The Bike Plan Implementation Team (BPIT), which met this Tuesday, is continuing their work on the “Top 10” list of priority projects. In addition to working on bringing bike lanes to 7th Street, the BPIT also began discussions about extending the existing Venice Boulevard bike lanes from their current terminus at Crenshaw Boulevard all the way to Downtown LA. We’d like to open up that discussion of bike lanes on Venice Boulevard to the public at large. Your ability to make it down to City Hall at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday shouldn’t impact your ability to help LA implement its Bike Plan and become more bike friendly.
As part of the BPIT’s continued outreach for input on “Top 10” projects, LADOT Bike Blog last month launched discussions (both on the blog and on Facebook) on how best to build bike lanes on 7th Street. We’d like to again extend the opportunity to comment on how to build bike lanes on Venice Boulevard.
The First Cross-City Corridor
Extending bike lanes along Venice Boulevard, where they already run over 9 miles from Pacific Ave in the west to Crenshaw Boulevard in the east, would create the first true east-west corridor of bicycle infrastructure in Los Angeles. By building the 4 miles of bike lanes from Crenshaw Boulevard to Main Street, a bicyclist could ride from downtown LA all the way to the beach without once leaving a bike lane.
This project will also connect with the terminus of existing bike lanes on Hoover Street and will also connect to whatever bicycle infrastructure comes out of the MyFigueroa project. This project embodies the zeitgeist of the Backbone Network contained as a part of the LA Bike Plan, and is a project deserving the full support of the bicycle community and the City.
As this project moves forward, LADOT will assist council offices in conducting outreach to the communities along Venice Boulevard.
Venice: A Very Varied Boulevard
From initial analysis by Bikeways Engineers, Venice Boulevard from Crenshaw Boulevard to Main Street was split into 5 sections. Each section has different roadway widths, and thus offers different options for extending bike lanes.
- Section 1: The roadway from Crenshaw to 7th Ave is .21 miles long and has a width of 67 feet. The current configuration has two lanes of travel in either direction and a two-way left turn lane in the center. The two parking lanes have peak-hour restrictions, creating two extra travel lanes on this section of Venice during rush hour.
- Section 2: The roadway from 7th Ave to Arlington is .41 miles long and has a width of 90 feet. The current configuration has three lanes of travel in either direction and a two-way left turn lane in the center. There is street parking on both sides of the street.
- Section 3: The roadway from Arlington to Orchard is 1.93 miles long and has a width of 56 feet. The current configuration has two lanes of travel in either direction and street parking on both sides of the street.
- Section 4: The roadway from Orchard to Figueroa is 1.17 miles long and has a width of 55 feet. The current configuration has two lanes of travel in either direction and street parking on both sides of the street.
- Section 5: The roadway from Figueroa to Main is .51 miles long and has a width of 40 feet. The current configuration has one lane of travel in each direction. The two parking lanes have peak-hour restrictions, creating two extra lanes of travel during rush hour.
Help Us Make Venice Boulevard the Best it Can Be
Armed with these facts, what are your thoughts on bringing bike lanes to Venice Boulevard? How would you avoid the “accordion effect” when reconfiguring the street? The “accordion effect” is when travel lanes keep changing in number (from 2 lanes to 3 lanes to 2 lanes again to 4 lanes, etc.), causing driver confusion and backups at merges. Are there problem-intersections that especially need our attention? Where do you think it would be appropriate to remove a travel lane or street parking to accommodate a bike lane? Are there sections of the street that you think deserve an alternative treatment like Sharrows? Are there sections that could take an even more aggressive treatment like Cycle Tracks?
Leave us your ideas in the comments section below. We’ll make sure all of them get back to City Planning and LADOT’s Bikeways Engineers as we move forward on bringing bike lanes to Venice Boulevard.
Hey, I asked this in the meeting but didn’t really get an answer, is the lane really only starting up at Crenshaw? That would leave a 4.5 block gap of no bike lane btw Crenshaw and La Fayette Rd when you head west on Venice.
@ Amanda,
I’m working on an answer for you. It looks like bike lanes from Crenshaw to Buckingham are workable. The left turn pocket from Buckingham to LaFayette makes things a bit more difficult. We also have to think about the Midtown Crossing development at Venice & San Vicente, which may complicate things between LaFayette and San Vicente. Whenever that development finally gets built, it may edge out bike lanes along that one block. I’ll try to get more information for you later.
Is that to say the lane that starts around LaFayette would be removed in front of the Lowes development? Part of my confusion with respect to the Lowes stuff is that the lane runs along that section land already, it’s the Victoria Park residential section where it doesn’t exist.
I only have 2 grips about the Venice Blvd. bike lane. 1) The road is total garbage with FAR too many dangerous holes, bumps, uneven concrete changes, and massive cracks. I seriously wonder how much money the city loses in paying damages to people injured on the road vs. the cost of repairing it. 2) On garbage day everyone puts their trash cans in the bike lane forcing you to weave in and out of traffic or scrape against parked cars to get where you’re going. This should either be a fine-able offense, or the street should be designated no parking on those days to make room for the bins. Ideally though I think a combination of fines through tickets and just simply urging people to be more creative and thoughtful with where they place their trash bins. Can’t they leave them near the sidewalk/grass and have waste management wheel them over to the truck on pickup day? It doesn’t seem like that large of an inconvenience vs. being a physical danger to commuters.
I don’t have a solution for this one, but the westbound intersection at Lincoln has a terrible merging scheme where cyclists and cars are left to guess who has the right of way and where is the best position to change lanes if you want to continue west on Venice. It doesn’t help that the road is quite possibly its most dangerous in this spot.
@Daniel – the garbage bin issue has come up a lot. I remember Sgt. Krumer telling the BAC once that LAPD can’t ticket people for garbage cans in the bike lane because it could be the owner of the garbage can who did it, it could be the trash collectors leaving it there, it could be a passerby who pushed them into that position. It’s a real sticky problem, and one worth rectifying, though the City doesn’t have a solution yet.
Copenhagen.
Berlin.
Groningen.
Pay no attention to AASHTO. Just hire Jan Gehl or similar and recreate a cycle-tracked boulevard. Have the will to pioneer this kind of facility in the USA.
Some examples:
Copenhagen:
http://tinyurl.com/3t2zssm
Berlin:
http://tinyurl.com/4yhu2nl
Groningen:
http://tinyurl.com/3gwsb9v
@ Erik –
Where on Venice do you think cycle tracks would work best? How would you square such a project with the existing parking, curb cuts, and driveways currently on Venice?
What would you think of introducing cycle tracks on streets with an old Red Car ROW as their median (like San Vicente)? I could imagine something like what was done in Washinton DC.
In order to get people from ages 5 to 80, that are equally divided amongst both sexes, to frequently travel on a bike, you have to install some sort of perceived barrier between the fast moving vehicles and the bicycles. Otherwise, we are just catering to mostly young males, which is a small part of the demographics. That means even if all of the bike plan is installed we will never reach anywhere close to 10% modal share for bikes due to almost all of the main roads having merely two paint stripes to designate where to ride.
To help illustrate how the installation of barrierless bike lanes on major arterials will work in getting people to ride I’ll give a few examples.
First, I work at the corner of Fallbrook Ave and Roscoe Blvd in the northwestern part of the San Fernando Valley which has bikes lanes on Fallbrook, Roscoe and the next major street south of Roscoe which is Sherman Way. We are located on the side of a hill and essentially there is a bike lane going in all directions north/south and east/west when entering or leaving the compound where we work.
Yet even a hardened veteran female cyclist who rides an hour one way to my company 2-3 times a week believes that Fallbrook Ave with it’s fast moving cars is dangerous and she would not ride it or Roscoe Blvd. Evelyn is 50 years old and she was the one who doggedly persisted in getting two bike racks installed at this company location six years ago and at our previous location. She is without doubt a dedicated bicyclist and a firm believer in biking yet she will not ride these two streets. She has indicated that she likes to ride the new bike lanes on Reseda Blvd near where she lives around Devonshire Blvd. So she is not entirely against riding on a busy street.
I work in a three story building that has a 1,000+ workforce that has three shifts working 24 hours a day. The commute by bike percentage has doubled in the last six years from just Evelyn and me to two other regular riders. Yet that is far from a high percentage of commuters in a building that is surrounded by bike lanes.
A 25 year old female coworker wanted to try biking to work from Topanga Blvd going down Roscoe Blvd but her husband thought it was too dangerous and she dropped the idea.
I am clearly seen as someone who bikes when I enter the building with my reflective vest and carring a pannier. I’ve had several people tell me that it’s dangerous to ride a bike out there with those ‘crazy drivers on the street.’
Another example is a 40+ old male who works at Reseda Bicycle on Reseda Blvd and Sherman Way. He commutes by bike mainly using the Orange Line bike path east of Reseda Blvd. He will not ride in the street and yet he travels one way 15+ miles by bike.
What I am getting at is that there should be at least a minimum of one through street with a bike protected bike lane or path going north/south and one going east/west through a large geographic area. The San Fernando Valley has this on the Orange line lane/path going east/west from the eastern side where it borders the city of Burbank and at the western side ending at Canoga Blvd. The western end of the San Fernandeo Valley will have a north/south bike travel corrider with a barrier from cars running next to Canoga Blvd and the eastern side has one that is expanding next to San Fernando Rd.
The San Francisco Bike Coalition has a vision of getting 20% bicycle modal share in their city by 2020 and they see this happening by getting five to eighty year olds riding in the streets. To illustrate how this would be done they have created a video http://www.connectingthecity.org/
In order to get 10+ bike modal share in Los Angeles it’s very clear that there must be a sufficient number of bikeways with barriers on some of the major streets.
I should have said 8 to 80 year olds in the above post. Obviously you would not want someone 5 years years old riding miles away from home without adult supervision.
An example of rapidly creating a significant modal share for bicycling by using bikeways with barriers is Sevilla Spain. They went from a smaller bicycle modal share than Los Angeles at .6% to 6% in five years.
http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/entry/sevilles_lesson_to_world_how_to_become_bike_friendly
http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/11/sevilla-velo-city-2011.html
Obviously that is not Los Angeles and putting restrictions on car use in the center of the city helped to increase bicycling. It does illustrate however that building a large modal share of bicyclists can occur quickly in a city without a strong recent tradition of cycling.
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I live in Santa Monica and worked in downtown LA. Most of the time I rode the bus, but in the last year before the early retirement incentive I rode my bike in several times.
My perspective on Venice Boulevard was that, even with the bike lane, it was more dangerous than Pico Boulevard because of buses. The bus operators would race ahead of me and then cut in if there were people to pick up. One time the operator couldn’t pass me, so he stopped in the vehicle lane and expected the passengers to cross the bike lane in front of me; I had to stop. They knew I was there (reflective flourescent yellow jacket, 700-lumen headlight, 400-lumen taillight) but showed no interest in courtesy. Because my average speed was about the same as that of the buses, I had more encounters like that than I wanted.
So, although it’s longer and has more hills than Venice, I used Pico. I had to be at work at 0630, and at that time of morning few cars were parked at the curb. It was a surprisingly peaceful ride except for a few blocks in downtown LA. Then I’d turn left onto Main and use the bus lane.
[…] have, for years, lobbied politicians in city hall, LAPD commanders, LA Department of Transportation officials, and others in local government to do something about the hazard of large numbers of trash cans […]
I am glad that the Venice Blvd. bike lane is being extended downtown, but I have to say, as a regular bike commuter, I tend to avoid Venice for the same reasons as the other posters. Buses, garbage, and poor quality pavement make Venice a tough road to ride.
If you want to do this project right, I say you keep traffic to two lanes at all times and eliminate parking on the narrower sections of the street. Also, a stripe of white paint doesn’t make a bike lane. Sharrows are nice, but how about decent paving and a double yellow line to demarcate the bike lane.