LA TRANSPO - For anyone traversing the San Fernando Valley, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Los Angeles is spending an enormous amount of money removing or modifying automobile travel lanes in favor of bus lanes and bike lanes. To many Angelenos, this looks like a ridiculous waste of money—not because better public transportation or safer streets aren't worthwhile goals, but because the city has yet to make public transit convenient, reliable and safe enough to persuade most people to abandon their cars.
And here is the uncomfortable truth Los Angeles politicians seem unwilling to acknowledge. People are not getting out of their cars anytime soon.
Take the bike lanes. In theory, protected bike infrastructure makes sense. If it is thoughtfully designed and actually serves a meaningful number of riders, it can be a valuable part of a transportation network. But Los Angeles is not Amsterdam, and the San Fernando Valley is not Copenhagen. This is a sprawling region built around the automobile, with long distances between homes, jobs, schools and shopping. It is also a place where much of the year is hot enough to make bicycling considerably less attractive for the average commuter. Yet the city continues to devote precious roadway space to bike infrastructure that, in many locations, serves a relatively small percentage of residents.
The problem isn't that Los Angeles has decided to build bike lanes. The problem is the assumption that changing the infrastructure will necessarily change people's behavior. Some undoubtedly will adapt. But millions of Angelenos have structured their lives around the automobile, and that reality isn't going to disappear because the city paints a bike lane or removes a traffic lane.
Councilmember Nithya Raman is a useful example of that tension, although she is hardly alone in it. Raman has been one of the stronger advocates on the City Council for expanding bicycle infrastructure and reducing automobile dependence. Her office has promoted projects intended to make biking, walking and transit more attractive, and her campaign has highlighted her record on bike lanes. Yet Raman has also acknowledged that she relies on a car because she has children and the demands of family life make driving necessary. There is another practical consideration: Council District 4 is geographically enormous, stretching across communities on both sides of the Santa Monica Mountains. A councilmember responsible for such a sprawling district has legitimate reasons to need a car. That isn't hypocrisy. It is reality—and that reality applies to millions of other Angelenos as well.
The point isn't that Raman should give up her car. She shouldn't. The point is that the transportation choices that are perfectly understandable for her are also perfectly understandable for the people she represents. When family life, work and geography make a car necessary for a councilmember advocating reduced automobile dependence, it should at least prompt some humility about policies that make driving more difficult for everyone else.
It is easy to advocate for fewer cars when discussing transportation policy in the abstract. It is considerably harder when you have to get children to school and activities, make appointments, go grocery shopping, commute to work and cross a region that can take an hour or more to traverse. The question isn't whether Angelenos should have alternatives to driving. They absolutely should. The question is whether those alternatives are good enough to compete with the automobile before the city starts making driving more difficult.
Chandler Boulevard offers a particularly good example of how good intentions can produce questionable results. The city ultimately awarded a $6.82 million construction contract for a 3.1-mile Chandler Boulevard cycle track project, upgrading the existing bike lanes to a protected bikeway. The project is intended to close a gap in the Valley's bicycle network and create a longer continuous protected bicycle route.
But there is a fundamental problem with calling it a continuous bike route: it isn't consistently continuous. Along portions of Chandler Boulevard, the bike infrastructure works reasonably well. But at numerous intersections, the protected lane becomes less clear or effectively falters, forcing cyclists to negotiate crossings and changes in configuration rather than simply following a clearly defined route. The problem is particularly noticeable around the newer Orange Line transit stops, where the bicycle path has to contend with transit stations, intersections and competing movements. A bike lane that works reasonably well between intersections but becomes confusing or fragmented at the places where traffic is most complicated isn't quite the seamless transportation alternative the city is selling.
The city has also squeezed parking and automobile travel lanes to make room for the new bike infrastructure. The remaining parking lanes are so narrow that they can feel dangerously tight, particularly for motorists traveling in the adjacent right lane. And for residents of the apartment buildings along Chandler who have little choice but to park on the street, the problem is even more serious. They have to get in and out of their cars in a space where passing traffic is uncomfortably close. Some may reasonably worry that they will wake up the next morning to find that their car—or several cars along the block—has been sideswiped. If a roadway design creates a foreseeable risk and puts residents in an unnecessarily dangerous position, the city ought to be thinking about more than bicycle infrastructure. It ought to be thinking about safety and potential liability as well.
And then there is what happened after the recent rains. The bike lanes were effectively unusable because fallen branches, leaves and trash had accumulated in them, much of it apparently coming from nearby transit stops and surrounding areas. The new configuration puts the bike lanes directly in the path of debris from the trees and, in places, alongside areas where litter accumulates around the transit stops. The city has even put up signs closing portions of the bike path because of the debris—presumably, one would think, to avoid liability if someone were injured trying to navigate an obstructed bike lane. If a $6.82 million bicycle corridor can become unusable after a rainstorm and then has to be closed because of the resulting debris, it is fair to ask whether the city fully thought through how the design would function in the real world.
Chandler illustrates the larger problem with transportation policy: infrastructure can look impressive on a project map and still fail to function as a practical transportation alternative on the street. Building a bike lane is relatively easy. Getting large numbers of Angelenos to use it instead of their cars is considerably harder.
And then there are the bus lanes, such as those on Sepulveda Boulevard. Ask an ordinary driver what the rules are for using those lanes and you are likely to get a lot of blank stares. Most drivers have no idea when they can enter them, when they cannot, or how they are supposed to interact with them. And I don't know about you, but I get particularly irritated when I see a car cruising down a bus lane as though it were the fast lane on the freeway. It defeats the entire purpose of a lane supposedly reserved for buses and creates another layer of confusion for everyone else on the road.
The rules governing these lanes are not exactly intuitive, and the result is predictable: confusion, inconsistent enforcement and motorists trying to figure out the rules while simultaneously navigating increasingly complicated streets. If the goal is to get people out of their cars, creating roadway configurations that even the people driving them don't understand is probably not the best way to start.
That is the larger problem. Los Angeles transportation policy increasingly seems designed to satisfy the demands of progressive transportation organizations and advocacy groups such as Streets for All rather than starting with the more basic question: What will actually move the greatest number of Angelenos safely and efficiently?
Mayor Karen Bass, to her credit, has shown that there can be a middle ground. Bass is hardly opposed to public transportation, bike lanes or reducing automobile dependence. But she has also demonstrated a willingness to recognize that transportation policy has to work for the people who actually live here. When faced with significant community opposition to the proposed redesign of Forest Lawn Drive, which would have removed a traffic lane in each direction to create a protected bike lane, Bass ordered the project redesigned rather than simply pushing ahead. Her revised approach calls for protected bike infrastructure while maintaining the existing traffic lanes.
That is the kind of balance Los Angeles needs. The choice shouldn't be between doing nothing and declaring war on the automobile. We can make streets safer, expand transit and provide better options for bicyclists without pretending that every traffic lane is an obstacle to be eliminated. Bass's decision on Forest Lawn Drive suggests that even a mayor committed to expanding alternative transportation can recognize that there are limits to how much roadway Los Angeles can take away from the automobile before the cure becomes worse than the disease.
The city's leaders appear to believe that if they make driving sufficiently difficult and provide enough alternatives, people will eventually abandon their cars. Perhaps some will. But transportation policy should be based on reality, not wishful thinking.
Los Angeles is not Denver or Portland, either. Those cities may have their own sprawling characteristics and transportation challenges, but Los Angeles presents a uniquely complicated geographic reality. Los Angeles isn't simply one city; it is a vast region made up of the City of Los Angeles and a conglomeration of surrounding cities and communities spread across an enormous geographic area. People routinely live many miles from their workplaces, schools, shopping, restaurants and the places where they go for entertainment. Someone can live in the San Fernando Valley, work downtown, take children to activities on the Westside and meet friends somewhere else that evening. That isn't an unusual lifestyle here—it is the reality of metropolitan Los Angeles.
This is why comparisons to compact, transit-oriented cities can be misleading. Los Angeles developed in the opposite direction. Its neighborhoods, commercial districts, employment centers and freeways were built around automobile travel, and the distances between the places people need and want to go are often substantial. You cannot simply take a transportation model that works in a denser, more compact city and assume it will produce the same results across a region where millions of people are spread over hundreds of square miles and across numerous municipalities.
That doesn't mean Los Angeles shouldn't invest in public transportation. Quite the opposite. If the city wants people to leave their cars at home, it needs to give them a compelling reason to do so. That means clean and safe buses and trains, reliable service, convenient connections, faster travel times and a transit system that people actually want to use—not simply one that transportation planners believe they should use.
There is nothing wrong with wanting a less car-dependent Los Angeles. There is something wrong with pretending that Los Angeles can become less car-dependent simply by making driving more difficult. The city has to earn that change by providing alternatives that work.
The hard truth for any politician running Los Angeles is this: you are not going to deprogram the automobile out of Los Angeles. The car is embedded in the city’s DNA. You can build transit, add bike lanes, encourage walking and create incentives to drive less, but the cold, hard fact is that Angelenos will continue to buy cars and drive them. Look at Van Nuys and countless other areas across the region, where acres upon acres of valuable land are devoted to automobile dealerships and enormous sales lots. There is an irony here that City Hall doesn't talk about very much: automobile dealerships are major employers and significant generators of tax revenue for the city. Nearly 30,000 people work directly at automobile dealerships in the Los Angeles region, and the average new vehicle sold in Los Angeles generates an estimated $4,960 in sales tax.
The city may want Angelenos to “drive less”, but it also has a very real economic interest in supporting an industry built around people continuing to buy and own automobiles. That's a contradiction worth examining—and probably an article for another day. So, in fact, those dealerships aren't going anywhere because the automobile isn't going anywhere—no matter what progressive politicians conjure up at City Hall.
The smarter strategy isn't to wage war against the automobile. It is to recognize that Los Angeles residents have extraordinarily diverse and complicated transportation needs. A parent taking children to school and activities, a worker commuting across the region, someone making several stops in a single day, or a resident traveling between communities may need the flexibility an automobile provides. Others may have perfectly good reasons to choose a bus, train, bicycle or walking. The point is not to force everyone into one mode of transportation, but to give people better choices that complement automobile use rather than trying to eradicate it.
You don't get people out of their cars by making driving worse. You get them out of their cars by giving them better alternatives.
(Thomas Glick is a former Los Angeles City Planning Department Planner with over three decades of municipal expertise. Since 2017, they have served as a Board Member for the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, continuing their commitment to local land-use policy and community advocacy.)
