How To Make L.A. Streets Bike Friendly
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Jane Choi of the Department of City Planning points out new bike routes in the 2010 plan. (Emily Frost)
Bicycles are a contentious issue in Los Angeles, but the city is hoping to ease the tension with the 2010 Bike Plan, which lays out the policies for increasing bike riding and make it safer and easier for the next 25 years. The plan is open to public comment by web or by mail until Friday, October 8th.
The transportation department held its final public hearing this weekend in Van Nuys, before the plan goes to the city planning commission for approval in early November.
In Van Nuys, the excitement over the new bike plan was palpable. (Special bike parking had been arranged, perhaps contributing to the high spirits.) It’s been years since the city’s developed a bike plan - the last one was adopted in 1996.
Most attendees were impressed by the proposed bike plan.
“There’s a lot of people behind this. I was very surprised when I came in this morning. it’s just incredible,” said Dennis D’Alfonso, a student at California State University, Northridge and a bike mechanic.
Jim Hasenauer of the International Mountain Biking Association was also impressed, but added, "We need more and we need faster."
Part of the excitement stems from the volume of new bike-friendly streets the plan calls for. If the Department of Transportation and the Department of City Planning honor their commitment, there will be 200 miles of new bike-friendly streets in Los Angeles in five years, and more than 1,600 within the next 25 – that would be almost a quarter of the city’s total street mileage.
There are only 339 recognized bikeways today, according to the Department of Transportation.
Funding for the new bikeways is secured by Measure R, a proposition L.A. County voters passed in 2008, which designates a portion of a small sales tax increase to transportation funding. Ten percent of that funding is earmarked for bike and pedestrian projects.
Bikeways fall into four categories in the plan: dedicated paths not open to cars; lanes on city roads; routes, usually streets that have been marked for bike use but on which bikes are not given their own lane; and bike-friendly streets, smaller neighborhood streets marked for bike use. Bike-friendly streets will grow the most in the next 25 years, with 651 proposed.
“We want to be able to get bike-friendly streets in local neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods were people have a problem with cut-through traffic, and give those neighborhood back to the neighborhood for bikes and peds and kids and dogs and grandmas and grandpas,” said Michelle Mowery, the bike coordinator for the Department of Transportation.
One way to make neighborhoods more bike-friendly is ‘route diets’ as the DOT calls them, where lanes are cut to calm traffic and make streets bike-friendly. This could be where problems arise, said Dennis Hindeman, a member of the L.A. County Bike Coalition.
“The main thing is going to be motorists objecting to making their commute worse,” said Hindeman.
It's when you start taking things away in the name of cyclists that problems arise, he contends. Hindeman's concerned about the building of L.A.’s proposed bikeways getting stalled by litigation. But he is excited about the level of transparency he feels the city is achieving with the 2010 document.
Mowery, of the DOT, emphasized the public’s role in bringing the plan to life.
“We need the neighbors to call their councilmen and say ‘we like these projects and we want them to happen’ and got to the neighborhood councils and stand up and say ‘we want that line on our map implemented soon.”
To read the plan and comment, go to http://www.labikeplan.org/draft_plan/.
Reach staff reporter Emily Frost here.
