Downtown LA

Yesterday, a construction notice appeared on the official L.A. City Transportation Department (LADOT) Twitter account. It announced a "resurfacing and bike lane enhancement project" to include "protected bike lanes" on downtown L.A.'s Los Angeles Street, extending from First Street to Alameda Street. Construction is set to begin this weekend, and conclude by May 15. During the month-long construction, cyclists and drivers will share a single lane.

Downtown L.A. is getting a little safer for walking with some new traffic signals that give pedestrians a head start. Officially, these are called "Leading Pedestrian Intervals." The concept is that when pedestrians get the walk signal a few seconds before drivers get a green light, they can walk into the intersection and be more visible, and therefore safer.

People Street meets Hope Street.

Last Friday, Metro began its slightly-delayed closure of the Little Tokyo Gold Line Station. The station will be closed for about three months while Gold Line tracks are relocated to make way for Regional Connector subway construction. If this construction goes reasonably well, the on time within-budget Regional Connector will open in 2021.

Streetsie winner Nathan Lucero encountered some irritating signage when bicycling north on the Main Street bike lanes near El Pueblo downtown. From his @onmybikeinla Instagram post: (lightly edited)

Last month, after a fairly lengthy debate, the Metro Board of Directors approved an $11 million contract to bring bike-share to downtown Los Angeles. Though there is a lot of interest in bike-share on the Metro board, there is not a lot of agreement on exactly how to move forward.

Downtown L.A.'s "Broadway Dress Rehearsal" project entered a new phase last month. SBLA readers will recall that the Broadway project was a relatively quick and low-cost creation of bulb-outs designed to calm traffic. The project removed space from cars, giving it to people dining and traveling on foot on one of L.A.'s highest pedestrian-volume streets. Broadway's Dress Rehearsal opened August 2014 and every day plenty of people use it, especially the tables and chairs there. Last fall, the city Transportation Department (LADOT) published a study showing baseline conditions on Broadway; this fall LADOT will be following up with comparison data on what has changed.

A couple weeks ago, I reported that the great new bike corral on Main Street at 5th was the first in downtown Los Angeles. Commenter Steven White correctly pointed out that there are indeed two other on-street bike corrals in the Downtown Arts District. So although it is the first in the historic core, the Main Street corral wasn't the first downtown L.A. bike corral, nor was that my first or or likely to my last error to appear in writing.

Earlier this week, I accepted an invitation to do a downtown Los Angeles bike-along with City of L.A. Transportation Department (LADOT) parking enforcement officers. LADOT also uses bicycle officers to do parking enforcement in the Valley, West L.A., and Hollywood. The parking enforcement staff downtown is 30 strong, all on bicycle.