Eyes on the Street – Colima Road Bike Lanes
SGV cyclists who want a climb should head to the ‘Heights’ – Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights, that is – because there’s now a three-mile continuous bike lane on Colima Road. It’s going to be five miles long within the next few years.
L.A. County Department of Public Works’ Colima Road Improvement Project removed some vehicle travel lane space, and otherwise narrowed vehicle lanes to make room for a buffered bike lane, as well as improvements to signals, sidewalks, driveways, and curb ramps. The price tag is about $41 million, and construction is expected to finish in Summer of 2028.
The nearly finished first segment starts in the west at Casino Drive and goes immediately downhill toward Hacienda Boulevard, then climbs back up to Punta Del Este Drive before dropping down again toward Halliburton Road.
At the moment though, the finished portion of the bike lane closes between Country Canyon Road and Halliburton, as construction crews are rehabbing and beautifying some medians between there and Azusa Avenue.
There’s an estimated two years to go until work is finished all the way to Fullerton Road. At that point, it will offer cyclists connections to Schabarum Regional Park (a great destination for mountain biking and hiking) and the Puente Hills Mall, as well as the several other job centers on Colima.
Colima is a fairly heavily trafficked arterial for the South San Gabriel Valley – one without a real parallel alternate. While this project adds more than a mile of new bike lanes, closing a bike lane gap (Allenton Avenue to Casino), several Reddit users on r/BikeLA have noted that the unprotected bike lanes don’t offer the safety improvements that protected bike lanes would.
Similar to the county’s South Whittier improvements, the Colima project includes worthwhile modest bike improvements and landscaping/beautification (primarily in medians), while the bulk of the project budget/scope (street resurfacing and widening, traffic signal upgrade) is focused on improving conditions for drivers.
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