One-Way Ticket; Yeah?
By Frank Gruber
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and surely one of the
more desperate of the latter is County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's
call to make Olympic and Pico Boulevards one-way to alleviate Westside
traffic desperation.
How desperate a measure? The best estimate of the increased capacity
on the two streets, under the most favorable formulation of the plan,
is a 20.5 percent bump. If Supervisor Yaroslavsky thinks that a 20 percent
increase in the efficiency of the two boulevards is going to allow him
to get him home in time for dinner from events in Santa Monica -- well,
let's just say he's desperate, because there's plenty of latent demand
out there waiting to use any available capacity.
But that doesn't mean the plan isn't worth a look.
Last Thursday evening the City of Santa Monica Planning Department
hosted a workshop on the plan at the Ken Edwards Center. (see
story) Lucy Dyke, the head of the Department's Transportation
Management Division, hosted the meeting, but the star attraction was
Allyn Rifkin, the retired traffic engineer who developed the plan for
Supervisor Yaroslavsky.
The first thing to say about Mr. Rifkin's plan, from the perspective
of a columnist who writes about Santa Monica, is that it is unlikely
that the plan will be adopted here for the simple reason that Pico and
Olympic in Santa Monica are narrower than they are in L.A. They are
too narrow to accommodate all the lanes that would be needed.
They also have medians that would have to be removed. The medians on
a considerable part of Olympic are intended to become the right of way
for the Expo Line light rail as it heads for its terminus in downtown
Santa Monica. The City installed the medians on Pico to improve the
commercial district there, and it's unlikely that the City would remove
them.
Santa Monica planning staffers told me that Mr. Rifkin has not yet
developed a model for implementing the plan within Santa Monica. It's
hard to imagine how the plan would "fit."
The second thing to say about the plan, from the perspective of a columnist
who as a believer in pedestrian friendliness has a visceral negative
reaction to one-way streets (also known as "auto sewers"),
is that it's a much more intriguing project than I thought it would
be.
The reason is that under Mr. Rifkin's plan the two boulevards wouldn't
exactly be one-way. There would be two contra-flow lanes. During peak
hours buses and authorized mini-buses and vanpools (i.e., the kind of
transportation I wrote about two weeks ago would use these lanes. (see
column) During non-peak hours one contra-flow lane would be used
for parking and the other would be open to cars as well as transit vehicles.
At the meeting last week Mr. Rifkin said that when he took the job
to design the project, he didn't want to do anything "unless it
was great for public transit," and he may have done just that.
Proposing to dedicate two contra-flow lanes to transit was a stroke
of genius.
Most bus lanes are only one lane, because lanes are hard to come by.
But single-lane contra-flow bus lanes don't work, because faster buses
can't get around the slower buses, and if a bus breaks down, everything
comes to a halt. In non contra-flow situations, single-lane bus lanes
don't help as much as they should because vehicles turning right slow
down the buses.
Two transit lanes allow for faster buses -- Metro Rapids, and point-to-point
mini-buses and vanpools -- to pass slower local buses, and buses do
not have to slow down or stop at corners to accommodate vehicles turning
right, since nearly all the traffic in the lanes will be going straight.
Mr. Rifkin didn't mention it, but two contra-flow lanes are also great
for cyclists, who have the right to ride in bus lanes, but who often
feel intimidated by buses trying to pass them with little room in single
bus lanes to do so.
There has also been a lot of discussion about whether left turns should
be allowed if the plan is implemented. Mr. Rifkin's modeling indicates
that without left turns, the plan will produce a 20.5 percent increase
in capacity, versus only a 5.7 percent increase with left turns. But
without left turns, the plan will create more side street traffic, as
motorists have to make three right turns instead of one left to change
directions.
But the tide may be turning toward allowing the left turns. As Mr.
Rifkin pointed out at the meeting last week, cars making left turns
will be making them against only intermittent traffic in the contra-flow
lanes, and should not create back ups.
More important, people should realize that if the plan is implemented,
the real benefit will not be an increase in capacity for cars, which
will be of temporary benefit anyway, but rather a dramatic improvement
in the speed of public transit, making it a viable choice for commuters
now driving their own cars. This could lead to permanent reductions
in traffic congestion.
It's too early to endorse the Yaroslavsky/Rifkin plan. There are too
many issues that have yet to be researched, particularly the potential
impacts on neighborhoods and local businesses. We also need to see how
the sidewalks will be landscaped to get an idea of the impact on pedestrians.
(Perhaps there is even room to widen sidewalks in commercial districts.)
As for Santa Monica, while our Olympic and Pico Boulevards may not
physically be able to accommodate the full plan, the Planning Department
still needs to evaluate how to connect them to L.A.'s boulevards if
L.A. and Beverly Hills implement the plan. In particular, the City needs
to devise a plan to give the buses, mini-buses and vans that would be
using the transit lanes expedited access to our employment centers.
But one thing I learned from last week's meeting is that the Pico/Olympic
project is not necessarily a one-way ticket to nowhere.
* * *
On Saturday the Planning Department will host an important public workshop
as part of the land use element update. The purpose of the workshop
will be to explore the potential over the next 20 years for redeveloping
Santa Monica's industrial areas.
Santa Monica's industrial core, through which the Expo light rail will
run, is the area of the city with the most potential for redevelopment.
Over the years Santa Monica has shifted from a blue-collar town to one
with an economy based on office and production jobs and service industries.
These new businesses concentrate more jobs on less land; meanwhile,
at least since Douglas left Santa Monica because it couldn't expand
here, industrial jobs have been migrating to the metropolitan edge.
This workshop will be an important one in the land use element update
process. Unfortunately, I'll be out of town and I won't be able to report
on it, but readers who are interested in Santa Monica's future might
want to invest a Saturday and attend.
The workshop will start at 9:15 and continue until 2:30. Registration
begins at 9:00, and participants are encouraged to RSVP by email to
shapethefuture2025@smgov.net. The location will be the Santa Monica
College Concert Hall, located on the northeast end of Santa Monica College,
1900 Pico Boulevard. For more details, go the City's website: http://www.shapethefuture2025.net/. |
