Eyes on the Street: Beverly Hills Bikeways

It's not really news that Beverly Hills has bike lanes. Streetsblog recently visited the 90210 city and shares photos of bikeways implemented there in the past couple years.

If I remember correctly, Beverly Hills didn't have any bike lanes about a decade ago. Circa 2012-14 the city added basic bike lanes on Burton Way and Crescent Drive. Cyclists pushed for the city to incorporate lanes on the city's revamp of Santa Monica Boulevard; the city installed bright green lanes there in 2018.

Those three segments were the city's only bike lanes in 2019, when the city developed its complete streets plan.

Since then, the city hasn't become a bike paradise, but it's clearly no longer a biking gap. There has been a trickle of new bike facilities, with more on the way. Also, the city's first subway station (some there opposed, some welcomed) will open next year.

Reading news coverage of bikeway approvals (in the face of some complaints) I expected more bike lanes there than there actually are. For example, last year the Beverly Press stated, "The new [Doheny Drive] bike lanes will connect to other bike lanes in the city on Clifton Way, Charleville Boulevard and Gregory Way." But Clifton, Charleville, and Gregory don't have bike lanes, just shared lane markings, called sharrows. (Sharrows have been termed the dregs of bike infrastructure; safety-wise they are basically useless. Beverly Hills calls them its "minimum grid bicycle pavement markings.")

Beverly Hills did recently add two new bike lane facilities, and approved a third coming soon.

Doheny Drive

In 2023 Beverly Hills installed one mile of bikeway on Doheny Drive, basically from Burton Way to Whitworth Drive, with a one-block gap south of Wilshire Boulevard.

South of Charleville, Doheny has standard bidirectional bike lanes (see photo at top of post).

North of Wilshire, Doheny has an uphill bike lane, with downhill sharrows. The bikeway ends at Burton Way, the L.A. City boundary.

Roxbury Drive

Beverly Hills is one of only about a dozen L.A. County cities that have protected bike lanes.

The city has one long block of quality parking-protected bike lane - on Roxbury Drive, along the front of Roxbury Park (between Olympic Boulevard and the city boundary just north of Beverly Green Drive). This ~900-foot long facility was approved as a temporary pilot in 2021, then, last year, the city process got underway to possibly make them permanent.

The Roxbury bikeway is protected southbound, in front of the park, and unprotected northbound. The parking-protected side features plastic bollards, and landscaped planters.

Beverly Hills' short Roxbury bikeway extends adjacent unprotected lanes on Roxbury in the city of Los Angeles.

(One frustrating thing I noticed is how this protected block of Roxbury contrasts with Neptune Avenue in the L.A. City neighborhood of Wilmington. When L.A. added diagonal parking to 56-foot wide Neptune Avenue, the city removed a bike lane, claiming it would not fit. On 54-foot wide Roxbury, the city of Beverly Hills managed to fit all the same features - two travel lanes, two sides on-street parking with one side diagonal - and included a protected bike lane. Maybe L.A. could learn a lesson from Beverly Hills, and rework Neptune to add the bike lane back?)

Next Up: Beverly Drive

In late 2023, Beverly Hills approved adding protected bike lanes on a four block stretch of Beverly Boulevard from Doheny Drive to Santa Monica Boulevard. The facility will connect to planned Beverly Drive bike lanes in the cities of West Hollywood and Los Angeles.