Olympico Plan: Bad for kids and global warming?

In the blog CityWatch ("An insider look at City Hall"), transportation planning consultant Ryan Snyder pens an interesting assessment of what's wrong with the Olympico proposal in his view. The short answer: A lot. Here's part of Snyder's longer answer:

The need to move faster in our cars trumps every other community goal. Indeed, it conflicts with many. Mobility may be one goal, but what about the others that we never dare to consider because we’re afraid to challenge the primacy of the car?

We want healthy neighborhoods where kids can walk to school and seniors stroll to the store. People don’t walk because our streets are inhospitable. Making Pico and Olympic Boulevards one-way race tracks will raise ominous barriers to pedestrians who want to cross. What about a kid who lives on one side of Olympic and goes to school on the other? Instead of walking, her parents will drive her, putting another unnecessary car on our streets. The medical price we pay for keeping our cars moving is obesity, diabetes, heart problems, respiratory illness and more.

Second, what about the value of social connections? The children that can’t cross the street become isolated so they’re slower to develop social skills. Seniors that don’t feel safe walking become housebound. Casual meetings happen where cars are tamed. Communities with strong social fabric provide nourishing places to grow up and rewarding places to live. We sacrifice this when cars are king.

[snip]

Last, our need for speed confounds efforts to reduce global warming gases. Accommodating more cars means more CO2 emissions and all of the catastrophic consequences of climate change. Reducing our driving isn’t just a matter of preference – it’s a matter of survival for our entire planet.

Zev frustrated

In a column about the spending habits of L.A. County Supervisors (who knew Mike Antonovich has a popcorn machine in his office?), Steve Lopez brings us this little bit of Olympico news:

[Zev] Yaroslavsky is ticked off that the city of Los Angeles hasn't moved on his proposal to turn Olympic and Pico into one-way boulevards to ease congestion.

But Lopez also notes one possible solution to Zev's frustration: A former state assemblyman is predicting that Yaroslavsky will be the next L.A. Mayor. Zev's response, according to the column: Not interested.

LAist on Olympico: It's "a freeway, stupid!"

Writing in the popular LAist blog, Kemp Powers weighs in with a piece called Love is not a one-way street. From the article:

Q: What do you call a road with five to seven lanes of traffic in one direction, if the only way to exit this road is by going to the right?

Pose that question to most Angelenos and the answer would be "a freeway, stupid!" But they'd be wrong. The answer is the increasingly popular proposal by LA County Supervisor Zev Yarolslavsky to convert Olympic and Pico boulevards into one-way streets in order to ease Westside traffic. The proposal has been hailed as an easy quick fix in recent articles and on the news after a report by former LADOT planner Allyn Rifkin declared a reconfigured Olympic and Pico would cut traffic by 20 percent, as long as the one-way streets prohibited all left turns for their entire 14-mile span. With left-hand turns allowed, the traffic decrease could be a significantly lower 6 percent. Whoop-dee-damn-doo.

Powers is an Eastsider with little sympathy for what he sees as the self-inflicted traffic woes of the Westside.

The most upsetting component of one-way proponents' arguments for the one-way configuration is that they believe the “Subway to the Sea” is a nice idea, but can’t be built fast enough to solve traffic problems now. Let’s see, Yaroslavsky (along with Rep. Henry Waxman) helped kill the subway extension back in the 90s (which is why the recently-renamed Purple Line stops so abruptly at Wilshire and Western) by banning use of sales tax revenues for subway construction. Then, years later, after traffic has spiraled out of control and the Westside is a giant overpriced parking lot, the same guys vote to repeal the ban.

But now, the construction time of the subway is waaay too long to wait and the cost is waaay too high. Hasn’t anyone stopped to think that if not for the very same NIMBYism that put the Westside into its traffic funk, it would be possible to hop onto a subway today and coast under Wilshire Blvd. all the way to Santa Monica, passing under Beverly Hills (getting its ass kicked by The Grove), Westwood (choking to death on traffic exhaust) and the 405 (no comment necessary)?

Powers also notes that the primary opposition is in Koreatown, where an Olympic Freeway would "slice through the heart" of the community.

Town Hall on Olympico Plan

The West LA Democratic Club holds a Town Hall forum on the Olympic/Pico one-way proposal in Venice on Wednesday, June 20. Here's the Web site, and here are the details:

What: Town Hall meeting on the Pico/Olympic One-Way Street Proposal

Speakers: Len Nguyen, Field Deputy to LA city councilmember Bill Rosendahl;
Jay Handal, President, West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council;
Mike Eveloff, President, Tract 7260 Homeowner Association

When: Wednesday, June 20 - 7:00 – 9:00 pm (doors open at 6:30 pm)

Where: Penmar Park Recreation Center,
1341 Lake Street (between Penmar and Walgrove) Venice 90291

Cost: Free. Donations accepted at the door.

Grassroots Traffic Enforcement

The blog Franklin Avenue brings us news of a particularly salty homegrown traffic protest in Hancock Park. Speeders on 6th Street are greeted by four signs urging them to "SLOW ... THE ... F**K ... DOWN". If it works, we may need to commission these in bulk for the Olympico zone.

(UPDATE: As of Tuesday, someone had removed the middle two signs.)

Santa Monica mayor calls one-way plan "interesting"

Speaking about the Olympico Plan, Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom tells The LookOut: "I think it's really interesting, and we should certainly leave no stone unturned." However, the plan faces some unique obstacles in S.M., including the fancy new pedestrian-friendly improvements on Pico, and all those beautiful old coral trees that run down the grassy strip in the middle of Olympic.

Britain to restrict one-way streets

Interesting news from across the pond: The Times of London reports that the "one-way street is to be phased out in residential areas [of the U.K.] as part of a government plan to give pedestrians greater rights to road space." Says the article:

One-way streets have been singled out for criticism by the transport department, which says that rather than reduce “rat runs” they actually encourage speeding, prolonging journeys and inconveniencing cyclists.

Louise Duggan, one of the authors of the guidelines said: “Since the late 1950s, the number of cars on the roads have meant they have taken priority. Now we have realised our roads should be used for more than getting from A to B. Our highways make up 80% of our public realm and we have realised it is wrong that we are only doing one thing with this space.”

(snip)

The transport department’s plans have won the endorsement of the RAC [the British equivalent of the AAA]. Robin Cummins, its road safety consultant, admitted some drivers treat one-way streets like “racetracks”.

“We accept the need for pedestrians and drivers to live together better in residential areas,” he said.

Olympico on KPCC's Airtalk

KPCC's Larry Mantle covered the initial Olympic/Pico proposal on April 16. You can listen to the 37 minute program here (requires Real Player).

Koreatown Opposition

The Los Angeles Business Journal reports on some early opposition to the Olympico Plan from businesses. Some merchants in Koreatown and elsewhere are concerned that turning Olympic one-way will harm their customers' access.

Two interesting notes from the piece: L.A. City Council members Tom LaBonge and Herb Wesson "have voiced opposition." Also, it seems the perception on the eastern side of the Olympico zone is that this whole idea is mainly intended to allow Westsiders to get to downtown entertainment venues more easily. From the LABJ piece:

The opposition is most intense in Koreatown, where business owners fear the community’s retail center along Olympic Boulevard will be harmed.

“Olympic has all the main stores in Koreatown. If we tinker with this, there’s concern that all of Koreatown may collapse,” said Kee-whan Ha, president of the Hannam supermarket chain and also president of the recently-formed Anti Olympic-Pico One-Way Task Force that includes about 500 businesses in and around Koreatown.

(snip)

[Pico Blvd. restaurant owner Demetrios] Pantazis said he believed that the plan was crafted for the benefit of wealthy Westsiders who want quicker access to the Staples Center and not for the neighborhoods and business districts in the middle.

The Wrong Way

The LAT's March 29 story about the Olympic and Pico One-way Plan (and this accompanying graphic) got the proposed direction of the streets backwards. (Click the image to enlarge.)

According to the feasibility report prepared for LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Olympic would go EAST, toward downtown, and Pico would head WEST. In other words, the entire loop would circulate clockwise.

LAT on the Olympico Proposal

On March 29, the LAT published its first major piece on the Olympic and Pico One-way Plan (which we're calling the Olympico Plan for short). It's the brainchild of L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, and according to the piece it already has the backing of L.A. City Council members Bill Rosendahl and Jack Weiss (who's also the subject of a so-far small recall effort because of his alleged coziness with Century City developers).

The Times makes the Olympico Plan sound like a cheap, easy fix to snared traffic in a city that can't seem to get its public transportation act together. The piece barely addresses another way of looking at this, a perspective anyone who lives, works, or sends their kids to school remotely near these two streets has certainly considered: Zev's plan essentially puts two new seven-lane freeways right through the heart of L.A. residential and business neighborhoods, and within blocks of more than two dozen schools. (For example, Carthay Center Elementary School and Los Angeles and Beverly Hills High Schools are actually on Olympic.) The hundreds of north/south streets that run between the two freeways also suddenly become "on-ramps," as motorists find inventive ways to navigate to certain locations on or near Olympic and Pico.

Perhaps the city as a whole will decide two new freeways are a good idea, but we shouldn't pretend we're talking about a simple re-striping job. A few key excerpts from the Times piece:

There are a lot of ideas for fixing traffic in L.A., but almost all would cost a fortune.

Subway to the sea: $5 billion. Extending the Expo Line: $800 million. Widening the 405: $1 billion.

Then there is an idea that would cost comparatively little and is generating growing buzz around City Hall and the Westside: turning Olympic and Pico boulevards into one-way streets from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica.

A traffic consultant is completing a study of the concept, which was proposed in January by Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and has been the subject of much discussion since.

It remains to be seen exactly how much the conversion would improve traffic. The study marks the beginning of what would probably be a more than yearlong process to reconfigure the streets. The change would require approval of the L.A. City Council as well as leaders in Beverly Hills, home of a small stretch of Olympic.

(snip)

The idea isn't new. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which closed the Santa Monica Freeway for months, then-Mayor Richard Riordan proposed making Pico and Olympic one way to improve east-west traffic. The proposal died amid concerns from some residents that the boulevards would turn into dangerous speedways.

As traffic has worsened, fears of a "one-way racetrack" have largely dissolved.

Still, Pico and Olympic are unusual candidates for one-way conversion. Most one-way streets are one block apart, making it easy for drivers to switch directions.

By contrast, the distance between Pico and Olympic varies. Through large swaths of West L.A., Mid-City and Beverly Hills, the streets are only two or three blocks apart. But in Century City and neighborhoods south of Hancock Park, the gap widens to up to three-quarters of a mile.