City Planning

At this week's meeting of the city's Bicycle Advisory Committee, the Planning Department's Rye Baerg outlined some proposed changes to the city's bike parking ordinance for new developments that should go public this Spring.

Apparently Occidental College's Urban and Environmental Policy Institute has more in store for the City's New Planning Director, Michael LoGrande, than just a question and answer session at tonight's event.  It looks like they're going to mix in a little advocacy, too.

As a city, is Los Angeles ready to create communities that best integrate with the new transit system promised by Measure R and the 30/10 proposal?

(This is the first of a two-part series on the Bike Plan before it's heard by the Planning Commission.  Part II, by Joe Linton, is coming tomorrow. - DN)

Traditionally, the Friday before a holiday weekend is considered the time to release news that you don't want to get traction in the public.  Sure, the story could get picked up, but there's less people watching the news that night or reading the newspaper the next morning than any other time.

Via the LADOT Bike Blog comes the news cyclists and community activists have been waiting for: The Department of City Planning and LADOT will finally be releasing the final draft of the Bike Plan, a mere half a year behind schedule.  Sources at LADOT have told me to expect the new plan to appear at labikeplan.org later today.  The Bike Blog offers a preview of some of the differences we can expect between the much-panned draft released last summer and the new version:

Los Angeles' Department of City Planning (DCP) is working on a study that has the potential to change the way that the city does streets. DCP's "Street Classification and Benchmarking Study" is lead by city planners Claire Bowin and Jane Choi and their consultant, Fehr and Peers' Jeremy Klop. The $55,000 study is funded by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG.) There's apparently no information on the study online yet, though briefings on it were presented at the recent StreetSummit and to the Green L.A. Transportation Work Group. Dorothy Le reported on the GLATWG briefing at the Bike Coalition's blog.

By the time the bike portion of the "Bike-Only" City Council Transportation Committee hearing began at 3:45, one hour and forty-five minutes late, it was clear that the bicycling-love-fest that we've seen at past "Bike-Only" meetings wasn't going to happen.  Not only did the meeting start late because of an over-run of the City Council meeting, but Councilman Richard Alarcon had already stormed out of the room because Councilman Bill Rosendahl had caused the full Council to lose quorum and Councilman LaBonge had already snapped at the audience for talking during public comment.