Traffic plan would end at border
PICO NEIGHBORHOOD The thought of driving in traffic on a Friday night is enough to keep Catherine Dunn entertaining thoughts of working late, or perhaps yearning to cut out earlier in the day to escape any gridlock.
An employee of Stitches from the Heart, a non-profit yarn store on Pico Boulevard, Dunn occasionally works until 6 p.m. on Friday nights when the store closes, the height of West Los Angeles congestion. It is then she faces her long and dreaded trek home — a 45 minute commute to head just a few blocks from the I-10 Freeway intersection of Pico Boulevard to Westwood Boulevard.
“It’s like every street is jammed,” Dunn said on Tuesday. “It’s solid cars.”
The commuting angst for thousands of motorists that traverse the seven-mile stretch of Olympic and Pico boulevards could be alleviated if Los Angeles City Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s new proposal to cut down congestion goes according to plan. Unveiled on Monday, the mayor’s proposal would cause both Olympic and Pico boulevards to behave as one-way corridors without actually placing any physical barriers, timing signals to favor traffic heading west on Olympic and east on Pico Boulevard. The proposal would also impose parking restrictions during peak hours. The plan would affect Olympic and Pico from La Brea Avenue to the Santa Monica city border at Centinela Avenue. Though the plan is restricted to Los Angeles, it’s sure to have an effect on the local business community and workforce, many of which live in West LA, where the rent is marginally cheaper.
More than 100,000 cars are estimated to travel along the two corridors every day, 60,000 of which are on Olympic Boulevard. The mayor estimates that his proposal would improve traffic flow by as much as 45 percent, a figure that has been questioned by some county and local officials.
The estimated $2.1 million proposal is split into three phases, the first of which would be to implement the rush hour parking restrictions, followed by the second phase to re-time the traffic signals. The third phase, which most likely won’t happen for another year after city officials evaluate the first two phases, would add more westbound lanes on Olympic and more eastbound lanes on Pico Boulevard through restriping. The first phase could begin in early 2008.
Earlier this year, LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose third district includes Santa Monica, suggested making both Olympic and Pico boulevards mainly one-way streets with one lane for buses, car-poolers and taxis.
Yaroslavsky said the third phase is the only phase that makes any substantive changes, adding that placing parking restrictions is a no-brainer that should’ve been done long ago, and the second phase just doesn’t make any sense.
“I’m not sure how you make traffic flow better on Olympic westbound while making it more slowly eastbound on Olympic,” the supervisor said on Tuesday.
Rather than waiting, city officials should implement the third phase as soon as possible, adding that it’s “where the payoff is.”
“The flaw in this (proposal) is that it has one foot in the status quo and one foot in the future and we need to get both feet in the future,” Yaroslavsky said.
The proposal was met with mixed results by Santa Monica city officials.
Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom said that while it would temporarily alleviate gridlock in the short-term, congestion will slowly creep back into the two boulevards as more and more people will see that it’s easier to drive. What is needed is a change in attitude, Bloom said.
Bloom also questioned the removal of parking spaces — a proposal that the Santa Monica City Council has explored in the past but passed on because of its potential effect on the quality of life.
“We have a long history in Southern California of adding freeways, and when they fill up, then we widen freeways and then when that fills up, we do things like synchronize signals to make the streets more efficient,” Bloom said.“All these things might be well and good, but they’re supporting a system, an infrastructure, that is broken and can’t sustain us for the long term.”
Santa Monica City Councilmember Kevin McKeown, who commutes on his bike, seemed optimistic about the proposal, interested in seeing how it would work in with the city’s Land Use and Circulation Element.
“Until we get light rail and a subway, some vehicular solution must be found,” McKeown said.
While traffic congestion is notorious in West Los Angeles, the gridlock doesn’t typically extend all the way on both corridors deep into Santa Monica, according to Lucy Dyke, the Transportation Planning Manager in Santa Monica.
“The parts of these streets in Santa Monica don’t have the same traffic volumes,” Dyke said.
Officials in both municipalities will work together to make sure the timing of the signals agree so that it doesn’t cause confusion and problems at the LA-Santa Monica borders.
“We’ve been extremely interested in working with the city of LA and everyone else in the region to look at (traffic at) the regional level to try to look at how we respond,” Dyke said.
One way to respond, which has garnered support from many Westside residents and officials, is the extension of the Exposition Light Rail from Culver City to Santa Monica and creating the Subway to the Sea under Wilshire Boulevard.
“Forget the busses, we need a subway,” Dunn said, while working at Stitches from the Heart. Dunn is hopeful that the Exposition Light Rail will come to Santa Monica and alleviate her commuting woes since the light rail track from Downtown LA to Culver City is expected to go near her West Los Angeles home.
Pamela Stollings, the owner of the UnUrban Coffeehouse on the corner of Pico Boulevard and Urban Avenue, doesn’t believe Villaraigosa’s plan will go according to plan.
The coffeehouse has been in business for the past 12 years. Stollings believes traffic has actually worsened on Pico in the last year.
For Stollings, a drive back to her home on Stewart Street can sometimes take 20 minutes.
“I think (the plan) is going to fail miserably,” she said on Tuesday. “All it’s going to do is reroute people and inundate the neighborhoods.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 28, 2007. Read the original PDF.