By Unless stuck in traffic, BILL
FOX 11 NEWS AIRED A SEGMENT ON the “worst traffic in Southern California,” recently. It’s between Sunset, Venice and Sepulveda boulevards and the Pacific Ocean. It’s no surprise that Santa Monica is the epicenter of the gridlock.
City Council politicians, especially the three, four and five-termers, and city planners must derive pleasure from the notoriety achieved for having the heaviest and most screwed-up traffic in the region.
Even Internet blogs are clued in. LA Observed,“A blog about media,news and sense of place” said March 27, “Ocean Park Boulevard could get worse. At the same time that officials are weighing whether to help untangle the Westside by switching Pico and Olympic into one-way boulevards, Santa Monica is considering a plan to purposely hinder traffic flow on another key east-west route.”
Residents of Sunset Park have asked for car and pedestrian safety mitigation for Ocean Park Boulevard, primarily between 14th and 18th streets where there have been a number of accidents in recent years — most of them resulting from driver or pedestrian stupidity, not faulty street engineering.
OPB is a major East-West thoroughfare. City transportation management staff in the planning department concocted four, similar, traffic calming proposals for part of OPB near John Adams Middle School.All proposals call for landscaped traffic islands and reducing traffic to two lanes with left turn pockets at 14th and 17th streets. Some proposals include narrower vehicle lanes, bike paths and diagonal parking. Although the proposals only apply to a few blocks, some residents would like to see them over OPB’s entire length West of Lincoln Boulevard, OPB widens and carries heavy traffic to Main Street, Venice and the beaches. Some Ocean Park residents also want this stretch narrowed with planters, walking/bike paths and more. But, if any of these alterations mean OPB can’t carry the load, even more motorists will divert onto neighboring residential streets.
I hope residents of Sunset and Ocean parks won’t allow city planners to jam this major traffic-carrying thoroughfare and turn residential streets into dangerous detours. If speeding and reckless driving are issues, perhaps vigorous enforcement is an answer — except that "enforcement” doesn’t keep a lot of planners and consultants employed.
The city’s planning department and transportation managers are caught in a 1980s time warp. The anti-private vehicle mindset started with powerful, forward-thinking Santa Monica for Renters’ Right’s politicians who mandated dramatically reduced street capacity even though motor vehicles numbers were increasing — by better than 50 percent over the last 20 years.
City planners began employing “traffic calming" design and physical impediments to slow vehicular traffic and discourage use of personal vehicles. Traffic lanes on 11th Street, 14th Street, Broadway, Montana Avenue, Fourth Street and elsewhere around town were cut from two to one lane in each direction. Speed bumps and curb radii (flares) were de rigueur. Traffic lights were sequenced to stop traffic. Lane widths shrunk to ten feet on major drags such as Wilshire and Pico boulevards where traffic-slowing landscaped islands were also installed — all as traffic increased.
The corner curb flare recently installed at Wilshire and Yale Street is typically bad street engineering. Delivery trucks can’t turn off Wilshire without encroaching on southbound Yale traffic lanes. Similar curb flares on 11th Street at OPB block thru-traffic on 11th if cars are waiting to turn. This kind of crappy design is par for the course — and dangerous. This is certainly not a way to keep things moving.
Similar nonsensical streetscape proposals were also recommended over a decade ago for Montana Avenue’s commercial district but were wisely rejected by local residents and businesses. Pico and Sunset Park neighbors were sold the “Pico Streetscape" and look at that mess, now.
All this “pedestrianization" has encouraged a citizenry (including parents or nannies with children) to step off curbs directly in front of moving cars. Here, the “pedestrians and bicyclists have priority” philosophy has fostered pedestrians who now don’t even look before crossing streets. Add bicyclists who routinely ignore stops signs, red lights and pedestrians with impunity, and it’s a miracle there haven’t been more deaths and injuries.
Eileen Fogarty, the city’s new director of Planning and Community Development, advocated for a “pedestrians and bicycles over automobiles” approach at recent city workshops on updating the city’s land use and circulation elements (”Residents’ views,” April 2, page 4). Based on her department’s presentation, we can look forward to even more gridlock and traffic jams while driving to work, school and shopping thanks to anti-motorist city planners.
Politicians and bureaucrats must face facts: traffic will worsen over the next few decades. If city staff isn’t willing to set aside their visions of Utopia and keep things moving, our city manager must intercede and make changes.
And, if our clueless politicians continue their gridlock-loving ways, we should replace them, too.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 9, 2007. Read the original PDF.