Santa Monica City Council Resolution Would Begin Design of 14th Street Protected Bikeway

This post first appeared at SBLA sister site Santa Monica Next.

For more on the transportation items on tonight’s SM City Council agenda, Juan Matute previewed the meeting and explained in an op/ed how the Safe System approach works and why he believes it is the right fit for Santa Monica.

The pitchforks are out for tonight’s city council meeting, with former mayor (and current city council candidate) Phil Brock and a website purportedly created by “concerned community members” attacking the city council for voting on whether to approve a $1,999,205 contract to Kimberly Horn Associated to design a protected bikeway on 14th Street between Washington Avenue and Pico Boulevard (Agenda, Item 4B). The meeting is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. tonight at City Hall.

Approval of the contract would be a milestone for the project, first approved as part of the city’s Bike Action Plan in 2020. Once the contract is secured, the consultant will design the roughly 1.3-mile bike safety project. The 14th Street facility would be an important link in Santa Monica’s growing network of protected bicycle infrastructure, connecting the 17th Street Metro E Line station, Santa Monica College, Lincoln Middle School, Memorial Park and the Michigan Avenue Neighborhood Greenway. 

It would cross three major streets, Broadway, Santa Monica Boulevard and Pico Boulevard, where the project is expected to include intersection safety improvements.

Unlike a project that would have to find funding from scratch, much of the money for 14th Street is already lined up. The project would draw $749,205 from a state Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities grant, $1.15 million from a Metro subregional grant and $100,000 from the St. John’s Hospital development agreement.

If Council approves the contract, design and community engagement would take place over the next two years, with construction currently targeted for fall 2028.

There is also a practical reason for the investment. Protected bike lanes are designed to make bicycling feel safer for people who are uncomfortable riding next to moving traffic. 

Research collected by PeopleForBikes has found that protected lanes can reduce crashes and injuries while attracting substantially more bicycle traffic than conventional painted lanes. In one national survey, adding a protected lane increased the share of people who felt very comfortable biking on a four-lane commercial street from 9 percent – with no protection – to 29 percent.

Locally, safety advocates including Santa Monica Spoke and Streets for All have been pushing the city to go beyond painted bike lanes and install more protected bikeways throughout the city. 

The project is not being proposed in a vacuum. Santa Monica has spent years identifying protected bikeways as a key part of its strategy to reduce serious and fatal crashes. The city’s Bike Action Plan and subsequent amendments have called for a connected network of facilities that people of different ages and abilities can actually use, rather than a collection of disconnected painted lanes.

But 14th Street has opponents

Former Mayor Phil Brock has been one of the most prominent critics of Santa Monica’s recent protected bikeway projects. As a councilmember in 2023, Brock raised concerns about the city’s 17th Street project after residents objected to the loss of parking and changes to the street. He crafted but ultimately pulled a motion that would have called for additional analysis and consideration of changes to the project.

Now Brock is comparing the proposed 14th Street design to the 17th Street project, despite the fact that there has not been a major crash along 17th since the lanes were installed. For Brock, the connections that the city trumpets along the 14th Street corridor are the reasons not to move forward with the project.

“14th Street runs unbroken from the top of the city to the bottom,” he says in a call to action on social media. “Fire, police, and paramedics use it daily, and UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center’s emergency department is one block away on 15th Street. This is the wrong street to narrow and the wrong way to do it.”

The 17th Street project created more than a mile of protected bikeway between Wilshire and Pico, including protected intersections at Broadway and Arizona. It connected the Metro E Line station with Santa Monica College, the Michigan Avenue Greenway and other bicycle facilities. When Streetsblog’s Joe Linton reviewed the finished infrastructure, he called the new protected bike lanes “amazing.”

The city’s account of the project points to a very different assessment from the one offered by its critics. The 17th Street and Michigan Avenue improvements have received the League of California Cities’ 2024 Outstanding Local Streets and Roads Project Award and the Southern California Chapter of the American Public Works Association’s 2024 Best Project of the Year award in the transportation category. The project was also named one of the best new bike lanes in the United States built in 2023.

The opposition to 14th Street has now been taken up by a small community group calling itself Unsafe Streets SM. The group’s website argues that the project would “squeeze” 14th Street and raises concerns about emergency access, parking, ADA access and traffic circulation. On 17th street, there was no loss of mixed-use (aka car) travel lanes.

The group is urging Council to delay the contract and conduct additional studies before moving ahead. However, the contract before Council is for design work, meaning the detailed configuration of the bikeway, intersections, crossings and other elements would still be developed. So what actually could be studied is something of a mystery.

Those concerns will presumably be part of the discussion Tuesday, should the measure be pulled from the “consent calendar” to allow for debate.