Santa Monica

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.

The debate on affordability and access to education turned ugly on Tuesday at Santa Monica College. A student protest of the board of trustees was halted by campus police using pepper spray, garnering national media attention. The heart of the contention between students and administrators is a proposal to maintain some classes slated to be cut due to state budget constraints, by introducing a second tier of classes with higher tuition. Basically, classes that were most popular with students, including many that would be prerequisites to gain entry to professional degree programs such as nursing would cost more than less popular ones, a move some students have called a privatization of public education. Protests continued this week, and the two tier plan may be placed on hold.

This week marks another milestone in new approaches to street design in the city of Santa Monica. A two block segment of Longfellow St. receives a makeover, taking cues from the mixed use woonerf concept from the Netherlands. Longfellow St. had always been too narrow to include both street parking for adjacent apartments and sidewalks, making it an ideal candidate for promoting mixed street use. Its formally unappealing design and poor lighting was also felt by some to be a contributing factor to crime in the area. Now vehicle traffic is calmed with cues from new plants and textured surfaces.  Solar powered pedestrian scale lighting with LED bulbs were installed along the street. Other ideas are being considered for further traffic calming enhancements later, that would eliminate the need for traffic control signage all together.