First Look at Farmer’s Field Traffic EIR: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Earlier today, AEG announced the completion of the first draft of environmental documents for Farmers Field, the proposed football stadium for Downtown Los Angeles.  The document, available on City Planning's website, is a mammoth 10,000 pages and the ceremonial handing over of the documents to the city at today's event involved 13 overflowing three ring binders.

Of course, the EIR was already available on City Planning's website.

With only 45 days to examine all 10,000 pages, the clock is running.  Here is our first thoughts on the transportation planning for Farmers Field.

Increasing Capacity on the 101

When the Daily News published its exclusive report on the transportation planning for the Downtown Stadium last night, it focused on a proposal to widen the 101 freeway from Downtown Los Angeles to Glendale Boulevard.  While the idea of eliminating a bottleneck probably appeals to car commuters from the Valley to Downtown and football fans alike, Caltrans and the other agencies who will spend AEG's $2.5 million to study the project need to be vigilant.

Lat month, the Metro Board authorized a funding agreement (Item 8) with Caltrans of $100,000 for development of Project Study Report (PSR) for the “Highway 101 Auxiliary Lane Project" that appears to be the same project proposed by AEG.  It should take up to six months for Metro, Caltrans and other participating agreements to be ready for the study.

Increasing capacity on one highway in an area where it connects with so many other highways in such a short area is fraught with peril, even if one only measures a highway project's success by traffic flow.  True, traffic may flow through the couple of miles that are bottlenecked now, but opening the flow in that area could encourage more people to drive to more destinations and increase congestion elsewhere.

Of course, the new traffic patterns will impact congestion, air quality, and life in general on a daily basis, not just on game day.  If the traffic study shows an increased amount of cars on the 101 and connected highways, and it probably will, officials will have to decide whether or not increasing the amount of cars on L.A.'s freeways is a cost the region is willing to pay to increase access to a special event's center.

Blue Line Station

To its credit, AEG proposes doubling the size of the Pico Boulevard platform at the Blue/Expo Line station directly across from Farmers Field.  A similar proposal was first floated by the Los Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club's Transportation Committee in their "scoping comments" submitted in April of 2011.  To see the Sierra Club's full transportation proposal, click here.

Looking at AEG's proposal for the station, Sierra Club Transportation Committee Chair Jerard Wright thinks that AEG is off to a good start.

Transit

A major part of AEG's pitch for the stadium focuses on creating the "greenest stadium" in the country.  A major part of that initiative is convincing fans and event goers to "take the train to the game" (or bus).  The environmental documents estimate that one in five Farmers Field attendees will arrive to the area via transit or via chartered bus.

To achieve this goal, AEG is going to need help.  No matter the time of day or day of the week, existing transit service won't be enough to get everyone to and from the area, so AEG will be asking for Metro, Metrolink, LADOT and other local carriers to increase service on event day.  In an era when transit agencies are cutting service for commuters, this could be a non-starter unless AEG or event planners help foot the bill.

For any of this to work, people need to be able to walk to the stadium from transit centers, from parking lots, from hotels, from their offices, or wherever else they might be starting.  AEG estimates that seven percent of all Field attendees will start and complete their trip entirely on foot on weekdays, and half that number on weekends.

Recognizing this, the environmental documents devote a lot of time discussing pedestrian access, including a 36 page section devoted exclusively to bicycle and pedestrian planning.  The document mostly discusses pedestrian planning in the form of street closures, sidewalk widenings, access to and from transit stations and intersection crossings.

Honestly, there's a lot of information in the report, and Streetsblog will have a full analysis next week, but for now our general opinion is that AEG appears serious about creating an attractive and safe pedestrian plan for the stadium.

As for bikes, there isn't a lot planned.  The environmental documents make no assumptions on whether the City Bike Plan will be completed and currently there aren't connecting bike lanes from Downtown Los Angeles to the stadium area.  Nevertheless, the stadium will feature 250 spaces on bike racks, more than double what exists for Staples Center/LA Live at the moment.

Oddly, they are assuming a bike parking center for the region similar to Long Beach's Bike Station will be built in the coming years which is a former project of the CRA but not the CRA's other transportation project for the area, the South Figueroa Corridor Project which has dedicated funding.

Parking

As part of the retrofit being done to the convention center as part of the proposal, AEG will demolish some parking lots even as it builds new parking elsewhere.  There will be a net increase of 1,102 parking spaces within 20 minutes of Farmer's Field joining the existing 50,000 parking spaces.  AEG will not own any of the parking.  Unlike the Dodgers, there will be no reason for the team or stadium to promote driving to the stadium.