Santa Monica

Back in January of 2010, food bloggers helped make the debut of a "food truck parking lot" at the vacant car dealership lot on 14th and Santa Monica a smashing success. Over 1,000 people showed up, and  many of the trucks actually ran out of food. However the event was illegal for the location under city zoning, and was quickly shut down on their 2nd day. This was back when the food truck scene reaching beyond the traditional market food trucks had always served before in Los Angeles was a new thing, and clearly the pent up demand for new food options exploded.

Yesterday, the Santa Monica Daily Press published a story documenting "budget adjustments" affecting the city’s Bike Action Plan. The changes being made are driven by a number of factors with declining state revenue to the city being chief among them. The changes went largely unnoticed until planning commissioner Richard McKinnon started digging into the matter and discovered numbers weren’t adding up to prior promises.

This post marks the conclusion to my 3 part series "Santa Monica Traffic, Is It Really So Bad?". Links to the first two parts are here (1) & here (2).

The Santa Monica Lookout News recently reported that Santa Monica is speeding up its bike share plans from the 2016 date originally in the city's bike action plan, to possibly by the end of next year. I felt the original goal date was unambitious, so I was really excited to read the status update the Lookout got from Francie Stephan, community and strategic planning manager for the city of Santa Monica.

Sadly this week marks the second fatality of a bike rider in Santa Monica this year (following the recent death of Antonio Cortez). This raises the Santa Monica traffic death toll to at least four that I am aware of in 2012, counting two prior pedestrian deaths this year.

Two weeks ago I started a conversation about traffic in Santa Monica.  That first post stirred up quite a bit of commentary and criticism. I expected this given my deviation from the playbook of many other local columnists: using populist rhetoric to complain about traffic congestion as a universal evil, with no viable proposals of what to do about it. When a "solution" is suggested, it's often something along the lines of "don’t build anything ever, unless it is building more parking garages" (which actually attracts more car trips).

Last week I started a multiple part series on traffic, and the myths that surround it in Santa Monica, promising a part 2. That is still coming, but I am holding it for next week's column to focus on recent developments concerning what had been proposed as a car-free mixed use apartment building at 401 Broadway.

If you were to summarize the biggest complaint of Santa Monicans and many Westsiders in one word, that word would probably have to be traffic. With no other subject but auto-traffic congestion do I encounter so much heated rhetoric, nor as many entirely contradictory messages about what’s causing it and what to do about it. So I thought it would be helpful to address some of the most common things I hear but which I feel are misunderstandings of how traffic really works.

It is not without a tinge of irony that parking structures, the enablers of all the excessive car traffic I so despise in urban life, are often some of the best places to get beautiful views of the city. Tourists flock to the hotels along Ocean Avenue and the bluffs of Palisades Park, to catch the stunning Pacific sunsets, but if you want to look at our own work as a human civilization, your better off catching the elevator to the top deck of Parking Structure #5. For better or worse, our parking structures are our grandest works of civic architecture, towering far above any other public buildings in Santa Monica.