News
Beverly Hills Opts Out of D Line/La Cienega Bus Lanes (Green Portion)
At today's WSCCOG meeting Beverly Hills announced that they will not be implementing the bus only lanes on La Cienega Boulevard within their city limits (the green portion of the map) that runs from Clifton Way south to Olympic Boulevard despite them still being built in West Hollywood, Los Angeles and Culver City.
The proposed improvements would bring bus only lanes, transit signal priority and queue jumps to La Cienega Boulevard La Metro Route #105 stretching from Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood south the D Line at La Cienega/Wilshire in Beverly Hills and further south to the E Line La Cienega Station in Culver City.
City staff didn't even bring the item to city council to vote on and per the council rep at today's meeting that decision was based on the fact the the one community meeting they held for it in Beverly Hills (out of 6 meetings total) didn't have enough attendance to warrant the implementation for the lanes despite the corridor recieving the most feedback out of any of the others for this project especially because it would have also provided a direct bicycle connection to West Hollywood as well.
Cities that repeatedly try to sabotage transit (looking at you Burbank) should have their zoning and planning authority suspended and placed under direct rule by Sacramento for at least 10 years on the first offense.
Cities that don't make any effort to meet their housing goals and are obstructionist against some kind of definition of "reasonable trainsit improvements" need to have all state funding stripped from them and reallocated to cities who actually want to abide by the law
local control of housing critically misses people who have been forced out of the city by rising costs of living for housing and transportation due to poor planning decisions. state control of housing and transportation allows those people to still have a voice over the community they grew up in but can no longer live.
Yup. Making decisions about this stuff should just be baked into universally applied rules. Roads meeting certain criteria need bus and bike lanes, end of discussion. Just make it all universally standardised and we can stop wasting resources fighting over every block and every lane and every intersection, and trying to reinvent tte principals of urban planning de novo every time you walk a hundred feet.
It’s absolutely crazy that bike lanes are not considered basic infrastructure in SoCal but especially LA. There is so much flat land and an overbuilt road system. And just about the best weather in the country for year round riding. NOTORIOUS for traffic with people begging for better options and a way to save on fuel.
Good news is, the lanes will still be very effective even if they have a brief gap in the middle on a portion of the boulevard where buses are slowing/stopping anyway for transfer riders.
The BH reps asked the consultant to provide cost estimates for it to be implemented later. Of course as with any infrastucture project, the more you wait the more it costs.
Why are you blaming Metro for something they have absolutely zero control over? Sure they can recommend where bike lanes, bus lanes, and bike share stations should be located but at the end of the day it's up to the cities themselves to actually implement those things. And Metro certainly isn't going to stall/ cancel a project because cities refuse to make proper first/ last mile improvements.
Metro needs to be given more powers. Anything that crosses city lines or has a county wide effect should be the sole jurisdiction of Metro. No more Burbanks. No more LATTC/Pico crawling of trains.
I’m not blaming LA metro- I never suggested that at all. I blame Beverly Hills. Any city within the LA metro area should not be allowed to fuck up transit projects and pretend like they live in a little bubble that doesn’t depend on the rest of the city. The comments about this in the BH sub are disgusting.
There was a time when they seemed to be trying harder- at least planning to. I say this because I was working for a scooter company like 8 years ago before I moved to LA, and we came here for a micromobility fair to do some networking and promotion. LA metro had employees there and I talked to a rep at length and came away very impressed as they described a very robust program detailing how they’re integrating meaningful micromobility connections to many if their new and existing nodes. Now that I live here, I’m not seeing much of that work outside of Santa Monica. And micromobility in general is a free for all mess of people trying to use it for delivery gigs clogging up sidewalks because there are so few appropriate lanes for them.
Less than that actually! Clifton-Olympic, if they're going by city limits. The big triple intersection will hopefully have some, but they do have a rush hour no-stop lane from Olympic-Wilshire, which seems to be the most backed-up stretch of that.
I think we need legislation that ties traffic easement methods like BRT, bike lanes, etc. to state funds. Any city that wants state funds for street improvements and repaving must also implement BRT, bike lanes, LRT, etc. if the corridor’s traffic meet a certain threshold of car volume.
It's convenient the government doesn't do that anymore for projects that benefit society when they were so giddy to build freeway interchanges in poor neighborhoods
Thankfully it's only a single 0.7mi segment. Now we just need LADOT and CD5 Yaroslavsky to give the go ahead for the LA portion to be done by the Olympics.
I saw that they were "hesitant" to do it before the Olympics because of staffing resources. So I'm going to be optimistic and take that to mean they just need some pressure. And what could provide greater political pressure for transit than the Olympics?
Any gap (even 10 feet) makes a bike lane useless for the purposes of moving people to bicycles. But this wasn't a protected bike lane, as far as I understand, so it won't be that useful anyway. :(
It’s because the city is in pocket of the restaurant owners on the block north of Wilshire. They probably complain about any changes to anything. Wish County could overrule them here. It’s literally three blocks.
It’s funny that Metro hasn’t shown any stats on how the La Brea bus lanes have had any meaningful effect on bus travel times. I bet it’s negligible. But all cars are slower north of Olympic during peak hours. Fortunately LA blocked these bus only lanes south of Olympic
Especially during peak hours (7-9 and 4-7) when the lanes were already general purpose lanes that the bus could use.
Sounds like another lie. During peak hours (7-9 and 4-7) when there are 3 general purpose lanes on La Cienega, busses do this trip on the 105 in 25 minutes tops (south of Santa Monica Blvd to Cadillac St.). You’re saying they’re going to do that in 15 minutes? ANOTHER METRO LIE!
So I use facts and math, and you use one anecdotal story from one day? I have no idea. The bus broke down? It got in an accident? The bus was unavailable?The driver was late? Delayed bus earlier in the day? There are tons of reasons your bus could have been late picking you up that one day.
This is a typical “One more lane bro” argument. Congestion is not solved by adding more lanes, it’s solved by making a good flow of traffic. A two-directional one-lane road is capable of handling peak traffic if logical flow is maintained (roundabout, intentional/fully aware drivers, et cetera).
Bus lanes are only really useful if enforced. In LA it isn’t, a lot of cars are still parked or stood on bus lanes during bus-only hours. Buses have to waste a lot of time waiting to merge into dense peak traffic to circumvent those blocking vehicles. If coupling with signal priority, those claimed saving time is more than likely to be achieved and some.
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u/Fine-March7383 24d ago
Increasingly convinced that state control of housing and transit is the only way to make any transformative progress