Santa Monica

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.

Santa Monica’s transit service, the Big Blue Bus, has been in a bind for a while now due to declining revenue from the state throwing off its budget. Many transit agencies have been dealing with similar shortfalls and forced to make tough choices. Unfortunately In many cases that has resulted in trimming routes or dropping service frequency at the very moment that demand for transit service is growing.

Santa Monica has been steadily rolling out more and more smart meters throughout the city with sensors for tracking when spaces are occupied. Nearly every paper in town has been writing about these installations, and the various policy tweaks and new features that accompany them.

Following recent street repaving along Montana Ave., you may notice preliminary markings that are a little different than what was there before.

Santa Monica city staff presented the beginnings of the developing Bergamot Area Plan to the Planning Commision Wednesday night for feedback, offering a promising look at what Santa Monica’s eastern transit oriented district might feel like. As part of the implementation of the LUCE general plan, a number of specific plans are being created involving their own public outreach process. Several large workshops were completed for the Bergamot area in recent months, offering direction that is shaping the drafting of the document.

Ever since I attended a lecture by Donald Shoup at the LA Street summit in 2010, it has been stuck in my brain that most municipal zoning codes effectively make it illegal for developers to pursue truly sustainable models of development. Parking minimum requirements set a bar for levels of parking that must be built, often with arbitrary formulas based on building use and size written during decades when trends of car use and ownership were on very different trajectories than they are today.

On Earth Day this past Sunday, the Expo Line Phase II Bicycle Advisory Committee, of which I am a member, was given a tour of the Expo corridor and bikeway proposals with a few of the private consultants and public planners involved in the project. Looking at diagrams is never a sufficient replacement for some on the ground perspective, so I was glad we had this opportunity to scope everything out. It was also exciting to see a few testing trains in operation in preparation for tomorrow's opening.  I had not had a chance to get out and see the trains in action previously.

The city of Santa Monica is hosting a grand opening opening of what is being called the Santa Monica Bike Campus this Sunday as part of April 22nd Earth Day activities. This bike campus facility is on a linear strip of what was no longer actively used roadway connecting to parking lots just east of the beach bike path at Ocean Park Boulevard. The pavement is now painted with various markings for teaching bike education classes. There are simulated lanes, sharrows, crosswalks and bike lanes for teaching lane positioning, as well as some designs for bike handling tests that are part of the League of American Bicycling’s “Smart Cycling” course material.

Santa Monica has done a lot of things right over the years, such as reinvesting in the public realm, supporting education, improving pedestrian accessibility, funding the Big Blue Bus, and being ahead of the curve regionally on bike facilities. However success is not without its own challenges. While many cities saw real estate prices plummet since  the 2008 US housing market crash, Santa Monica has largely retained high home prices because it is such a desirable place to live.  The downside of this trend is that multifamily residential rents are also climbing.