Bike Lanes Extended on Reseda Boulevard Are First Clear Measure HLA Upgrade

Around a month ago, the L.A. City Department of Transportation (LADOT) installed about 350 feet of new bike lanes near the south end of Reseda Boulevard in Tarzana. The hilly suburban block of bike lanes is not much in and of itself, but represents the first new facility clearly resulting from the passage of Measure HLA.

Voters approved Measure HLA last March. The new law requires that the city install any planned bus/bike/walk features when the city repaves streets. Measure HLA is triggered by modifications at least an eighth of a mile long. For the most part, improvements – mainly bus lanes, bike lanes, and pedestrian enhancements – are planned on bigger streets (see maps). Also for the most part, the city Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) paused repaving projects that would trigger bus/bike/walk upgrades.

StreetsLA’s Measure HLA pause remains in place now, but is not quite airtight, as one repaved segment (Reseda) out of about five hundred completed since last March did trigger improvements.

StreetsLA resurfaced about a mile of Reseda Boulevard in early September. Soon thereafter, LADOT reinstalled existing bike lanes for most of that stretch, but the short new HLA section was still pending as of mid-November.

Streetsblog visited Reseda Boulevard yesterday, and the new stretch is complete.

It’s going to take some advocacy (maybe some lawsuits), but, with one successful HLA upgrade under their belt, StreetsLA and LADOT can continue to take advantage of future repaving to make more L.A. streets safer and more multimodal.

The addition extends some records that Reseda Boulevard already holds:

• Reseda Blvd. has the longest continuous on-street bikeway facility in L.A. County: now 10.0 miles
• Reseda Blvd. has the most total miles of on-street bikeway of any L.A. County street: now 11.8 miles
• This didn’t change; Reseda Blvd. still has the longest continuous protected bike lanes in L.A. County: 3.9 miles