L.A. City recently completed three miles of complete streets upgrades along the San Fernando Valley's Reseda Boulevard. While the street and its surrounding neighborhood remain somewhat suburban, the recent upgrades are benefitting the pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders who travel on Reseda every day.
The Reseda Boulevard upgrades are primarily the brainchild of L.A. City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, though he collaborated with Councilmember John Lee, whose district includes a short portion at the north end of the project. Credit also goes to the city departments that designed and installed the improvements: the Department of Transportation (LADOT), Department of Sanitation, and Public Works Department's Bureaus of Street Services, Engineering, and Street Lighting.
Reseda Boulevard construction kicked off in late 2020. Streetsblog shared in-progress photos in July 2022. When the project wrapped up last March, the city partnered with CicLAvia to host a Ready for Reseda grand opening. Streetsblog didn't make it out to that event, but visited Reseda Boulevard last week.
Reseda Boulevard now has the longest continuous protected bike lane facility in Southern California: 3.9 miles long from Plummer Street to Victory Boulevard.
The Reseda project added missing bike lane segments to close several gaps. It also upgraded existing unprotected bike lanes, resulting in 2.9 new protected miles. Those connect to L.A. City's very first protected bike lanes, the mile-long Reseda Boulevard Great Streets improvements.
The new bikeway protection varies somewhat. The sturdiest protection is concrete bus-boarding islands. The vast majority of the lanes are parking-protected, with a handful of narrower blocks protected by soft-hit bollards.
Overall, Reseda Boulevard now has 11.7 miles of sometimes hard-fought continuous bike lanes. (For what it's worth, that "continuous" omits a short [~800 foot] gap at the 118 Freeway; taking that gap into account, the continuous total drops to 9.9 miles.) Those 11.7 miles are the longest bike lane total for any street in the city of Los Angeles. That beats all the city's other lengthy bike lane streets: Venice Boulevard (9.7 miles), Devonshire Street (9.2 miles), Rinaldi Street (7.9 miles), Avalon Boulevard (6.4 miles), Valley Circle Boulevard/Mullholland Drive (6.2 miles) and Winnetka Avenue (5.6 miles).
Of those bike lane streets, Venice, Avalon, and Winnetka all have significant protected stretches, though they are shorter than Reseda's. Venice had planned a 5.1 mile continuous stretch of protected bikeway, but the city scaled that project back and left several sizable gaps.
The Reseda Boulevard Complete Streets Project isn't all bicycle improvements. It also features new street trees, concrete bus-boarding islands, rainwater gardens, additional lighting, upgraded traffic signals, and one newly signalized crosswalk.
Below are a couple more photos showing off the Reseda Boulevard upgrades.
