West Hollywood

Yesterday at noon, the City of West Hollywood officially launched WeHo Pedals, the fourth bike-share system in the region operated by CycleHop. WeHo Pedals has 150 bicycles at seventeen stations throughout West Hollywood with rates ranging from $7 an hour to a yearly pass at $99. There is currently a discount for the yearly pass, $69 until September 6. For more information, visit the official website.

The full system launch is not until August 30, but the city of West Hollywood soft-launched its bike-share system yesterday. WeHo Pedals now has dozens of bicycles available at four initial stations. Introductory annual memberships are just $69.

It has been a week since Metro Bike Share opened in downtown Los Angeles. The system is currently open only to members, who must pre-register online. So I figured it's time to take a ride and assess how bike-share is doing in various incarnations around the L.A. basin, including West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and downtown Los Angeles.

The cities of West Hollywood and Los Angeles celebrated the grand opening of a collaborative project yesterday: 1.2 miles of bike lanes on Fairfax Avenue. The new bike lanes extend from Melrose Avenue to Hollywood Boulevard. The northern end of the lanes were striped by the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) in 2014. That facility was extended southward this year, through the cities of both L.A. and West Hollywood.

Yesterday, The Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee approved terms for five Breeze bike-share stations to be located in the L.A. City neighborhood of Venice. Full details are available in the staff report [PDF] for council file 16-0176.

Last year, the city of West Hollywood completed planning for the La Brea Streetscape Project. This ambitious plan includes “design, installation and construction of streetscape improvements to a .375 mile segment of La Brea Avenue in West Hollywood,” as quoted from Metro’s The Source. In addition, the project promised to transform La Brea into a “more complete street that can support more alternative modes of transit”.

The City of West Hollywood launched a new website yesterday to help citizens stay involved and informed of efforts to update the Creative City's 2003 Pedestrian and Bicycle Mobility Plan. Walk+Bike WeHo features a news site specific to the plan, a 10 question survey on people's experience walking and bicycling in West Hollywood and a "Shareabout" map developed by OpenPlans. (Yes, THAT OpenPlans.)

Hollywood is changing.

(I noticed an uptick in press discussions about "density and transit" and "density and West Hollywood."  To respond to these articles, many of which are predicting doom for anyone foolish enough to try and densify their cities, I asked Dan Wentzel, a transit advocate who resides in West Hollywood, to take take a turn at the Streetsblog helm.  His article is below.  For more Wentzel, you can pretty much read any transit-related story's comment thread here on Streetsblog.  Or check out his personal blog at Ride the Pink Line. - DN)