Main Street Bike Lanes Coming to Downtown L.A.

Former striping has been cleared from Downtown L.A.'s Main Street - in anticipation of bike lanes to be added this weekend

In anticipation of new bike lanes, the old lane markings have been scraped away from Main Street in Downtown Los  Angeles. It’s the second Main Street that the city is adding bike lanes to – after Main Street in Venice a couple weeks ago. This project extends the recent Spring Street bike lanes southward 0.7 miles – from 9th Street (where Spring merges onto Main) all the way to Venice Boulevard – through Downtown L.A.’s Fashion District.

New bike lanes on Main Street in Venice

New bike lanes on Main Street in Los Angeles' Venice neighborhood

The city of Los Angeles Transportation Department (LADOT) has finished striping some snazzy new bike lanes on Main Street in Venice. The Main Street bike lanes extend 0.8 miles from Windward Circle (the traffic circle at Grand Boulevard and Windward Avenue) all the way to the city limit border with Santa Monica, just northwest of Rose Avenue. 

Thoughts on ThinkBike L.A.: 1 – Downtown

On September 22-23 2011, Dutch bicycle facility designers came to L.A. and worked with Angelenos to create great designs. The ThinkBike event was covered at LADOT, and L.A. Streetsblog, but the coverage didn’t include too much in the way of sharing actual designs, like S.F. Streetsblog coverage of their ThinkBike did. I figured that I would do a series of three posts (1 – Downtown, 2 – Pacoima, 3 – South L.A.) showing off more of the great work. The designs are posted at LADOT, but they’re big pdfs, difficult to search, find, and share. I’ve broken them out into place-specific entries and tried to run a lot of images and text, to make this excellent work more findable. In addition, I’ve done a fourth blog post about the overall process, which I did find a bit disappointing.

THINKBIKE 1 of 4 – DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES

The Downtown L.A. ThinkBike team included folks from DLANC, FAST, LACBC, LADOT, and Metro. The pdf of their full slide show is on-line at LADOT.

Map of the Downtown L.A. ThinkBike plan - mainly Main Street and Spring Street from Cesar Chavez Avenue to Venice Boulevard

The Downtown ThinkBike Team focused mostly the one-way couplet of Main Street and Spring Street, from Cesar Chavez Avenue to Venice Boulevard.