Bike Lanes

Many Cities Get Free Bike and Bus Upgrades from New Development

From LA.Streetsblog.org

L.A. City could shift current resources that today go to widening streets – and instead upgrade sidewalks, bus stops, and bike lanes – especially when new development pays for it

By Joe Linton

L..A. City voters just passed Measure HLA, which city officials assert will cost billions to add bikeways, bus lanes, and sidewalks. One way for L.A. to get a jump on these improvements would be to learn from adjacent cities that are getting bike and bus improvements implemented for free – alongside new development. This practice won’t do everything – but it’s one inexpensive way to move toward multimodal streets.

At new development sites, L.A. could shift current resources that today go to widening streets – and instead upgrade for walkability, transit, and bikeability.

When a developer builds something, L.A. city typically requires that the project widen streets, adding new car lanes and/or new parking. The city’s multimodal Mobility Plan (approved 2015) and new mitigation metrics (approved 2019) and a new no-widening ordinance (any day now) were supposed to curb the city’s practice of requiring new development widen streets.

But widening never ended. The city continues widening alongside new development – from the Valley to downtown L.A. Metro stations to, right now in 2024, Hollywood to Historic Filipinotown.

Photo by Andrew Gook on Unsplash

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Bike Lanes Are Good For Business, Actually, And Everyone Who Says Otherwise Is Wrong

From Jalopnik.com

By Collin Woodard

Bike lanes are obviously good for cyclists, as they make it safer to ride and encourage people to make more trips on two wheels. More people riding instead of driving is also better for the environment and cuts down on noise pollutionfrom cars. Still, since bike lanes often replace street parking, it’s understandable that business owners would be wary that the city putting in bike lanes will drive customers away. As Business Insider reports, though, the research actually shows that those fears are unfounded.

Take, for example, a study from 2012 that looked at two shopping districts in Seattle that got new bike lanes. One replaced three parking spots, while the other replaced 12. Sales tax data showed that spending at the former generally tracked with other areas that didn’t have bike lanes, while the latter saw sales quadruple. It’s probably going too far to say the bike lanes in the second district caused the increase in sales, but clearly, adding bike lanes and removing parking spaces didn’t hurt sales.

That’s not the only study that came to the same conclusion. A study in New York City the next year found that business also increased in pedestrianized areas relative to the rest of each borough. Manhattan saw sales increase by nine percentage points in one bike-friendly neighborhood, while one in the Bronx was up 32 percentage points. In Brooklyn, the jump in sales was even more drastic, climbing by 84 percentage points.

Photo by Dário Gomes on Unsplash

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L.A. City Planning Protected Bike Lanes for Two Miles of Hollywood Blvd

From LA.Streestblog.org

By Joe Linton

The Hollywood Boulevard Safety and Mobility Project will extend along Hollywood from Gower Street to Lyman Place. This stretch would be the first protected bike lanes in City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez’ district

The city of Los Angeles Transportation Department (LADOT), working with City Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Nithya Raman, is planning two miles of protected bike lanes along Hollywood Boulevard. The improvements would serve transit-rich and relatively population-dense portions of the neighborhoods of Hollywood, East Hollywood, and Los Feliz.

LADOT’s Hollywood Boulevard Safety and Mobility Project is planned to extend along Hollywood from Gower Street to Lyman Place. This stretch of Hollywood would be the first protected bike lanes in Soto-Martinez’ council district 13. The protected bike lanes were already approved in the city’s 2015 Mobility Plan.

The new bike lanes would be located just east of the iconic Hollywood Walk of Fame, where the city is planning the tepid Heart of Hollywood project. That project, developed largely under Soto-Martinez’ anti-bike predecessor, secured quite a bit of Metro bike/ped funding with designs that do little for bike/ped safety.

A few blocks east of the current Hollywood Boulevard Safety and Mobility Project, advocates are pushing for the Sunset4All street safety improvements, which would include protected bike lanes.

The proposed bike and walk upgrades would connect directly to the Metro B Line Hollywood/Western subway station, and would be spitting distance from Hollywood/Vine and Sunset/Vermont stations.

 

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Santa Monica wants to be bike capital of the world unveils new “Dutch” project

From Momentummag.com

Written by:

In a groundbreaking celebration, Santa Monica Mayor Gleam Davis declared, “Watch out, Amsterdam! We are going to be the bike capital of the world,” as the city unveiled its recently completed 17th Street curb-protected bike lanes, according to a news report. This project, boasting a region-leading design marks a significant achievement with Southern California’s first protected “Dutch-style” intersections.

The Safe Streets for 17th Street and Michigan Avenue project includes full Dutch-style curb-protected intersections at both Broadway and Arizona Avenue. These intersections, considered best safety practices, incorporate small concrete islands to compel drivers to slow down when turning across the bikeway, enhancing safety for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists alike.

The project spans just over a mile of protected bikeway between Wilshire Boulevard and Pico Boulevard. The configuration varies, with sidewalk-level bike lanes south of Michigan Avenue and concrete curbs added north of Michigan, relocating existing unprotected bike lanes behind curbs and parked cars.

The new protected bike lane protect was not free of criticism when it was proposed and then approved this past summer.

Photo by Gerson Repreza on Unsplash

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Where L.A. City Is Quietly Removing Bike Lanes and Adding On-Street Car Parking

From LA.Streetsblog.org

By Joe Linton

Six streets where LADOT added motorist parking at the expense of bicyclist safety. And the city wonders why traffic deaths keep increasing?

Los Angeles City has been removing bike lanes. The practice probably is not widespread, but that is difficult to verify as the city does these removals with no notice, no reporting.

Generally the city Transportation Department (LADOT) removes bike lanes to add more on-street parking.

There’s a pro-car double standard at play here. It can take months, sometimes years, of community outreach to add bike or bus lanes. This often means watering down projects. After significant outreach processes, recent worthwhile projects on San Vicente, Venice, and La Brea were whittled down to just 60, 75, and 40 percent of the respective initial plans. (Those projects got built. Often bus/bike/walk projects that would remove some parking are quietly declared “infeasible” and never even vetted by communities.)

But adding parking and removing bike lanes? That can be done with no public process whatsoever.

For many of the projects listed below, there is no public record, no public vetting of proposals, no community outreach, often not even a public announcement of what has been done.

This post focuses on permanent changes to streets, but temporary LADOT bike lane removals are also not uncommon. SBLA reported on a 2020 temporary removal of the Jefferson Boulevard bike lane.

Photo by Dário Gomes on Unsplash

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Sacramento is installing bike lanes to help meet California climate goals. Here’s how it works Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/environment/article278500889.html#storylink=cpy

From SacBee.com

BY SONORA SLATER

Local artists designed the murals that flank a cyclist’s ride down Franklin Boulevard. Community members painted the monarch butterflies, vintage cars and portraits of Hispanic men and women who reflect the area’s deep-rooted Latino heritage. Hungry riders have options: a taqueria or a bakery with cases full of sweet conchas. But on a summer day, the sun beats down, unobstructed by a tree canopy. In fact, there are no green spaces at all. There’s no bike lane, and cracks in the narrow sidewalk make the ride bumpy. Crossing the street is challenging, as few and far between designated crosswalks push cyclists to find a break between speeding cars.

At first glance, Franklin Boulevard seems like the perfect place to commute via bike, as does the rest of Sacramento. The city has warm weather, no snow and a flat terrain. What more do you need? As it turns out, a lot. People in the region are heavily car dependent. More than half of Sacramento’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to 2016 data included in a report by the Sacramento Mayor’s Commission on Climate Change, come from the transportation sector.

Photo by Dário Gomes on Unsplash

 

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Culver City Plans Protected Bikeway on Overland Avenue

From LA.Streetsblog.org

By Joe Linton

Culver City’s proposed ~2.5 mile Overland bike facility is mostly new protected bike lanes (about a mile and a half), plus about a half-mile of new unprotected bike lanes at the north end, and a short stretch of bike route at the south end.

Culver City is currently in the design phase for a project that would add protected bike lanes along Overland Avenue, Playa Street, and Hannum Avenue. Next month the city will host a community input meeting on the Overland Bike Lane Project – meeting details below.

The project would extend existing bike lanes on Overland that were installed circa 2019, covering about a half-mile between Culver Boulevard and Ballona Creek. The proposed new bikeway would be about 2.5 miles long – from Overland and Venice Boulevard to Hannum and Slauson Avenue.

The design varies somewhat for different parts of Overland, Playa, and Hannum, with the lion’s share (about a mile and a half) being new protected bike lanes. The project would include about a half-mile of new unprotected bike lanes at the north end, near Venice Boulevard. It also includes a short stretch of bike route connecting to the Culver City Transit Center on Slauson near Sepulveda Boulevard.

Image courtesy of Kimley Horn

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New El Monte Bike Lanes Connect to Transit Station and More

From L.A.Streetsblog.org

By Chris Greenspon

Two recent bike lane stripings in El Monte’s downtown area near the Valley Mall offer the area’s working class cyclists a safer ride to the the El Monte Transit Station off Ramona Boulevard, as well as the Metrolink Station on Tyler Avenue.

The lanes were installed on roads already heavily used as alternates to the town’s hectic arteries (Valley Boulevard and Santa Anita Avenue): Tyler as the north-south route, and Ramona, as an east-west proxy for Valley. Of course, the two meet just south of the Valley Mall, providing an opportunity for transit commuters to get off Santa Anita on their way down to Ramona.

Both of these roads are highly traveled by cars too, and thankfully the striping took this into consideration, marking separate car parking beside Tyler’s mom-and-pop markets, and buffering stripes and bulbouts (both striped and cement) along various parts of the two routes.

Local El Monte mobility non-profit Active SGV’s executive director David Diaz told SBLA he’s very pleased with the lane designs. “We’re happy to see the recent progress the City of El Monte is making on implementing the 2014 approved El Monte Bike Master Plan. The Ramona Blvd and Tyler Ave (N of Ramona) project designs contribute to improved multi-modal connectivity and safety for people biking. Designs even included considerations of the door zone! Personally, I travel along Tyler and Ramona multiple times a week and have never felt safer while riding my bike in El Monte. Excited for the future complete street projects in El Monte that include Valley Blvd, Merced Ave, Parkway Drive, and Garvey Ave.”

Photo by Andrew Gook on Unsplash

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Cordova Street Enhancements

From CityOfPasadena.net

The City of Pasadena seeks to provide mobility choices for all residents. The Cordova Street Enhancement project creates a complete street environment, improving safety and accessibility along Cordova Street with buffered Class II bike lanes, bicycle detection, pedestrian ADA accessibility upgrades, curb extensions, and incorporating sustainable water quality improvements.

The project advances the City of Pasadena’s Mobility Element objectives that “Streets should reflect neighborhood character and accommodate all users; streets should accommodate all users such as pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit, skateboarders and scooters; Streets should reflect individual neighborhood character and needs, and support healthy activities such as walking and bicycling; and design streets to achieve safe interaction for all modes of travel particularly for pedestrians and bicycle users.”

Project provides for 1.5 miles of complete street elements including Class II bicycle lane and bike detection on Cordova Street from Hill Avenue to Arroyo Parkway

  • Installation of curb extensions at eight intersections
  • Replacement of over 50 non-compliant curb ramps
  • Replacement of sidewalk, curb and gutter, and driveway approach
  • Pavement resurfacing
  • Parkway landscaping and irrigation
  • Enhanced striping and signing at crosswalk and travel lanes
  • New traffic signals at five intersections
  • Signal modifications at nine intersections
  • Video detection system upgrades for a bicycle detection feature

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The Best New U.S. Bike Lanes

From PeopleForBikes.org

By: Martina Haggerty, PeopleForBikes’ senior director of local innovation

With more protected bike lanes and low-stress bike networks being built across the country than ever before, we had a tough time picking this past year’s best new bike lanes. While numerous projects deserve recognition, we rounded up the top nine projects worth emulating.

9. Marin Boulevard Bikeway
Hoboken and Jersey City, New Jersey

In November, Jersey City and Hoboken completed construction on the Marin Boulevard and Henderson Street bikeway, which was first called for in the “Let’s Ride JC Bike Master Plan” as a way to better connect the two cities. The expansion of CitiBike into Hoboken also increased demand to ride between the two cities, says Mike Lydon of Street Plans, who worked on the project’s design. In 2022, CitiBike’s most popular route was between Hoboken Terminal and Jersey City’s Hoboken Avenue and Monmouth Street, which saw a total of 5,500 bike share trips. With the completion of the Marin Boulevard project, those rides can now be made entirely on protected bike lanes.

The bikeway is separated from traffic with plastic curbing and flexible posts, and it includes a textured painted surface that makes the bikeway more visible and improves traction. As a “quick build” project, the cities chose to move forward with somewhat temporary materials to expedite the project and improve safety, something that wouldn’t have been feasible with more permanent materials that require sidewalk reconstruction and drainage work, not to mention a longer timeline. According to Lyndsey Scofield, senior transportation planner of Jersey City, this approach “provides us with more flexibility to iterate on the design over time as we learn what works well and what could be improved.”

8. Broad Street
Providence, Rhode Island

After being declared one of Rhode Island’s most dangerous streets, Providence worked with the local community to reimagine Broad Street with protected bike lanes, bus islands, and crosswalk improvements. While balancing the needs of local businesses, bus riders, and people walking and biking, Broad Street now serves as a key component of the city’s Urban Trail Network, improving safety and accessibility for some of the city’s poorest and most diverse neighborhoods to jobs and opportunities citywide, as well as access to three major urban parks and multiple regional trails. Space for the bikeway was created by removing a wide center turn lane, which also helped reduce speeding along the street.

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