Eyes on the Street: Beverly Hills Bikeways
From LA.Streetsblog.org
A trickle of new bike facilities – including one sweet protected bike lane – in recent years means that Beverly Hills is no longer a gap in the growing countywide bike network
By Joe Linton
It’s not really news that Beverly Hills has bike lanes. Streetsblog recently visited the 90210 city and shares photos of bikeways implemented there in the past couple years.
If I remember correctly, Beverly Hills didn’t have any bike lanes about a decade ago. Circa 2012-14 the city added basic bike lanes on Burton Way and Crescent Drive. Cyclists pushed for the city to incorporate lanes on the city’s revamp of Santa Monica Boulevard; the city installed bright green lanes there in 2018.
Those three segments were the city’s only bike lanes in 2019, when the city developed its complete streets plan.
Since then, the city hasn’t become a bike paradise, but it’s clearly no longer a biking gap. There has been a trickle of new bike facilities, with more on the way. Also, the city’s first subway station (some there opposed, some welcomed) will open next year.
Reading news coverage of bikeway approvals (in the face of some complaints) I expected more bike lanes there than there actually are. For example, last year the Beverly Press stated, “The new [Doheny Drive] bike lanes will connect to other bike lanes in the city on Clifton Way, Charleville Boulevard and Gregory Way.” But Clifton, Charleville, and Gregory don’t have bike lanes, just shared lane markings, called sharrows. (Sharrows have been termed the dregs of bike infrastructure; safety-wise they are basically useless. Beverly Hills calls them its “minimum grid bicycle pavement markings.”)
Photo by David Vives on Unsplash
