The L.A. City Transportation Department (LADOT) recently installed new bike lanes on Avenue 51 and Townsend Avenue. These two streets form a hilly connection between two Northeast L.A. neighborhoods: Eagle Rock and Highland Park.
The new bike lanes are one-way uphill, with downhill sharrows. This asymmetric treatment is not ideal, but makes sense on somewhat narrow, hilly streets where cyclists ascend at speeds much slower than car traffic. The city's first one-way uphill bike lane was installed in 2022 on Yosemite Drive, the street at the north end of the new Townsend bike lane.
The new bikeway includes 0.5 mile of uphill bike lane on Avenue 51 (from York Boulevard to Townsend Avenue), 0.4 mile of uphill bike lane on Townsend (from Yosemite to near the crest of the hill), and about 0.15 mile of overlap (Townsend bike lanes in both directions) at the top of the hill.
Townsend also received a short stretch (about 800 feet) of one-way bus-only lane for the Highland Park/Eagle Rock DASH.
LADOT and Metro have recently collaborated on 40 miles of new bus lanes (50 lane-miles). Townsend adds to that total, and appears to be the city's first DASH-only bus-only lane.
While the Townsend bus lane is perhaps a precedent that could spread to improve transit in many locations, here it appears to be less of a needed transit improvement than a way to narrow an over-built street. Townsend is a wide hillside street where drivers sometimes travel (and pass) at unsafe speeds on curved stretches with limited sight lines. The new bus lane appears aptly designed to improve safety by discouraging unsafe driving behavior.
All in all, these new bus and bike lanes are worthwhile modest steps toward safer, more multimodal streets.
