Santa Monica

Each year, Santa Monica hosts a Main St. Independence Day parade, with a cutesy small town feel that has made it one of my favorite annual events a few years ago. Various civic groups create small floats, or dress up, with homemade signs, and bikes are a staple for a rolling presence. City council members, past and present, cruise the street in electric vehicles, of which Santa Monica has quite a sizable fleet, candy is thrown, flags are waved, it's a fun little time. National political issues of the day sometimes make an appearance, with a group of whistle blowing marchers supporting Bradley Manning & Edward Snowden this year.

This week the Santa Monica city council authorized the city manager to award contracts for the installation and maintenance for the Big Blue Bus Shelter Redevelopment Program, bringing us close to implementation of a process that has dragged on for far too long. This plan to update and modernize bus stop facilities and extend amenities to more locations goes to discussions at least as far back as 2007. I still recall seeing renderings and promises in the papers many years ago, and before I was much involved in transit advocacy, that just never materialized.

Yes, bike riders are subject to the same laws drivers are.

Following last Friday’s horrific tragedy, the national media spotlight that followed, and another unrelated shooting soon after, some semblance of normalcy returned to Santa Monica last week with a council session punctuated by contentious land use agenda items and familiar debates about development.

This Wednesday,  the Santa Monica Planning Commission was presented with and spoke on the latest draft proposals for the Transportation Demand Management (TDM) portion of the pending zoning code .  The zoning code is currently being overhauled to meet goals and guidelines in the Land Use & Circulation Element. In short, TDM measures are polices that act as deliberate carrots and sticks to reduce car trips, or average vehicle ridership (AVR).

Fostering a culture and built environment that embraces walking is at the very core of sustainable urbanism, and frankly, the human experience as the endurance adapted bipeds that we are. However I must admit looking back over my Santa Monica columns thus far, I haven't given pedestrian issues a lot of specific attention yet. In many ways Santa Monica is a ahead of the curve on walkability. That so many travel from elsewhere in the region to come walk around in Santa Monica is evidence of this fact. However some areas of the city are better served than others, and safety remains a significant concern. Pedestrians being killed or seriously injured by collisions involving vehicles looms large among the most tragic headlines annually.

This week a UCLA research team (that included our own board member and contributor Juan Matute), published their findings on life-cycle green house gas emissions impacts, energy use, smog & respiratory particulates of public transit compared with driving, using the Metro Gold Line train and Orange Line bus rapid transit corridor as case studies.

Don’t get me wrong.

Santa Monica was just awarded a bump in it's Bicycle Friendly Community (BFC) classification by the League of American Bicycling, from bronze to silver. Coinciding with that news the walkability web application Walk Score released a new round of Bike Score rankings which now includes Santa Monica, which received an average score of 82.5 (rounded up to 83), high enough to come 5th in analyzed cities. Now there are probably few people more excited than myself about the real progress being made toward normalizing bicycling in Santa Monica, but I feel compelled to maintain some skepticism toward popular systems of classification for bicycle friendliness.