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
