looms large among the most tragic headlines annually.

At a public workshop back in January (presentation pdf) the city of Santa Monica kicked off the process of crafting a new Pedestrian Action Plan, which unfortunately I had to miss at the time. Much like the Bicycle Action Plan process, it was initiated specifically to set the direction for pedestrian planning in the years ahead, although a new direction this time around is the city has adopted an online “virtual town hall” to solicit feedback on an ongoing basis and in the hopes of engaging some people that might not otherwise be part of the conventional public planning process. The Santa Monica Daily Press has some more detailed background on the new forum system, the involvement of Alta Planning, and some of insights gathered from it so far.

I am cautiously optimistic about the forum, which has in recent weeks also offered incentive rewards for participants. While on the one hand I think the regular meeting schedule ends up excluding a lot of valuable perspectives, online comment threads can have a way of getting divisive at times in a way that differs from face to face interactions. In any case I know city staff really are looking at the feedback, which has already informed some areas to focus on that weren’t anticipated as the highest priorities, such as how much lighting is important to people walking at night, and where it is lacking. If you have the inclination to leave some comments on enhancing the pedestrian experience of living and visiting Santa Monica, please direct some of that commentary to the virtual town hall, I won’t mind if that means fewer comments here.

One thing I will take issue with though is the following phrase that appears in the page text, “Maybe nobody walks in LA, but (just about) everyone walks in Santa Monica.” I am totally with Alissa Walker on banishing the overuse of this trope. At any given time of the day in Los Angeles there are probably more people out walking than the entire population of some states in the union, so can we give that tired line a rest already?

I know bicyclists using sidewalks despite Santa Monica’s laws against it is a never ending complaint, and in this new forum like others, heated rhetoric and finger pointing come out on this issue.  I covered this topic back when new signage first appeared discouraging sidewalk riding on some sidewalks, but it is a problem rooted in our aggressive road culture and defies simple resolutions regardless of the state of local bicycling regulations (which also differ just outside our borders).

As a longtime walker of Santa Monica (yes I do in fact leave the bike parked quite a lot), I consider the big elephant in the room to be vehicle speeds. Moderating speeding is critical for the safety of crossing, or even just being on the sidewalk for that matter (drivers do jump curbs somtimes). Both in the real terms of risk, collision severity, and the degradation of the public soundscape, as well as perception of safety. People complain really loudly about those certain hours of the day and places where vehicular traffic in Santa Monica consistently hit a wall of it’s doing with pronounced congestion, but on most of our city streets, at most hours of the day (and night), speeding is more prevalent than being stuck. It is not by coincidence that a disproportionate amount of traffic collisions severe enough to maim or kill occur outside the times of heaviest travel.

High on the list of pedestrian deficiencies from my own experience is the absolutely deplorable conditions facing those trying to walk between the downtown area and Pico Neighborhood residences just south of the freeway near Lincoln Blvd., where I used to live for a few years. In air distance it is not any radically different distance from downtown than where I am now north of the freeway and a little further east, but the experience on the ground is worlds apart, and consequently I walk to downtown a lot more often now. Options to cross the freeway are highly limited, and any backtracking for a more desirable experience is far more problematic and time consuming on foot than by faster modes of travel. This is a systemic problem for many routes attempting to make north/south walking connections across the bisected Pico Neighborhood. With the transfer of Lincoln Blvd. within Santa Monica to the city from Caltrans, I hope something can finally be done soon to start improving one of the bleakest, most threatening and disheartening walks in the city, along an important bridge connection with no convenient alternatives.

From "Life-Cycle Assessment for Transportation Decision-making" report by Mikhail Chester, Juan Matute, Paul Bunje, William Eisenstein, Stephanie Pincetl.

This week a UCLA research team (that included our own board member and contributor Juan Matute), published their findings on life-cycle green house gas emissions impacts, energy use, smog & respiratory particulates of public transit compared with driving, using the Metro Gold Line train and Orange Line bus rapid transit corridor as case studies.

In some ways the paper highlights pretty intuitively obvious conclusions, but having the supporting evidence and the details matter. For example new light rail systems in the short term have a greater impact than a BRT busway, but edges out emissions and energy efficiency in the long term. The mix that goes into our electric grids weighs heavily on the operating energy demand of light rail, and if the emissions of the grid can be lowered, it will lower the impact of running electric transit systems. However improvements to the bus system can be made on a faster timeline at lower upfront cost, and rail requires a greater corridor ridership to be justified. These are all important factors to consider in the timeline horizons of various emission goals.

One of my takeaways from this is that if environmentalists and communities with sustainability goals such as Santa Monica has, are really serious, bus systems deserve a lot more attention and resources than they are typically given. Every new electric vehicle, especially “sexy” ones like the Tesla, nets endless fawning attention on so many “green” blogs, while the real work horses of efficient transportation, city buses, are barely given any attention at all. We could reduce the emissions and energy use of transportation a lot more, and a lot faster with striping more dedicated right of ways for buses, than we could ever get waiting for the slow attrition of inefficient private automobiles being churned through over the many years U.S. fleet turn over takes.

One of the great under appreciated local success stories has been the “Any Line, Any Time” program for SMC students, faculty and staff, that was just renewed for another year. The college bundles the cost of bus fare with a deal with the city (and some cost recovery on student fees), and everyone from SMC has free bus fare on the entire BBB system. In effect it treats bus ridership more like the way many businesses and institutions treat providing car parking through bundling costs. The number of students getting to campus without driving has grown to more than half, largely driven by the success of the bus ridership, and an impressive feat especially given how few students of SMC even live within Santa Monica’s borders.

The SMC main campus BBB stop has the highest ridership in the BBB system, and during peak times handles more boarding than some Metro train platforms. Imagine if many of these students drove instead.

It frustrates me when people who ought to know better discuss public transit in Santa Monica in the future tense. That transit oriented development or any measures or policies that relax the mandates that support and favor driving now would be premature until the Expo Line train is running, or not even then because one transit line “isn’t a real system”. Read more…

A typical pit stop on the Westside

Don’t get me wrong.

I love Bike to Work Day. I had a blast yesterday trying to hit as many Westside pit stops as I could before making my way back to my home office to get down to work.

Which isn’t exactly the point, I know.

The idea is to encourage people who would otherwise drive to their places of employment to try bicycling by providing incentives and information, in the hope that once they try it, they’ll like it. And hopefully, keep doing it.

I get that.

And I enjoyed the opportunity to partake in a free rolling breakfast and gather up mini-Clif Bars and other assorted bike swag, while talking with other riders I might not otherwise meet on the roadway. As well as offering my insights to anyone looking for a little advice on bike commuting while, sadly, finding no takers.

Everyone I met seemed to know as much about the subject as I do.

Which is part of the problem.

As with many bike advocacy efforts, we too often find ourselves preaching to the choir; rewarding those who already ride rather than getting more people to leave their cars behind, if only for one day.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Bicycling, and bicyclists, should be celebrated.

Whether or not some impatient drivers, or even the wider community at large chooses to acknowledge it at times — particularly when it involves removing a traffic lane in order to carve out a little space for those of us on two wheels. Read more…

Walk Score's heat map Bike Score of Santa Monica gives an 83/100

Santa Monica was just awarded a bump in it’s Bicycle Friendly Community (BFC) classification by the League of American Bicycling, from bronze to silver. Coinciding with that news the walkability web application Walk Score released a new round of Bike Score rankings which now includes Santa Monica, which received an average score of 82.5 (rounded up to 83), high enough to come 5th in analyzed cities. Now there are probably few people more excited than myself about the real progress being made toward normalizing bicycling in Santa Monica, but I feel compelled to maintain some skepticism toward popular systems of classification for bicycle friendliness.

Relative to other cities ranked in the LAB system, the sliver may be an appropriate and deserved award, but about that bike score putting us in the same league as the platinum awarded cities of Davis,CA and Boulder, CO, I think it’s a little early to pop the champagne bottles just yet. Some e-mail blasts, Facebook shares, and a locals news post have already circulating touting Santa Monica ranking #5 on Bike Score, so I think it’s worth putting this in some needed context.

The first and most obvious issue here is cities are not all alike, and trying to compare them as such often ends up as in exercise in trying to put square blocks in round holes. Santa Monica has a higher score overall than Portland, OR, but Santa Monica is a small city boxed in by the city of Los Angeles in the patchwork of municipalities that form L.A. county. Our score covers a smaller foot print without any isolated sprawl or hilly regions. So while the core of Portland actually scores higher, the number that spits out for each city includes in some cases very disparate areas like steep hillside homes that are tanked with topography penalties in the Bike Score methodology. Even among cities more approximate to each other, comparing averages will always leave out important details.

What is bicycle friendly or bikability, is inherently subjective, and can mean very different things for different people. What’s bikable enough for me is not good enough for many others. We should be asking bikeability for whom? Are we making it accessible for all who wish to, or just certain groups. Do parents feel comfortable allowing their kids to bike to school? At what age? Are facilities only accessible to certain neighborhoods and not other? Are political, social, racial, gender or economic inequities or other differences apparent in where a city makes investment in improving bicycling conditions or who feels they can ride? These questions and many others are critically important, but nuanced and defy simplistic efforts to rank a city as a whole or comparing one city to another. Read more…

Photo: Gary Kavanagh/Flickr

One of the sub-rifts I’ve observed within the debates and backlashes against development in Santa Monica reflects the diverging views within environmentally conscience minds about balancing localized and broader impacts. There are people who have advocated for environmental initiatives of various kinds their entire life, who I fundamentally clash with despite also considering myself a passionate advocate environmental protection. We’re seeing the same issues with completely different lenses.

In what I am going to refer to as a slow or no growth locally perspective, to add development intensity of any kind here is to further potentially increase the impact of Santa Monica. This impact is a net negative, and one perceived to be associated with a linear increase in more vehicle traffic or other negative consequences.

Anchoring around walkable areas tied to transit investments already under construction, is lower impact and more sustainable (ecologically speaking and financially) than having the investment capital for development flow outward. Adding transit oriented development is a non-linear process, and facilitates more walkable and bikeable distances between a greater number of potential homes and businesses along with the potential for longer trips made by transit service. A shift away from automobile dependency and centrism is an imperative.

Within the realm of choices Santa Monica can make for itself, allowing for more transit oriented development near our already under construction electric light rail line connecting us to Downtown Los Angeles, is one of the best things we can do to enable lower energy use per capita for more people, maintain strong city finances, and address some of the supply side of the forces making the city less affordable and accessible. People living in Santa Monica along the Expo Line corridor already have shorter commute times than most places in the region, I’m guessing in part because so many jobs already exist within that area (my own 10 minute daily bike commute fits completely within that light pink slice).

Our ideal climate also reduces household energy demand significantly. As of this writing, Burbank just set a new record high of 103 degrees. Santa Monica was in the low 70′s and upper 60′s during the same part of the day, wrapped in that natural air conditioning we call the marine layer. Given a choice of adding units in Burbank or Santa Monica, units in Santa Monica will by default use less energy without residents even having to think about it. The means to live a lower carbon lifestyle, so long as one can afford the barriers to entry and the capacity exists, is just plain easier in Santa Monica. Read more…

This? all photos by Joe Linton

The Southern California Streets Initiative, the local non-profit that staffs and edits Streetsblog Los Angeles, has voted to support local journalism outside of the city limits to Long Beach and Santa Monica. Thanks to local support from Santa Monica Bike Center and Long Beach Community Foundation, we’ve been able to do this without reaching into our regular operating funds.

Or this? Photo: Gary Kavanagh

Our goal is to expand coverage into Santa Monica and Long Beach, and with your help, these dreams will come true. We’re proud to announce we’re raising funds for both a Streetsblog Long Beach and a Livable Streets/Green Living news website in Santa Monica (which would be sort of a cross between Streetsblog and the old Green L.A. Girl website). This is where you come in. Your gift can help determine which city gets its own Livable Streets news site first.

We’re holding  the “Long Beach v.  Santa Monica” Livable Streets Contest. Whichever city raises the most funds between April 15, 2013 and the end of this month wins and will be the first city to get its own Southern California Streets Initiative either Streetsblog Long Beach or <Un-named project> Santa Monica. Regardless of which city wins, we’ll continue trying to raise the funds to bring each city its own Livable Streets news site.

There’s a lot of ways you can contribute:

• Make a donation to Streetsblog Los Angeles by clicking here. Make sure to designate the funds to go towards “Los Angeles” and indicate the city you’re supporting in “why you support this work” section.
• Make a monthly donation. If fifty people make a $5 monthly donation, that creates a $3,000 funding stream for your local website.
• If you’re a major donor or potential advertiser for either site, email me at damien@streetsblog.org. Your commitment will count towards picking the Livable Streets Fundraising Champion.
• Write a check to Streetsblog Los Angeles, 11539 National Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90064.

If you don’t care about Santa Monica or Long Beach, shame on you! But you can still contribute to support Streetsblog, and and we’ve got some great prizes, including a Dahon Folding Bike and a Bike Commuter Pack courtesy of Planet Bike..

Oh, and for those keeping score at home:

Santa Monica: $450

Long Beach: $100

SMO sunset, photo used with creative commons share alike license from Flickr user Nogwater

The debate over the ultimate fate of Santa Monica Airport (SMO)  is contentious with impassioned views from stakeholders on all sides. More concerned with the state of our ground transportation, I hadn’t given much thought to my own views about the local airport operations or followed very closely the prior discussions on the issue (although it’s impossible to not hear some about it).

Our Santa Monica weekly column is supported by Bike Center in Santa Monica.

I felt I should get caught up on the issue so I tuned into the council meeting this week for an action packed SMO agenda (video of meeting here). I’m glad that I did, both for getting a sense of what’s the latest going on with the airport, and because nested within the various coalitions for and against SMO are so many of the debates that define other points of contention on land use and transportation within the city.

There were two major agenda items. One to raise the landing fee from $2.07 to $5.48 per thousand pounds, and include planes based out of SMO. The second was to consider alternative scenarios for the airport land in addition to other efforts that might mitigate impacts. In 2015, an agreement from 1984 with the FAA governing a portion of the runway will expire, opening the possibility that the runway could be shortened so that jet aircraft could not use the facility. At times the public comment flowed across both items interchangeably, and was extensive at over 90 requests to speak with overflow seating.

From my observation most voices fell into one of a few camps. There were the pilots and others from the airport who see the fee increase as an unwelcome burden, and talk of an eventual full closure of the airport as a threat to their employment or operations at the facility.

There are residents that are simply fed up with the airport for various reasons from the annoyance of sound to the more serious concerns of leaded fuel emitted so close to dense neighborhoods. However there are some residents and homeowners who split in support of the airport status quo on the assumption that without it the land would become intensely developed and cause more automobile congestion. There are those who view the airport as a critical part of the city’s historic character that should not be lost. Some voices have articulated a vision for a substantial park to be financed by a public bond measure, a one last chance for a truly significant park on the Westside that isn’t a golf course. Read more…

Rachel & Owen from image right, blowing the minds of Roosevelt Elementary students ( who were competing for active miles to school) with their cross country trip plans. (source: odog4life.wordpress.com)

Owen Gorman and Rachel Horn, two friends who’ve known each other since their time attending Samohi, are embarking on a coast to coast bicycle tour combining their advocacy interests along the way. The two college graduates were both part of the early student led effort to host a bike to school event on the Samohi campus that became the successful Bike It! Walk It! program. I caught up with them recently to chat about their plans for riding coast to coast and about their advocacy.

Our Santa Monica weekly column is supported by Bike Center in Santa Monica.

Owen, who you may have seen behind the scenes at many Santa Monica bike advocacy events, first filled me in on some of the back story to the early days of the Bike It Day! movement at the school. I was curious to hear more details about the beginning as I had seen it all developing from the outside back when I was first taking interest in blogging the local bike movement, but I had never been involved directly.

He told me he had started going out to Santa Monica Critical Mass rides, back when it was bigger and before the police campaign had completely stifled its momentum. That participation sparked his interest in the politics of bicycling, and new possibilities for the way life and local transportation. Owen was a school newspaper photographer at the time and started covering Santa Monica critical mass and started the Santa Monica High School Bicycle Coalition, with students he got to know through covering critical mass.

Around the same time, the Samohi Solar Alliance, a school club that started in 2004, succeeded in their goal of getting solar water heating installed on the school’s Drake pool building. The scope of issues the group tackles has revolved around moving away from fossil fuel dependency and environmental sustainability, with a think global act local ethos. From solar power, to waste reduction, to reducing car trips, the Solar Alliance has had it’s sights set on promoting forward thinking at the school.

Rachel Horn was a member of Solar Alliance club when the group, led by then Samohi student Lulu Mickelson, decided they wanted to promote biking to school as an alternative to the line of cars drop off culture that became the norm.  Rachel told me the idea was proposed as a collaboration with the Bike Club. The initially generically titled “Bike To School Day” event was born at Samohi in 2007. The effort expanded and later became known as Bike It! Walk It! day, which I’ve watched continually and gradually shift the culture not only at the local schools, but of the whole community.

Owen stayed involved in bike advocacy while he was studying cultural anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, helping to get a student bike library program going to make bikes more accessible to incoming students. He also helped put together an after school bike club at the local middle school. I’ve also seen him teaching student bike safety classes since returning to Santa Monica among other things to keep building the local bike culture. Read more…