Culver City

Eyes on the Street: Recent Centinela Bike Lanes in Culver City

The new partially-protected Centinela facility is a welcome safety upgrade for a stretch that long lacked any type of bikeway, but the area remains not all that bike-friendly

By Joe Linton

3:22 PM PDT on May 8, 2024

Eyes on the Street: Recent Centinela Bike Lanes in Culver City

Recent protected bike lane on Centinela Avenue in Culver City. Photos by Joe Linton/Streetsblog

Culver City recently installed new bike lanes on Centinela Avenue. The project includes a short stretch of protected bikeway, some green pavement, and a bicycle traffic signal.

The project added about a half mile of new bike lanes – from near Bristol Parkway to the boundary with L.A. City (near Mesmer Avenue). The new section extended Culver City’s existing Centinela bike lanes that used to end east of the 405.

The lanes were striped 4-6 months ago.

The bike signal, uncommon in Southern California, was added soon after. The signal gives cyclists their own phase at the busy intersection of Centinela and Sepulveda Boulevard (where drivers have two right turn only lanes).

A new bicycle traffic signal at Centinela/Sepulveda gives cyclists a signal phase separate from two lanes of right-turning cars

A closer look at the bike traffic signal. During Streetsblog’s visit yesterday afternoon, numerous drivers made prohibited right turns against the signal – note the red right turn arrow at the far side of the intersection (middle right of the image). In the case of this photo, the camera-activated bike signal was trigged by the photographer standing (with bicycle) on the curb – so no cyclist was actually crossing.

The new Centinela lanes are a welcome safety upgrade for a stretch that long lacked any type of bikeway, but the area remains not all that bike-friendly; it is still wide streets, choked with lots of car traffic spilling onto and off the adjacent 13-lane-wide 405 Freeway and the nearby six-lane 91 Freeway.

The western end of the bikeway is at the Culver City-L.A City boundary near Mesmer.

The new Centinela bikeway includes intermittent green striping at conflict areas

Culver City has several other bikeways and traffic calming coming soon to that Fox Hills area, including protected bike lanes on Buckingham Parkway, new unprotected lanes on Bristol Parkway and Green Valley Circle, and extending existing bike lanes on Hannum Avenue.

(The city of L.A. Mobility Plan approved several future bikeways that would connect to Culver’s Centinela lanes: new protected bike lanes to the west on Centinela, upgrades to existing unprotected lanes southward on Sepulveda, and a neighborhood connection on Arizona Avenue. These will be gradually installed under new Measure HLA requirements.)

Credit to Streets for All’s Michael Schneider for bringing this bikeway to SBLA attention via this tweet.

Joe Linton

bike lanes | Culver City

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