New bike lanes on Burbank Boulevard in North Hollywood
Within the past week or so, the city of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) added 2.7 miles of bike lane on Burbank Boulevard. The new Burbank Blvd lanes extend from Radford Avenue (just west of the 170 Freeway) to Hazeltine Avenue (just east of Van Nuys Boulevard.)
The city’s approved bike plan and 5-year plan do not include this stretch. The bike plan does designate future bike lanes coming to the part of Burbank Boulevard just west of this: 1.12 miles from Van Nuys Blvd to Sepulveda Blvd. That future stretch isn’t listed in the city’s 5-year plan listings, though it appears on the 5-year plan map (which the city had online but later removed.)
The lanes are listed on the LADOT website as “in design.” I learned that they were complete from this June 6th 2012 comment by Dennis Hindman.
These bike lanes are fairly close to existing lanes on Chandler Boulevard, which runs parallel about a quarter-mile south. Some folks have criticized this sort of redundancy (for example in places where the Orange Line bike path parallels the L.A. River bike path), but I think near-redundancy is the sign that a network is emerging. Bring it on!
New Burbank Blvd bike lanes running along the south end of L.A. Valley College
This portion of Burbank Boulevard is a mix of commercial and residential, including multi-family apartment buildings to single-family homes; it includes significant Latino and Jewish residential populations. The new Burbank bike lanes serve to link residential areas with quite a few destinations, including the numerous commercial strips. The lanes connect with a handful of schools; they run along the south end of Los Angeles Valley College.
New Burbank Blvd bike lanes intersect the Metro Orange Line bikeway-busway at Valley College Station
The lanes intersect the Metro Orange Line busway and bikeway at the Valley College station. The lanes also intersect with a couple of short 1970s-era segments of bike path along the Tujunga Wash. The wash crosses below Burbank Blvd at Coldwater Canyon. These Tujunga Wash bike paths are rather marginal, but do offer excellent views of the Great Wall of Los Angeles mural.
For two blocks, between Woodman Avenue and Ventura Canyon Avenue, the roadway narrows slightly. For this short stretch, the bike lanes have been dropped and instead the roadway features sharrows.
Sharrow on Burbank Boulevard just east of Woodman Avenue
I’ve been, well, rather critical of sharrows, but actually I think that this two-block area is one of the few types of places where I generally think that they make sense. I don’t mind sharrows for short stretches between other bikeways, on streets that aren’t wide enough for preserving existing car uses and adding bike lanes. I didn’t actually measure, but I think this is the case on Burbank east of Woodman.
This sort of lane+sharrow treatment is done in San Francisco, including on Polk Street where there’s mostly bike lane, but a few blocks of sharrows, too. Historically, LADOT has taken more of what I might call a throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater approach. Sometimes a short pinch point had been used to omit miles and miles of bike facility. The example that comes to mind is that miles of Reseda Boulevard were omitted from early drafts of the bike plan, presumably due to a 2-block stretch where street parking was ultimately removed. Kudos to LADOT for doing the right thing on Burbank by putting as few sharrows as possible, only where most appropriate.
Big thanks to LADOT, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and City Councilmembers Paul Krekorian and Paul Koretz for getting these Burbike… er… Burbank Boulevard bike lanes implemented!
One exciting footnote to this project: as far as I can ad tell, this appears to be the project where the city broke the 40-mile mark for new bike lanes in Fiscal Year 2011-2012. Wooooot! Woooooooot! (Please double-check my bike lane tracking spreadsheet here. Looks like 40 was broken either on Burbank Blvd or the Los Angeles Street lanes.)
From 1996 to 2009, the city striped roughly 5 miles of bike lane each year. With the mayoral directive to implement 40 miles of new bikeways each fiscal year, the LADOT has dramatically stepped up its bike lane mileage. I, frankly, had a lot of doubts that this would ever happen – especially when LADOT spent a couple months ignoring the new bike plan and mostly focusing on sharrowing existing bike routes. I am impressed that so many new bike lane miles have been implemented. I’ve been critical of some of these bike lane projects, and have praised many. Overall, I think it’s very good – and making a visible difference, noticeable to cyclists, drivers, and others.
And the fiscal year isn’t over yet! There’s still 15 more days worth of bike lane implementation!
More reporting on the totals and trends soon – probably next week.
B.I.K.A.S. 
Dennis Hindman
06/15/2012
A consideration for usefulness of bike lanes is the traffic-stress level that the street has for most potential adult cyclists. Burbank Blvd is a four lane street which has considerably less traffic than Victory Blvd, Sherman way, Ventura Blvd or Roscoe Blvd heading in the east or west direction of the valley, so Burbank Blvd should be less stressful to ride compared to these streets.
The next major street south of Burbank Blvd, Chandler Blvd, is essentially a two lane street with a median that blocks from view the two lanes that go in the opposite direction. This is a fairly well ridden street for the valley, that connects to the Orange Line bike path and it has no-turn traffic lights at several intersections that help to reduce the stress level for cyclists.
About 85% of the vehicles hit speeds of 45 mph, which is probably the most stressful aspect of riding on this street for most people. Like most primary streets in the valley, Chandler Blvd could do with some traffic calming to create a less stressful environment for both pedestrians and cyclists.
So, both Vineland Ave and Burbank Blvd were recently given bike lanes and yet neither of these sections of streets are on the bike plan for installation of bike lanes. I can’t say they are a bad choice, since both streets were easy installations, with smooth riding surfaces. Although there still is a problem of favoring putting in easy to install bike lanes in the valley, compared to many other areas of the city where bike lanes would be used more.
About 47% of the centerline street miles for the city of Los Angeles are in the San Fernando Valley. So, proportionally, there should be slightly less than a 50/50 split of bike lanes/paths in the valley compared to the rest of the city. Both the proportion of bike lane and bike path mileage are more than 50% in the SFV. This is mainly due to the valley having more room to put bike paths and bike lanes in. Its great to see the recent plans for putting in bike lanes downtown. Hopefully, this will help to swing the percentage of bike lanes to a more balanced proportion between the valley and the rest of LA.
Dennis Hindman
06/16/2012
Portland has a big lead in the percent of bicycle commuters, compared to the 90 biggest cities in the U.S., at about 6%. Los Angeles is at about 1%.
With Portland having about 166 more miles of bike lanes, bicycle boulevards (bicycle friendly streets in LA), bike paths and barrier protected cycle tracks than LA has, according to the latest ladotbikeblog figures, and LA having 1.38 times more centerline miles of streets than Portland, it should take a little more than four years for LA to match the ratio of miles of bicycle infrastructure to total centerline street miles that Portland now has.
Does this mean that after 440 miles of bicycle infrastructure have been installed, LA will have a 6% bicycle commuting modal share that matches what Portland now has? Probably not, New York City has a couple hundred less centerline miles of streets than LA has, and they have over 600 miles of bicycle infrastructure. Yet, New York City has even a smaller bicycle commuting modal share than Los Angeles, at .8%. It takes time to convince a much larger amount of people to take up cycling and Portland has worked on increasing theirs for about 20 years.
It also may be tougher for larger cities to get people to bicycle when you weigh in other factors such as the stress from higher traffic congestion, rude behavior towards cyclists (especially women) and crime.
Still, we should see some big increases in the bicycle commuting modal share for LA in the next four or five years, with increasing prices for gasoline helping to spur this on.
Bike Rental Central Park
06/21/2012
Los Angeles city is busy city. This new bike lane helps to control the traffic in road.