The city of Los Angeles Transportation Department (LADOT), working with City Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman, is planning two miles of protected bike lanes along Hollywood Boulevard. The improvements would serve transit-rich and relatively population-dense portions of the neighborhoods of Hollywood, East Hollywood, and Los Feliz.
LADOT's Hollywood Boulevard Safety and Mobility Project is planned to extend along Hollywood from Gower Street to Lyman Place. This stretch of Hollywood would be the first protected bike lanes in Soto-Martinez' council district 13. The protected bike lanes were already approved in the city's 2015 Mobility Plan.
The new bike lanes would be located just east of the iconic Hollywood Walk of Fame, where the city is planning the tepid Heart of Hollywood project. That project, developed largely under Soto-Martinez' anti-bike predecessor, secured quite a bit of Metro bike/ped funding with designs that do little for bike/ped safety.
A few blocks east of the current Hollywood Boulevard Safety and Mobility Project, advocates are pushing for the Sunset4All street safety improvements, which would include protected bike lanes.
The proposed bike and walk upgrades would connect directly to the Metro B Line Hollywood/Western subway station, and would be spitting distance from Hollywood/Vine and Sunset/Vermont stations.
An LADOT project fact sheet notes that this part of Hollywood Boulevard has seen "a pattern of serious crashes" in which "56 people were killed or severely injured between 2010 and 2019." Among them was Tomás Galvan Muñoz killed in May 2015. Muñoz was on his bike crossing Hollywood in a marked crosswalk at Hobart Avenue in full afternoon daylight when a driver crashed into him, throwing the cyclist into a parked car. Muñoz was pronounced dead at the scene.
At a virtual town hall meeting last week, LADOT shared their proposed designs for new protected bike lanes. In order to improve safety, LADOT plans to remove a travel lane (termed a road diet) in some stretches, and eliminate on-street parking in others.
In addition to the lane reduction bikeway, LADOT is planning speed tables, left turn hardening, and paint/bollard improvements at the Hollywood/Vermont intersection.
According to Councilmember Soto-Martinez' newsletter, the Hollywood Boulevard town hall was their "most attended virtual event" since Soto-Martinez took office. The council office noted that more than 200 people attended and "over 80 percent of speakers expressed some level of support for the project."
LADOT is currently finalizing project plans, and will coordinate implementation with future street resurfacing.
Post updated 2/6 to include image from and link to last week's LADOT presentation which was added to LADOT's Hollywood Blvd project webpage.
