10 ideas for fixing Los Angeles traffic
A new study by the City of Vancouver has identified how the city can save $50 million annually on road repairs.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti speaks as he presents Mayor Ed Lee’s final wish list at a City Council meeting in Los Angeles, Calif, on Tuesday, June 29, 2017.
L.A. could get a big boost from a proposed infrastructure bond, but it also faces a whole set of problems to solve.
A new study by the City of Vancouver identifies how the city can save $50 million annually on road repairs. It also points out that the city needs to find ways to make the streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists. It recommends a whole set of action plan items to make the city greener, more sustainable and more pleasant to live in. Here are some of those ideas.
Fix streets where they make sense, where drivers stop.
When people drive down a road and notice a street is missing from the map, they call it a “canyon” or a “tunnel.” The solution is to make streets where the numbers fit work better for everyone so they don’t need to be a “tunnel” in the middle of the road.
The city has already identified roads where it would make sense to do this, notably in the Arts District. It identified the streets in its study with the following criteria:
The street has a traffic light. The traffic light is in use more often than it is allowed to be left on because it is an eyesore.
It is very narrow.
It has no intersections.
It is the right-of-way of a transit line with a dedicated bus stop.
There is a light pole or crosswalk with three inches or more of clearance between the street and the curb.
There are no parked cars or other obstructions within 10 feet of the curb.
It has four lanes of traffic or more.
It is more than 20 feet wide.
You could make the street work by doing it the right way, but the city didn’t.
For example, the city has done this with two-way northbound streets in Koreatown. On these streets, drivers who are traveling eastbound can turn left or right to go west or east, but drivers whose cars are going northbound don’t get an option to do that. This makes it very difficult for