The city should be fulfilling its pledge with 40 miles of bike lanes - like these lanes recently added to Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard

Some folks have said: “OK, Joe, you don’t like the city’s sharrows – but what should they be doing?” Generally my answer is: BIKE LANES!

This blog post is a more long-winded response to the question of what projects I think L.A. should be implementing right now. Below I list bikeway projects that I think are good – and that I think that the city of L.A. could move forward with quickly.

I tend to favor easy “low-hanging fruit” projects. I’d love to see protected bike lanes, bike boulevards, road diets… but I think that these will take a relatively long time. Under current city biases, these ambitious projects can take years; so I tend to favor the easier bike lane projects. The good news is that the city is already doing quite a few of these easy projects – for example, recent lanes on Vermont Avenue and Washington Place.

My list below (sorry the framing is getting long, and it’s not over yet) are all EASY bike lane projects – aka low-hanging fruit – specifically:

• Bike LANES – not sharrows, not bike routes, not “bike-friendly streets.”
• NO CAR LANE REMOVAL – Bike lanes that can be implemented in the existing roadway without impacting through-traffic-capacity.

The list below are the cheap, easy, quick projects that can get the city to its pledged 40 miles this fiscal year. My sense is that if the city can actually complete more easy painless bike lane projects, L.A. drivers will see more bike lanes and will come to expect them. Soon, with greater public acceptance, the city can move on to doing additional and more ambitious projects.

I’ve broken my list into three categories. There’s a tiny bit of overlap, but this is how I thought these through, so I’ve kept them in the different groups. Again these are all easy bike lane projects that can be done with no removal of car lane capcity:

1. Easy Bike Lane projects in the city 5-year plan (7.8 miles)
2. Easy Bike Lane projects on LADOT sharrows list (5.1 miles)
3. Easy Bike Lane project LADOT approved but not done (0.8 mile)

1. Easy Bike Lane projects in the Five-Year Implementation Strategy document

These are all easy, no-through-lane removal bike lane projects – all already approved in the city’s 5-Year Implementation Strategy document.

• Avenue 18 – from Pepper to Figueroa 0.48miles (Cypress Park)
• Bellevue Avenue – from Echo Park to Marion 0.50miles (Angelino Hts)
• Burton Way – from San Vicente to Doheny 0.70miles (Beverly Hills adjacent)
• Colorado Blvd – from Ave 64 to Figueroa 0.50 miles (Eagle Rock)
• Cypress Avenue – from Gay to Figueroa 0.28miles (Cypress Park)
• Eagle Rock Blvd – from Westdale to Colorado 0.70 miles (Eagle Rock)
• Huntington Drive – from Kendall to Collis 1.98miles (El Sereno)
• Marion Avenue – from Sunset to Bellevue 0.10miles (Angelino Hts – contiguous with Bellevue above)
• Rampart Blvd – from Beverly to 6th 0.60miles (Westlake)
• Riverside Drive – from Van Nuys to Tyrone 0.26 (Sherman Oaks)
• San Vicente Blvd – from La Cienega to Wilshire 0.60 (Beverly Hills adjacent – contiguous with Burton Way above)
• Tuxford Street - from Glenoaks to Sunland 0.25miles (Sunland) [listed as Tuxford Street in 5-Year plan, but 5-year map shows this to include part of Tuxford Street and part of La Tuna Canyon Road)
• Washington Place - from Zanja to Centinela 0.40miles (Mar Vista - working with Culver City to extend recently-striped Washington Place lanes in L.A. and in Culver City)
• Westwood Boulevard - from Wellworth to Le Conte 0.50miles (Westwood)
• TOTAL 7.85miles

2. Easy Bike Lane projects on the August 2011 LADOT sharrows list

These locations are all on the ill-considered city sharrows list, which LADOT described as streets "too narrow for bicycle lanes" but actually contained many excellent examples of locations where bike lanes can be added without impacting through-traffic capacity.

• 51st Street - from Hooper to Long Beach Avenue 0.5miles (South L.A.)
• Arden Place - from Arden Blvd to Rossmore 0.05miles (Hancock Park)
• Colden Avenue - from Avalon to Clovis 0.5miles (South L.A.)
• Fountain Avenue - from La Brea to Highland 0.3miles (Hollywood)
• Fountain Avenue - from Vine to Bronson 0.5miles (Hollywood)
• Fountain Avenue - from Western to St. Andrews 0.1miles (Hollywood)
• Laurel Canyon Blvd - from Hamlin St. Oxnard St. 0.6miles (North Hollywood)
• McConnell Avenue - from Culver to Ballona Creek 0.3miles (Mar Vista)
  

  McConnell Avenue is 44 feet wide, easy street to add bike lanes without removing any car lanes

• Redondo Blvd – from La Brea to Jefferson 2.3miles (Mid City)
• TOTAL 5.15 miles

3. Bike Lane project LADOT already approved but that hasn’t been implemented yet

This project is listed on the LADOT website as having been “signed” (approved) in June 2009, but is still awaiting implementation.

• Anaheim Street – from Gaffey to Figueroa 0.8miles (Harbor City)
• TOTAL 0.8miles

(Big thanks to Julia Lippe-Klein and Charlie Peel for working on this. For anyone interested in double-checking my work, here’s my spreadsheet where I’ve tracked and totaled bike lanes implemented each year, and my recommended projects.)

New bike lanes on Chandler Boulevard in North Hollywood

For New Year’s Day I headed up to the San Fernando Valley to check out two new bike lane segments. Bike lanes striped recently:

• Tuxford Street – 1.3 miles from Lankershim Blvd to Glenoaks Blvd – in Sun Valley
• Chandler Boulevard – 0.9 miles from Woodman Ave to Leghorn Ave – in North Hollywood (near Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks)

These are both fairly cheap, easy, low-hanging fruit projects; they both squeeze new bike lanes in without removing any existing lanes. These wide excess-capacity street are still fairly common in the San Fernando Valley – so that’s why most of the city’s recent new bike lane mileage has taken place there.

These projects are also both worthwhile gap closures.

The new Tuxford Street lanes connect with existing bike lanes on Glenoaks and on Roscoe. One more block northeast and they’ll also connect with the La Tuna Canyon Road bike lanes (and that last block looks like it’s in the city’s 5-year implementation plan - though the 5-year plan says “Tuxford from Glenoaks to Sunland” – the street forks, half of it turning into La Tuna Canyon Road. The 5-year plan map [which has been removed from the city bike plan websites] shows La Tuna – so we’ll see.)

New bike lanes on Tuxford Street in Sun Valley

The new Tuxford lanes are in a nearly entirely industrial area. When I was there on New Year’s Day, I only spotted one cyclist who was stopped. When I asked him, in my broken Spanish, if I could take his photo, he declined. So my shot of the new lanes regrettably doesn’t show any cyclists.

The city’s recent bikeway implementation report shows the distance for these as “0.58 miles” but google maps has them as 1.3 miles. According to that city report, they were completed on September 23rd 2011.

Here’s a map showing both of the new bike lane segments (in green) and the existing bike lanes that they connect with (in blue.) The upper diagonal green is Tuxford, the lower horizontal green is Chandler:

View Larger Map

The new lanes on Chandler Blvd extend west where the Orange Line bike path begins – veering diagonally northwestward from Chandler. That’s at a little street called Leghorn, which is located one block east of Coldwater Canyon Avenue. So… these new lanes bridge the gap between the exising bike lanes along the Orange Line busway (from Leghorn to the NoHo Station) and the existing lanes from Woodman to Van Nuys.

Before the Orange Line opened, this was the way I used to bike across the Valley. It’s a fairly quiet, residential street, with a great mature tree canopy. On New Years, there were plenty of cyclists, apparently having fun recreation on their first ride of the year.

Cyclist enjoying the new Chandler Boulevard bike lanes

Both of these segments were approved as part of the city’s Bike Plan, aproved in March 2011. Neither of them are in the city’s 5-Year Implementation Strategy document.

So… going back to the listing of bike lanes implemented by the city of Los Angeles in the first six months of FY11-12 (which I listed earlier here), here’s a revised version – again listed roughly in completion date order:

• Wentworth (Wheatland – Foothill) 1.30 miles
• Woodley (Saticoy – Sherman) 0.28 mile
• Jefferson (La Brea – La Cienega) 0.99 mile
• 7th Street (Catalina – Figueroa) 2.20 miles
• 1st Street (Boyle – Lorena) 1.60 miles
• Cahuenga (Odin – Yucca) 0.60 mile
• Reseda Blvd (Roscoe – Parthenia) 0.50 mile
• Tuxford (Lankershim – Glenoaks) 1.3 miles
• Vermont Avenue (Del Amo – Knox) 0.54 miles
• Spring Street (Chavez – 9th) 1.50 miles
• Washington Place (Albright – Grand View) 0.77 mile
• Chandler Blvd (Leghorn – Woodman) 0.88 mile
• TOTAL 12.46miles

So, looking at the overall mileage… the good news is that 12.46 miles is significantly more than the city has generally done in 6 months. From 1996 to 2009, the city averaged about 5 miles of new bike lanes installed each year – so 12.5 is five times the city’s 2.5 average – coool! The bad news is that it doesn’t look like the city is on track to reach the mayor’s pledge to “build 40 miles of bikeways a year.” We’ll see. There are still plenty of these relatively easy, cheap, quick bikeways that they can do – and still half a year to go!

Cyclist headed north on Vermont Avenue at Knox Street, utilizing the new Vermont Avenue bike lanes

The city of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) recently striped new bike lanes on Vermont Avenue. The new bike lanes extend 0.6 mile from Del Amo Boulevard to Knox Street in the L.A. City neighborhood of Harbor Gateway. 

According to a December 14th 2011  L.A. City Planning Department (DCP) and LADOT report on bike plan implementation (see the first page of attachment 2) (thanks Dennis Hindman for alerting me to the report in this comment) these Vermont Avenue lanes were installed on November 13th 2011. I wasn’t aware of this project when I did the overall list of lanes installed this year – at the bottom of this earlier post.

Vermont Avenue bike lanes - near Francisco Street

The lanes are on a stretch of Vermont Avenue that’s surrounded by the cities of Gardena, Torrance, Carson and some unincorporated L.A. County. The lanes are about a mile west of the soccer stadium at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Immediately south of Del Amo Blvd both sides of the street are unincorporated county. North of Knox the east side of the street is unincorporated county.

This part of the city of Los Angeles has been known as the “shoestring.” It’s a thin north-south strip (about a quarter mile wide and 5+ miles long) that connects the central city to the harbor,  The city annexed this strip about a hundred years ago, so L.A. can stake its claim to the commercial hub at the harbor (read that history here.)

The half-mile stretch is almost all industrial. It’s mostly tilt-up buildings, surrounded by plenty of car parking. The street is relatively wide. As far as I can tell, the bike lanes were added without altering any of the existing striping. It’s a good example of the sort of “low-hanging fruit” facilities that cost very little and can be implemented very quickly.

On a friday afternoon, the few cyclists I spotted there appeared to be working class Latinos, presumably commuting home from work. This one preferred the sidewalk:

Sidewalk cyclist next to the new Vermont Avenue bike lanes

These lanes are not in the city’s 5-Year Implementation plan, but they are in the 2010 Bicycle Plan.

Below I’ve explained the 5-Year Plan, posted my corrected version of it, and posted maps of the bike lane facilities planned.

When the initial draft of the 5-Year Plan came out in mid-2010, I wrote this L.A. Streetsblog article analyzing it a bit. Much of that article is still valid, though the document itself underwent some changes. My conclusion at the time was that it represented “a big improvement compared to past performance.” From 1996 through 2009, L.A. implemented an average of about 5 miles per year of bike lane (67 miles in 13 years.) The 5-Year Plan was showing 40 miles per year for six* years. (*Though it’s a “5-Year” it includes year zero through year five – so it’s actually six years.)

The approved final version of the five-year plan states the following totals:

Total mileage from the city of L.A. Five-Year Implementation Strategy

Overall that’s:

• 183.5 miles of Bike Lanes  (72.5%)
• 7.7 miles of Bike Routes  (3.0%)
• 62 miles of Bicycle Friendly Streets (more often called Bicycle Boulevards - smallish streets that prioritize walking/biking) (24.5%)

These three add up to 253.2 total miles in six years, or just over 40 miles per year of the six years. This appears to be where Mayor Villaraigosa got the 40 miles per year that he pledged to install… later clarified to be installed beginning fiscal year 2011-2012 - which is July 1st 2011 through June 30th 2012. Almost immediately, LADOT (in my opinion inappropriately) started painting sharrows, pretty much wholesale disregard for the 5-Year Plan.

Recently, the city requested input from cyclists regarding prioritization of the facilities in the 5-Year Plan (to see and respond to the survey go to the LADOT website here.)

The 5-Year Plan is posted online as one of those unfriendly pdf scans that one can’t actually copy text from. If that wasn’t difficult enough, the scan is masterfully arranged so that, for the tables listing the facilities, the text goes to the right on one page and to the left on the next.

To analyze the 5-Year Plan, I created a spreadsheet, which I’ve posted here. Click here for the overall spreadsheet – which includes four pages (those tabs at the bottom):

1. Raw Copy – directly transcribing the actual city document
2. Corrected Raw – correcting errors and inconsistencies, making unclear stuff clearer
3. Sorted by Type – sorting the overall spreadsheet into the types of bike facilities (bike lanes, routes, and bike boulevards)
4. Bike Lanes Only – sorting the bike lanes alphabetically by street, combining segments that are contiguous into a single entry

More details follow on each page:

Page 1. Raw Copy

The raw copy is pretty straightforward – it’s just a excel file that directly transcribes the city’s document. It’s minor, but I couldn’t quite get my transcription to match the city’s totals. The city document states 253.2 miles, and I got 253.4 miles. It’s a very tiny discrepancy (especially compared to larger discrepancies in other LADOT documents), but I went over it line by line and wasn’t quite able to get their total from their listing.

Page 2. Corrected Raw

There’s quite a few relatively small things that I don’t think make much sense in the document as approved – so I’ve made a lot of corrections. On the spreadsheet, I color-coded the corrections. BLUE highlighted changes are basically inconsequential things that I thought made better sense another way (ie: spelling errors, clarifications, conventions, etc.)  YELLOW highlighted changes are things that I found to be in error that I fixed.

Some examples of the inconsequential changes (highlighted in blue on page 2 of the spreadsheet):

• Typos: Edgewood is listed as “Edgewodo,” Muirfield as “Murfield,” etc.
• Clarifying segments that are clear, but incorrect: The document lists bike lanes on “Silverlake” from “Sunset” to Beverly. The actual street is “Silver Lake”, which doesn’t actually intersect Sunset (but goes under Sunset at Parkman), so I’ve correct it to “Silver Lake” from “Parkman” to Beverly.
• Combining duplicate segments: For segments of streets that are the dividing line between two council districts, the city document lists the segment twice, each time with half of the actual mileage. This is just a convention, not an error, but I initially found it confusing. When measuring these, I only listed the total mileage once.
• Minor mileage discrepancies: Where I checked the distance (using Google maps) and my measure differed less than 0.1 mile from the city document, I used my measurement… but I figure that it’s not a significant difference.
• Substituting actual streets for city limits: There are quite a few segment end points listed only as “city limit”, which Google maps doesn’t quite recognize. I looked up the boundary and put in actual street names. For example, the city document lists “Washington” from “city limits” to “city limits.” Though that text isn’t really clear, based on mileage and maps, it’s possible to figure out where it actually is. I’ve updated that segment to “Washington Place” from “Grand View” to “Albright.”

Some examples of the errors I’ve fixed (highlighted in yellow on page 2 of the spreadsheet):

• Mileage discrepancies: In some cases the city distance is significantly greater than or less than the actual mileage. Examples: York from Eagle Rock to Figueroa is shown on the city document as 1.4 miles, but the actual distance is greater: 2.2 miles. Sherman Way from Hazeltine to Balboa is shown on the city document as 4.0 miles, but the actual distance is less: 3.5 miles.
• Correcting end point errors: The listing contains some segments that that don’t actually exist. Examples: The city document lists Redondo from Olympic to San Vicente, but Redondo and Olympic don’t actually intersect (they come close – about a quarter block off), so I corrected this one to Redondo from La Brea to San Vicente.

• 

  Bike lane on Zoo Drive in Griffith Park, November 2010

• Existing facilities: The city document contains some bike lanes that already exist. For example, the document lists bike lanes on Zoo Drive and Western Heritage Way in Griffith Park. I zeroed out the mileage for these because re-doing existing lanes doesn’t create any new mileage.
• Duplicates: The city document includes some duplicates. Examples: Abbott Kinney from Venice to Washington is listed twice, exactly the same extent. 2nd Street is listed from Hill to Main and from Spring to Main, which is included entirely in the former extent. I zeroed out the mileage on all duplicates.
• Miscellaneous other corrections:  “Avenue 64″ is listed as “Avenue 46″, etc., etc., etc.

Though I corrected a lot of mileage numbers, some increased and some decreased, cancelling each other out.   The initial document showed a total of 253.4 miles; my corrected document shows to 245.5 miles. The overall mileage total went down just a bit: 7.9 fewer miles – 3% of the total.

Page 3. Sort by Type

I took the corrected version and sorted it into bike lanes, bike routes, and bike boulevards.

Page 4. Bike Lanes Only

I tend to focused primarily on bike lane projects. In my opinion, bike routes are generally meaningless, and bike boulevards seem pretty difficult for today’s LADOT to do well – for example, see my account of LADOT’s recent difficulties in doing meaningful changes on Fourth Street. I think that we’ll be able to do some great bike boulevard projects… some day… but for now, I’m not expecting much.

So, for this page of the spreadsheet, I sorted the bike lane projects alphabetically by street name. Where the 5-Year Plan shows multiple contiguous listings for a bike lane facility, I clumped them all into a single listing. (Mostly the city 5-Year Plan document splits segments out based on council district jurisdictions; though sometimes they’re split up for no apparent reason.)

With the multiple listings clumped and the bike lanes listed in alphabetical order, the document becomes more readable… and from there, I mapped all the bike lanes on seven bike maps:

1. Central Los Angeles – bounded by La Cienega, the 10 Freeway, the L.A. River, and the Santa Monica Mountains – includes Downtown, Hollywood, Koreatown, etc.
2. East Side – east of the L.A. River, east of the Arroyo Seco – includes Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, etc.
3. Harbor – south of the 91 Freeway, includes Wilmington, San Pedro, etc.
4. North East Los Angeles – East of the L.A. River, West of the Arroyo Seco – includes Cypress Park, Atwater Village, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, etc.
5. San Fernando Valley – north of the Santa Monica Mountains – includes Reseda, Sherman Oaks, Sunland, Canoga Park, etc.
6. South Los Angeles – south of the 10 Freeway and north of the 91 Freeway – includes Watts, Leimert Park, etc.
7. West Los Angeles – west of La Cienega – includes Mar Vista, Venice, Westwood, etc.

A couple notes about these maps: They include only the bike lane facilities listed in the city’s 5-Year Plan. Most of the bike lane projects are shown in green. The city has now completed some of these projects, so I’ve mapped facilities that are entirely complete in yellow. What’s not shown that would be helpful is existing facilities… I think I may go back in and show those (probably in blue.) This will include some facilities that are partially complete (including 7th Street) which I am not sure yet how to show. So the maps may well be updated over time…

From here, I am interested in looking further into which facilities are most easily implemented right away – ie: the low hanging fruit. Keep your rss tuned to this blog for further developments.

(Huge huge huuuuuge thanks to Julia Lippe-Klein for contributing a lot to the analysis and mapping for this article. Anyone out there want to help us with mapping and/or measuring some of these streets? Leave a comment or email linton.joe [at] gmail.com)

New bike lanes on Washington Place in Mar Vista

Thanks, Vicki Karlan, for taking some great photos of folks riding the new Washington Place bike lanes. The lanes, which were explained in detail at this earlier post, were striped by the Los Angeles Transportation Department (LADOT) last weekend, Saturday December 10th 2011. They extend 0.77 miles – from Albright Avenue to Grand View Boulevard – in L.A.’s Mar Vista neighborhood, adjacent to Culver City. 

Rider on the new Washington Place bike lanes

Southwest end of the bike new lanes on Washington Place

As far as I can tell, since July 1st 2011, this brings the city of L.A.’s total bikeway mileage completed to 9.74 miles. That’s about half a year to complete about a quarter of the mayor’s pledged 40 miles for this fiscal year. Here’s hoping that the city is able to finish the other 30 miles in the next six months.

L.A. bikeway mileage completed so far in FY11-12, listed roughly by completion date oldest to newest: (I think that this is right, but let me know if I missed anything)

• Wentworth (Wheatland – Foothill) 1.30 miles
• Woodley (Saticoy – Sherman) 0.28 mile
• Jefferson (La Brea – La Cienega) 0.99 mile
• 7th Street (Catalina – Figueroa) 2.20 miles
• 1st Street (Boyle – Lorena) 1.60 miles
• Cahuenga (Odin – Yucca) 0.60 mile
• Reseda Blvd (Roscoe – Parthenia) 0.50 mile
• Spring Street (Chavez – 9th) 1.50 miles
• Washington Place (Albright – Grand View) 0.77 mile
• TOTAL 9.74miles

New bike lanes on Washington Place in Culver City - alongside Tito's Tacos on Washington Place just west of Sepulveda

I was on the Westside yesterday for L.A. Streetsblog‘s end-of-the-year party (at the wonderful, yummy Earl’s Gourmet Grub on Venice Blvd), so I got the opportunity to ride on Culver City’s new bike lanes on Washington Place and Bentley Avenue. Apologies that it was late at night, hence the really poor photos. 

I was tipped off to the new bike lanes on Washington Place by LADOT’s December 2011 Bikeways Report, which shows what bike projects the city of Los Angeles’ Department of Transportation is in the process of implementing. The report states that, this month December 2011, L.A. is implementing bike lanes 0.77 miles from Grand View Blvd to Albright Avenue, in the Mar Vista neighborhood. This stretch of Washington Place is listed in the city’s 5-year Implementation Plan as a “bike-friendly street” (ie: bike boulevard), but this isn’t quite right.  Washington Place is a big wide multi-lane street with plenty of room for bike lanes. The Washington Place stretch from Zanja Street to Centinela Avenue is also in the 5-year plan with the same incorrect designation as a bike boulevard.

While these L.A. City Washington Place lanes are not yet in place, I did notice that some work on them was underway. Part of the Washington Place roadway has been scraped (erasing existing lane markings) and new “V” marks show where the future lane markings will go.

White V-shaped markings on Washington Place at Grandview - show where the future bike lane will soon be implemented

I did discover, however, that Culver City had already implemented two new bike lanes:

• Washington Place – 0.4 miles from Albright Avenue to Washington Blvd (at Tilden Avenue)
• Bentley Avenue – 0.3 miles from Venice Blvd to Washington Place

You're going to have to take my word for it that this poor nighttime cellphone photo is actually the new bike lane on Bentley Avenue in Culver City

The Washington Place lanes are in Culver City’s recent Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan (adopted November 2010.) As far as I can tell, Bentley Avenue wasn’t actually designated for lanes in the plan, but apparently the lanes fit and the city implemented them. They’re a good connection with the existing Venice Blvd bike lanes. I am not sure when either of these streets were  striped; they may be year-old news. The Washington Place lanes are already visible in google street view… but I couldn’t find an announcement anywhere on-line, so I am reporting them here.

Below is a map showing the new Washington and Bentley lanes (in green), the additional Washington Place lanes coming soon (in yellow), and the existing Venice Blvd lanes (in blue) – it looks like an emerging network:

The real good news here is inter-city cooperation. Washington Place is partially in the city of Los Angeles and partially in Culver City. Portions of it have one side Culver and one side L.A.  It’s great that, at least for this street in this stretch, both cities are implementing planned bike facilities.

Lastly, here’s a listing of the rest of the bike lane facilities on the way, from the December 2011 L.A. City LADOT Bikeways Report:

• Washington Place bike lanes (Grand view Blvd to Albright Ave) – 0.77 miles – to be installed December 2011.
• Vermont Avenue  bike lanes (Del Amo Blvd to Knox Ave) – 0.54 miles – to be installed December 2011.
• Chandler Blvd bike lanes (Woodman Ave to Leghorne Ave ) – 0.88 miles – to be installed December 2011.
• Foothill Blvd bike lanes (Wheatland Ave to Wentworth Street) – 1.5 miles –  design complete, installation pending other work there.
• Main Street bike lanes (Grand [Blvd] to city of Santa Monica) – 0.9 miles – installation planned mid-January 2012.
• Devonshire Blvd bike lanes (Reseda Blvd to Hayvenhurst Ave) - 2.49 miles – design complete, installation planned early 2012.
• York Blvd bike lanes (Ave 55 to Figueroa Street) – 0.9 miles – design complete,  installation planned early 2012.
• Rose Avenue bike lanes (Lincoln Blvd to 4th Street) - 0.47 miles – preliminary design started. Project requires parking removal, so community outreach is next.
• Aviation Blvd bike lanes (Imperial Hwy to Century Blvd) – 0.98 miles – design complete, installation work orders are being prepared.
• Vermont Avenue bike lanes (I-105 to 88th Street) – 2.1 miles – City controls east side of street which will receive bike lanes. County controls west side side of street which will receive bike route.

The better-known mayoral letter to Occupy L.A. - click for pdf

I was forwarded Mayor Villaraigosa’s open letter to Occupy L.A., which is all over, including at the mayor’s facebook page. It was forwarded to the Eco-Village listserve by Eco-Village’s founder.

Today, reclusive Eco-Village resident Greenbelly Chan forwarded me these two additional letters from the mayor. One is addressed to Bank of America, the other to the American Medical Association. I can’t verify that these are actually from the mayor, but they appear to be written in a similar style to the mayoral Occupy L.A. letter.

I present them here unconfirmed and unabridged – can anyone verify if these were actually sent? Are they for real? Is the rumor true that LAPD will be raiding and shutting down these menaces soon?

Unconfirmed Letter from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to Bank of America:

November 25, 2011

To Bank of America and the Greater Corporate Banking Industry:

This summer our national political conversation was consumed by debt ceilings and deficit reduction. Our national leaders were single-mindedly focused on cutting spending and cutting services. Issues of social justice and economic equality sat neglected and ignored on the political sidelines.

You have changed that. In a few short years, your greedy misdeeds have awakened the country’s conscience.  Your foreclosures have activated voices not often heard. You’ve sent piles of past due notices to the middle class families who wonder how they will get by. You’ve been instrumental on piling debt onto the students who made the grades and have graduated into a job market woefully short on prospects and possibility. You’ve systematically screwed over homeowners who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times and have lost their homes and life’s saving. You bankers have gotten so rich on the misery of the people who face the bitter prospect of an American Dream that grows more and more elusive every day. 

The banking industry is now at a crossroads. Banks face the question of how you can profit from the economic turmoil you’ve caused.  It is a question of whether energy will be consumed to foreclose particular patchs of earth or whether that energy will be channeled into governmental bail-outs to further undermine economic equality and signing more risky loans for people to up the imbalances in American society and worldwide.

Your rapacious foreclosure record is not sustainable. This is especially true from the standpoint of public health and public safety. Accordingly, we must close your local branches, repair our local banking system, and re-open homes to access for improperly-foreclosed families. For this reason, we will close all of Los Angeles’ national corporate banking offices on Monday, November 28th at 12:01 am. The bank closure will include a set of measures that will assist L.A. foreclosees to reoccupy their personal belongings and property from inappropriately foreclosed homes. We will also offer social and health services for those in need.

I am very proud of the fact that since the start of the fiscal and foreclosure crises, we have done things differently in Los Angeles.  We have communicated. We have listened. We have negotiated, but the banks are still sucking energy from Los Angeles neighborhoods. The time has come for staring each other down from opposite sides of barricades and barbed wire. While we had hoped to solve problems peacefully and to avoid the scenes of violence and brutality, it’s clear that the banking industry is still straining the civic fabric of this and other cities.

It is my hope that we can conclude this latest chapter of the rapacious bank behavior in L.A. in a similar spirit. I wish the banking industry would show courage and character. You need but open your eyes to the hellish economic hardship you’ve shown to your fellow citizens in the midst. I am discouraged by your passionate commitment to the bottom dollar at the expense of social justice. I  look forward to the discontinued progress of your efforts.

Very Truly Yours,
Antonio R. Villaraigosa
Mayor

I think that this is one of the best bicycle photos I've ever taken - fixed gear rider on First Street in Boyle Heights

I got a chance to ride the new green bike lanes on First Street in Boyle Heights. The city installed green pavement markings there last Saturday, November 18th 2011. The First Street lanes are different than the new Spring Street green bike lane downtown in a few ways… but I think that both of them are excellent high-visibility bike projects. 

The First Street bike lanes extend 1.6 miles from Boyle Avenue to Lorena Street. I initially reported them here, then posted the greening plans when the preliminary markings appeared on the street. The green pavement on the First Street lanes was added only in conflict zones – areas where bikes and cars cross paths: driveways, alleys, merging areas, beginning of each block, etc. This limited deployment of green marking makes sense for drawing both cyclist and driver attention to these zones… and it’s also cheaper to maintain in the long run.

Spring Street green-paint bike lane

The Spring Street lane, on the other hand, is pretty much continuous green for the entire block… which makes more sense downtown, because there are few driveways, hence few conflict zones. In downtown, doing just conflict zones could mean almost no green on many blocks.

Spring Street’s green lane was done with paint… which, unfortunately, is already showing signs of wear. I suspect that this is mostly due to the paint going down during a rainy weekend, so it probably didn’t set entirely well.

Boyle Heights First Street lanes were done with thermoplastic… which is basically a very very durable paint made out of melted plastic. The city of L.A. uses thermoplastic for pretty much all roadway lane striping. I described the thermoplastic lane-striping process in excessive detail here. After all of two days, the thermoplastic seems to be holding up really well… at least better than the paint downtown.

(For the record, some additional differences between Spring and First: the Spring lane is one-way, First lanes are two-way. The Spring lane is buffered, First is not.)

I am glad to see the city Transportation Department (LADOT) experiment with this green-colored lanes. Green pavement has certainly been a worthwhile tool in other cities – including San Francisco and Long Beach. But… Joe’s critical caveat here… I wouldn’t be very supportive of LADOT using green coloration really widely.

According to the city’s bike plan, the cost of one mile of bike lanes is either $30,000 or $50,000 (there are differing figures shown in different places… actual material costs are on the low end… analysis, design, outreach, etc. add up to the higher figure.) According to the city fact sheet distributed at today’s green lane press conference, the Spring Street one-way paint cost was about $150,000 and the First Street thermoplastic was about $250,000. So figuring a per-mile bike lanes cost, the green comes out to about $200,000/mile for paint-continuous or $150,000/mile for thermoplastic-conflict-zones. Either of those amounts would more than triple the ~$30,000 materials cost of conventional bike lanes.

The city has relatively few bike lanes today. I think that the best use of limited bike funding will be for LADOT to add lots of new (conventional not-green) bike lane miles. It could chew up the entire bikeways budget to go back and paint green on all the streets in the city’s meager existing bikeway network… and at the end of the day, we’d have the same inadequate mileage as we currently do. Nobody is actually proposing revisiting all the existing bike lanes… but I just thought I’d put it out there that I think we need a whole lot more miles of bike lane… and not so much green coloration… nor sharrows. I am sure there will be some good L.A. uses for the green paint, just not all over.

Another shot of the green thermoplastic bike lane, First Street, Boyle Heights

Awesome new buffered green bike lane on Spring Street in Downtown L.A. - not a photosim - actual unretouched photo

Before today’s  rain got going, I had the chance to ride the new green bike lanes on Spring Street in Downtown Los Angeles. The green-colored buffered bike lanes were described and discussed quite a bit in this earlier post. They extend 1.5 miles one-way from Cesar Chavez Avenue to 9th Street. 

For the city of Los Angeles, they’re the first significant length of buffered bike lane in the city, the first real bike lanes through Downtown Los Angeles. (The 7th Street bike lanes are buffered from Alvarado to Parkview, along MacArthur Park – and the 7th Street lanes do reach downtown, but only for a block between the 110 Freeway and Figueroa Street.) Along with the First Street bike lanes in Boyle Heights, the Spring Street lane is the first green-colored bike lane in the city. Apparently both First and Spring received green paint yesterday – Saturday November 19th  2011 – but I didn’t get to check out the new green addition to the First Street lanes yet. The Spring Street bike lane is really central to L.A. – going along City Hall, Police headquarters, L.A. Times offices, historic buildings downtown, and, of course, they’re on the CicLAvia route. Frequently, for location filming, this stretch of Spring Street is a stand-in for New York City.

Kudos to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilmembers Jan Perry and Jose Huizar, the L.A. City Department of Transportation (LADOT), the Downtown L.A. Neighborhood Council (especially Valerie Watson), the L.A. County Bicycle Coalition (especially Alexis Lantz) and everyone else who made this great project become a reality!

This is the first phase, too – with more to come. This one-way southbound lane on Spring will be paired with a future one-way northbound lane on Main Street (one block east of Spring.) The city’s 5-year implementation plan includes extending the lanes south on Main Street from 9th Street to 16th Street. Additional enhancements could include upgrading these to protected bike lanes, as envisioned at the recent ThinkBike workshops.

(Here’s a quick cell-phone video I shot of them.) [Update: In my haste to post this, I forgot to mention tomorrow's press conference: 1pm Monday September 21st 2011 at the corner of 2nd and Spring. I also made some minor updates to this article to make it read better... but I got the story posted early!!]

North end of the Spring Street bike lane at Cesar Chavez Avenue in Chinatown

The squares in the foreground will soon be green - one of Los Angeles' first green pavement bike lanes. First Street at State Street in Boyle Heights.

This seems to be the week for announcing the preliminaries appearing on the streets for some good green bike facilities in Los Angeles. Earlier, we showed off the preliminaries on the new green buffered bike lanes on Spring Street downtown. Today it’s the green… well almost green (think Bruce Banner) …preliminaries painted onto First Street in Boyle Heights. 

Regular readers will recall that LAEV covered Boyle Heights’ First Street bike lanes, when they were initially striped in early September 2011. The city of L.A. Transportation Department (LADOT) website announced that the First Street lanes would be L.A.’s first green-colored bike lanes. LADOT later clarified that the green color wouldn’t be  on every inch of the lanes, but would just emphasize conflict areas: driveways, alleys, merging areas, beginning of each block, etc.

Here’s a close-up of part of LADOT’s specifics  (at least as of November 3rd) of where the green goes and doesn’t – click for pdf file of the overall striping plan:

LADOT specifics for where the green goes on First Street bike lanes - click for full pdf

As readers can see in the above schematic, showing the area from Cummings Street to St. Louis Street, there will be:

• green swaths (20 feet long) with white bicycle symbol – at the beginning of each block
• green swaths – at each driveway
• green dashes – at the end of each block, where cars merge into the bike lane to turn right (these areas are currently dashed white lines)

I think that making just the conflict areas green makes a lot of sense. There’s a cost to paint and just putting it down everywhere adds to the cost of a project, and to the long-run maintenance costs.

In some places in Europe, nearly every inch of all the bicycle rights-of-way are painted. In the United States, color is used a bit more sparingly. San Francisco uses green in merge areas and elsewhere, especially on Market Street. In Long Beach’s innovative protected bike lanes, green was used to highlight conflicts. If it’s good enough for bike-friendly Long Beach, then I think it’s probably good enough for that other big city in the county of Los Angeles.

Looking forward to riding the new greener First Street bike lanes!

Another shot of some of the preliminary markings showing where the green will go on the First Street bike lanes.