– Presented by Damien Newton for the Culver City Bicycle Coalition
Following the decline of the movie studios in the 1960s and 1970s, Culver City had to reinvent itself. In the 1990s, the city once commonly referred to as “The Heart of Screenland” undertook an aggressive campaign to revitalize the downtown area and was mostly successful in attracting businesses and tourists to bolster the city’s economy. Today, nearly 40,000 people call Culver City home and it’s widely thought of as a safe place to live and a good place to raise children.
Despite its reputation for embracing New Urbanism (in 2007 the New York Times called the city a “nascent Chelsea”), Culver City had never embraced transportation planning for cyclists and pedestrians. In fact, when the City approached the Los Angeles County Public Health Department about a PLACE Grant, it had never had either a bicycling or pedestrian element in its Master Plan. While critics of the plan, including some of the people that helped create it, complain that the plan isn’t as progressive or specific as it should be, creating change is a crucial first step for a city that was starting with no foundation or advocacy community.
The lack of a bicycle and pedestrian plan of any sort was a major reason Culver City was awarded the PLACE grant. Obesity statistics, especially for grade school–age children, are lower than the national average. In addition, Walk Score, an organization that ranks walking districts on a national scale recently ranked Culver City as a “very walkable” community.
As any parent of a toddler can tell you, you have to learn to walk before you can run. When it comes to planning for people-powered transportation, Culver City is walking and the fruits of that walk are a brand new Bicycle andPedestrian Master Plan.
Or, as Ron Durgin, president and co-founder of Sustainable Streets and a member of the master plan’s citizen advisory committee, put it, “These are the broad strokes they’re going to need to move forward.”
It’s long been accepted that auto-dependency leads to poor air quality, as pollutants spewing from tailpipes have been blamed for a laundry list of human ills including many lung conditions (such as asthma) and neurological disorders (such as autism.) However, modern public health experts are looking at the ills of car dependency in a new light, noting that areas with poor sidewalks tend to have higher obesity, that there is a correlation between a drop inchildren walking and biking to school and an increase in childhood obesity and that cities with more bike lanes havehealthier overall populations. Some research even points to improved mental health for those who take regular walks or bike rides.
With $320,000 in public health money in hand, the city embarked on a three-year process to create its first Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, which serves as both a collection of projects that the city hopes to complete in the next five years and a vision for a Culver City that encourages walking and cycling in a very real way.
“The city of Culver City is extremely grateful to the L.A. County Department of Public Health’s PLACE program for providing us with grant funding. The county made it possible for us to create the city’s first Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan,” wrote Culver City Mayor Micheal O’Leary. The process of developing the BPMP engaged the community like never before in bicycle and pedestrian issues. The resulting documents will help shape the city for years to come by communicating clear goals and by identifying priorities for improvements in bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. We are dedicated to providing educational, encouragement and enforcement efforts in the future.”
The mayor’s support of walking and cycling extends to his life outside public service. During Bike to Work Day, Joxer Daly’s (the restaurant/bar he owns) had a special happy hour for any commuter who arrived on bicycle.
We’ve already discussed how the city’s public process created the Downtown Connector project that gave birth to well-marked bike routes to connect the future Expo Station to downtown Culver City (and east Culver City residents to their schools and parks) and led to the creation of the Culver City Bicycle Coalition. Now we’ll examine the plan itself.
In addition to five public meetings, Culver City and their project consultants also conducted a series of bicycle and pedestrian counts to inform their project process. To examine a bicycle and pedestrian plan such as this, there are several things we have to examine. The first is whether the plan is putting in infrastructure in places that make sense. Second, we have to look at whether the projects themselves make sense. Last, because this is a smallish city that is basically surrounded by the mammoth city of Los Angeles, we need to see whether or not their infrastructure plans are in sync with those of their neighbors.
“They were kind of going together in the same process,” explained Culver City resident John Rivera, the PLACE grant coordinator for Culver City. “The L.A. plan was adopted about four months after ours,” he said.
Culver City used Alta Planning – the same consultant used by L.A. “We kept track of them, we looked at their maps as they were proceeding. We tried to make sure that each of our bikeways met up with an L.A. bikeway,” Rivera said.
Culver City claims it can implement the entire plan in the next five years, which would really bring a dramatic change in the city’s infrastructure. Currently, there are a paltry 4.2 miles of bike infrastructure within the city. If implemented, the Culver City Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan would increase the mileage of bike infrastructure nearly tenfold, to just over 41 miles. Culver City has a firm deadline when officials hope to complete plan implementation – November of 2015 – five years after passage of the plan.
The only existing infrastructure was a small portion of the Venice Boulevard Bike Lanes, the Ballona Creek Bike Path and a portion of the Culver Boulevard Bike Path, all of which connect to larger infrastructure outside of the city. Looking at the map, one can see that the proposed bicycle network connects each one to the other and eventually, the large existing bike lanes and bike paths. A recent study by urban planner Gian Claudia–Sciara published by theUniversity of California Transportation Center shows that creating complete networks, where cyclists don’t have to leave the network to travel large distances, is a key to encouraging new cyclists and, thus, increasing the amount of exercise a community gets through transportation choices.
The project also provides a network of local bicycle facilities designed specifically to encourage cycling within the city. The routes providing connections to Venice Boulevard, downtown or the Bike Paths are really designed for people traveling to and from Culver City, but the internal network is perhaps more important in encouraging new riders, which is a key component of a public health component to transportation planning.
This is where one of the concerns with the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan comes into play. Most of those local connections are designated as either “bicycle routes” or “bicycle-friendly streets.” Of the 36.9 miles of infrastructure in the plan, more than 20 miles of the infrastructure are either routes (5.6 miles) or “bicycle-friendly streets” (14.6 miles).
Most bike facilities are clearly designed. Bike paths create bikeways that are separate from regular travel lanes and completely remove cars from bicycle traffic. Bike lanes and
“sharrows” both use paint to create safe space for bicycles parallel to or in the middle of mixed-use travel lanes – unlike bike paths. However, both bicycle routes and “bicycle-friendly streets” don’t have a specific treatment. Bicycle-friendly streets could be as simple as a route marked with signs or could have a series of traffic calming devices, sharrows, road signs, directional signs, traffic circles, chicanes, loop detectors, diverters, etc.
In short, nobody is 100% certain what a lot of the plan will look like when it is implemented. In fact, the term “bicycle-friendly street” is not one in common usage with bicycle planners across the country, but is a favorite term of Alta Planning and Design. Alta is not just the consultant for this plan, and the recently passed plan of the city of Los Angeles and pending plan of the County of Los Angeles.
(Next week, we’ll take a close look at the plan)
Damien Newton wrote this story while participating in The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.
Join the Culver City Bicycle Coalition at Fiesta la Ballona. Take advantage of the free bike valet hosted by Palms Cycle. Avoid traffic and parking hassles by riding to the event and parking for free. The coalition will lead a family ride to the Fiesta on Saturday, Aug 27.
Bike Safe, Bike Smart! is a weekly column to promote responsible cycling by providing information, education and advice about riding. It’s written by members of the Culver City Bicycle Coalition (CCBC), a local chapter of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. Join them for their family bike ride the last Sunday of every month. For more information and to submit questions, write: ccbicyclecoalition@gmail.com and visit their blog at ccbike.org.
