Friday Bikeway Briefs: Ktown, Leimert Park, UCLA, USC, Highland Park, and Tarzana - Streetsblog Los Angeles

Recent bike lanes on 43rd St, Westholme Ave, and Mesa Ave. Bike upgrades on First St and on Jefferson Blvd. Slow progress on Reseda Blvd displays city's meager HLA response.

4:28 PM PST on November 8, 2024

Newly protected bike lanes on Jefferson Boulevard. Photos by Joe Linton

For your Friday reading: updates on six bike projects in various L.A. City neighborhoods. Nothing earthshattering here, but a few positive steps toward a more bikeable city.

This week, in population-dense Koreatown, the L.A. City Transportation Department (LADOT) closed a dangerous slip lane in front of Virgil Middle School and within a couple blocks of a half-dozen schools. The site is also two blocks south of the Metro B Line Beverly/Vermont Station.

The city reconfigured the northeast corner of First Street and Vermont Avenue. The curved area that facilitated drivers turning without stopping is now blocked off by plastic bollards. The street is restriped to ensure drivers make a safer turn.

The former turn pocket space has been reallocated to add about a hundred feet of protection to the existing bike lane.

(Note: this one is near and dear to this author, Streetsblog Editor Joe Linton. It's close to where I live. I often bike or walk through it to get to the Metro station. I frequently walk my daughter through this intersection to get to and from her school bus stop. I have long been concerned about how some drivers whip around this corner without stopping.)

Along with recent repaving, LADOT is making some changes to streets in Leimert Park Village, long a beloved cultural and business center for Black Los Angeles.

Recent Leimert Park street changes include:

Last summer, UCLA added a westbound plastic-bollard-protected bike lane on Westholme Avenue from Hilgard Avenue to Charles E. Young Drive.

The new Westholme lane joins a handful of protected bikeways installed on campus in recent years.

There is more collegiate bicycle news across town - could a bikeability rivalry be in the offing?

In September, LADOT added plastic bollard protection to existing bike lanes on Jefferson Boulevard along USC's South L.A. campus. The area around USC has long seen high levels of bicycling and walking.

The modest Jefferson upgrades extend eastbound from Orchard Avenue to Royal Street, and westbound from Hoover Street to Orchard. They dovetail with pedestrian scramble intersections at Jefferson/Hoover and Jefferson/McClintock Avenue.

A couple months ago, LADOT added new bike lanes on Mesa Avenue. The one-block quarter-mile-long facility extends from York Boulevard to Avenue 61 in the northeast L.A. community of Highland Park.

The Mesa bikeway connects to bike lanes on York, and is a fairly flat short (one-third mile) bike ride from the Metro A Line Highland Park Station.

It is taking the city a while to complete new bike lanes high up in the hills at the Tarzana end of Reseda Boulevard.

Reseda resurfacing was completed in early September. Soon thereafter, LADOT reinstalled about a mile of existing bike lanes there, but in early October the promised bike lane extension was nowhere to be seen. In mid-October LADOT spokesperson Colin Sweeney assured Streetsblog that "completion of [the Reseda Boulevard] bike lane extension will happen in the coming days/couple weeks, pending issuance of work orders and staff availability."

Streetsblog visited Tarzana earlier this week. LADOT preliminary lane markings are in, but the new lanes remain unfinished.

This ~400-foot-long portion of Reseda Boulevard is expected to be the first mobility improvement to clearly result from the passage of Measure HLA which now mandates that the city install planned/approved bus, bike, and walk facilities during routine repaving. HLA took effect in April.

(Arguably, Manchester Boulevard bike upgrades, installed after early August repaving, might be the first HLA-required project installed.)

In the seven months since HLA became law, the city has completed either one (Manchester) or zero new bikeways approved in its Mobility Plan. After voters supported more bike lanes, city bike lane output declined.

In June, LADOT General Manager Laura Rubio-Cornejo announced that her department had submitted a list of project-ready Mobility Plan corridors to the city Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA). Despite Streetsblog's repeated inquiries to LADOT and StreetsLA, that project list remains unrevealed and uninstalled.

On city streets, drivers continue to kill pedestrians, cyclists, and each other, in record numbers.

Joe Linton is an editor at Streetsblog Los Angeles

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