Road Diet

Amidst all the election news comes word that there is a small Bikelash brewing on the Westside from residents worried that the diet is creating spillover traffic jams on other local streets. The good news is that the proposed solutions seem to be about improving traffic calming measures on the streets parallel to Motor Avenue. The bad news is the complaints will be heard at tonight's meeting of the Palms Neighborhood Council which will feature local City Council Member Paul Koretz. The agenda for tonight's hearing is here.

A recent report by Cullen McCormick uses a road diet in Northeast Los Angeles as a case study to examine the economic impacts of reducing mixed-use travel lanes and increasing bicycle lanes. Despite the traditional opposition of local businesses when diets are proposed in front of their stores, McCormick's case study finds there was little difference in the hyper local economies after a portion of York Boulevard underwent a road diet in 2006.

The first time I biked down Main Street in Santa Monica and then into the Venice Neighborhood of Los Angeles was the summer of 2008.  I was following Santa Monica Critical Mass and part of the comically over-aggressive antics of the SMPD included herding cyclists into the lane by buzzing groups of cyclists on motorcycles and cruisers until we passed into Los Angeles.  When we crossed the border two things vanished, the police presence and the bike lane.

Last night, the Venice Neighborhood Council agreed  to the Main Street Road Diet/Bike Lanes plan proposed by LADOT.  The new road striping ought to be on the ground "in the next couple of weeks."  Despite its approval, the Neighborhood Council had some concerns with the project and wanted LADOT to return with more safety measures to protect cyclists and calm traffic.  The Road Diet will run on Main Street from Navy St. to Windward Circle, and will extend the Santa Monica bike lanes and road diet into Venice.

Tomorrow night, the Venice Neighborhood Council will debate, and possibly approve or reject a proposal by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to remove travel lanes on Main Street in Venice in an effort to calm traffic and create space for bike lanes.

If the newly-restriped .3 mile area of Wilbur Avenue was supposed to be a compromise between the LADOT, City Council Office, advocates of fast moving car traffic, bicyclists and residents, it appears the LADOT put the politics of the situation over the road diet ahead of responsible engineering.

When we last checked in on the embattled Wilbur Avenue Road Diet, Councilman Greig Smith had ordered asked the LADOT to move forward with a "compromise" proposal that would maintain continuous bike lanes along the 2.3 mile diet but would return the northern .3 miles of the old diet to a four lane road. The merge will occur just south of the lighted intersection at Devonshire where four lanes will go to three and the reduced diet will begin

The heated debate over the Wilbur Road diet is back in the news as Councilman Greig Smith has asked the LADOT to move forward with a compromise proposal that it presented to a joint meeting of the Northridge West and Porter Ranch Neighborhood Councils last month.  The Council's had sent representatives to a "Wilbur Working Group" who helped LADOT devise the compromise, however neither the communities that wanted Wilbur returned to its faster design of yesteryear nor the community that applauded the calmed traffic was happy with the compromise.

For eight months now, the LADOT has been taking shots in the Valley over the a two mile road diet on Wilbur Avenue.  Between Nordhoff and Chatsworth, Wilbur went from two lanes in both directions to one lane in each direction, a left turn lane, and bike lanes on both sides.  Last night, representatives of the Northridge and Porter Ranch Neighborhood Councils, in an official and deciding vote, voted to leave the current road configuration as it was instead of repainting the road to a compromise plan created by the LADOT and a Wilbur Working Group.  There's a lot of potential headlines from this meeting, so I'll do my best to give each of them their due.