Rambla La Cienega

Los Angeles is full of wide boulevards whose potential to be great urban corridors, like Parisian boulevards, has been well noted. However, overcoming funding challenges, along with entrenched interests like motorists and auto-oriented development, might make it seem daunting. So how about a starter project on La Cienega Ave.

La Cienega Blvd? No, La Cienega Ave. Just south of the 10, after it crosses Venice, La Cienega Blvd swings east before resuming its southward course towards the oil fields. Where the boulevard swings east, the avenue runs straight, south to Washington. A look at ZIMAS gives some insight.

Judging from the odd layout of property lines on La Cienega Blvd between Washington and Fairfax, and the strange property lines heading due west from the curve in Adams, here’s a guess at what happened. The original layout of La Cienega went straight south from Venice to Washington. Meanwhile, Adams went straight west from Fairfax to Washington, and then curved northwest to the intersection of Venice and La Cienega.

Later, when it was decided to create La Cienega Blvd as we know it today, a new road was laid out from Washington to Fairfax, across the pre-existing property lines. Rather than accepting a skewed five-way intersection between La Cienega, Washington, and Adams, the latter was realigned to curve northwest and intersect Washington east of the new La Cienega, which took over the route of Adams from the old La Cienega to Washington. This would have been done to create a better north-south arterial roadway; Fairfax north of the 10 has a narrower right-of-way (ROW) than La Cienega, and this change would eliminate the dead-end on La Cienega.

Got that? All speculation based on the property lines, but next time you’re out there, note that LADWP’s power lines follow the initial route for Adams suggested here. The important thing is that this change left La Cienega Ave dangling in urban design limbo, a 100’ ROW that became a minor street.

Most of that space has been given over to angle parking. While it doesn’t look like much space, this is actually about the same ROW width as the famous La Rambla in Barcelona. Redistribute the street space, and you could build a mini-rambla on La Cienega Ave.

I won’t even try to design or render that green space – that’s what landscape architects are for! Leaving the street in their hands, what about adjoining land use?

La Cienega Ave is currently zoned C2, which allows many commercial uses and also R4 residential density (the denser end of the dingbat spectrum). However, this zone is limited to a total FAR of 1.5, which won’t cut it. It should be upzoned to something like RAS4, which allows mixed use with FAR 3.0, or better yet, a hypothetical RAS5 zone with FAR 6.0, allowing denser residential development. ZIMAS uses orange for multi-family residential zones, but don’t let that fool you: the residential streets here are almost all RD2 and RD1.5, which allows only 2-3 units per lot. The side streets feeding La Cienega Ave, Hargis and Melvil, should be upzoned to R4 or RAS4. Parking requirements, as always, would probably need to be relaxed.

Ultimately, the hope would be to create a mixed-use district centered on the rambla, something like Americana at Brand but without the inevitable overplanning and uniformity of design that come with a single owner.

The upzoning might be able to help pay for the improvements to La Cienega Ave, which should be a minor burden if distributed out. As for transit, this area is less than a mile from both Culver City and Jefferson/La Cienega on the Expo Line, and well served by bus routes 33/733 on Venice and 105/705 on La Cienega.

Eliminating Loop Ramps: The 10 at La Cienega and La Brea

In this introductory post on urban freeway improvements, the elimination of loop ramps and slip ramps was identified as some of the lowest-hanging fruit. It’s relatively cheap to do, and it makes things much better for bikes and pedestrians by getting rid of long, skewed crosswalks and road geometry that encourages drivers to speed. Since loops take up a lot of real estate, it also frees up a decent amount of land for development. Inspired by a recent comment, here’s a look at two interchanges on the 10: La Cienega and La Brea.

La Cienega

The westbound ramps at La Cienega are already in a tight diamond configuration, so there’s nothing to change there. The eastbound ramps are in a cloverleaf configuration, albeit a modified one, since Venice cuts through the vicinity. Thus, the northbound La Cienega on ramp to the 10 eastbound is a right on Venice, then a right on the ramp. The loops are very tight, with curve radii down in the neighborhood of 80’.

The basic idea here would be to remake the eastbound ramps in the image of the westbound ones. The interchange would become a modified tight diamond, with a new road connecting the two ramps between La Cienega and Venice. This would reconfigure the free movements to and from the ramps into normal city intersections, making them less hazardous for pedestrians and bikes. It would also yield new signalized pedestrian crossings of La Cienega and Venice, making things a little more walkable.

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This concept uses 10’ lanes and 6’ curbside bike lanes on La Cienega. Now, I know what you’re thinking – why is there no crosswalk on the north side of the intersection of the new ramps and La Cienega? Three-legged pedestrian crossings are horrible! The reasoning is that adding a crosswalk there makes things considerably harder for the traffic engineering, and this location is a rare exception to the rule that you should never omit a crosswalk. Because there’s nothing on either side of La Cienega on that side of the ramps, there’s no chance a pedestrian would have to use all three crosswalks in lieu of the missing crosswalk. Anybody walking here is going to either a destination north of the 10, in which case they can cross at David Ave and the onramp to the 10 westbound, or a destination south of the new ramps, in which case they can cross on the south side of the intersection.

This concept adds two lanes under the freeway bridge. It looks like this might just fit under the existing bridge, because the east side has a row of parking between the existing edge of pavement and the columns.

On the traffic side, the loop ramps are both serving over 10,000 vehicles per day. Those turning movements, which are currently free (unsignalized) right turns, will be replaced with left turn phases at the new traffic signal. Excluding the crosswalk on the north side of the intersection makes that left turn easier, reducing the green time needed for the eastbound movement. Again, this is only acceptable because it’s a special situation. Here are the traffic volumes at the new intersection.

Traffic volumes are from Caltrans and LADOT. This is a really rough estimate. The approach was to guess at the worst conflict group (combination of movements that can’t proceed at the same time) for each intersection, and figure out the sum of capacities needed for each movement in the group. That’s the “g/C” column (green time divided by cycle time), representing the percentage of the total intersection capacity needed for that movement. For example, the left turn from the 10 eastbound to La Cienega northbound needs 23% of the capacity at the intersection. If the total of that column is greater than 100%, or even relatively close, the intersection is close to failing.

La Brea

The existing interchange at La Brea is a full cloverleaf, with loops almost as tight as 100’ radius. However, the interchange doesn’t function like a true cloverleaf, because the outer ramps have very sharp cure radii to and from La Brea, and the offramps using the outer ramps have traffic lights instead of free-flowing turns.

The plan at La Brea would be to reconfigure the interchange as a tight diamond, using the same parameters – 10’ lanes, 6’ bike lanes. There are two options, one with the ramps tight up against the freeway, and one with the ramps intersecting La Brea near where the outer ramps do today.

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it’s a perfectly cromulent word

The advantage of the first option is that it lets you do the same crosswalk trick as at La Brea. However, unlike at La Cienega, there’s no extra room under the freeway at La Brea. We can steal the weaving lane to get four lanes under the bridge, but that leaves only a single lane for the left turns onto the 10. Unfortunately, that probably won’t work on the traffic side.

By pushing the ramps further away from the bridge, the second option lets you fit in a second left turn lane, though due to the lane’s short length, it might be a little optimistic to assume it could be used to its full capacity. Also, because the second option puts the new development between the ramp intersections, it’s no longer acceptable to omit a crosswalk. That makes the traffic design more challenging.

Traffic volumes on La Brea are daunting – the road serves nearly 70,000 vehicles per day here, more than many freeways that are two lanes per direction. The heaviest ramp volumes are to and from the east, all approaching 10,000 vehicles per day.

This design would require the crosswalks closest to the freeway to be concurrent with the left turns from the freeway offramps, which might be difficult given the traffic volumes.

Palmer Paradise

Now normally this is the part of the post where I’d suggest auctioning off the real estate to the highest bidder, as long as they agree to do something with it other than surface parking. That way you don’t end up with prime real estate owned by the government sitting vacant for years because it was impossible to come to a consensus on what to do with the land.

But you know what? F!@# it. These freeway-adjacent sites are right in GH Palmer’s wheelhouse. Just dial him up and let’s get us a few hundred Italianate apartments built. We can call them The Palude and The Catrame (the Italian equivalent of La Cienega and La Brea).

Traffic Troubles

While the idea of improving these interchanges for pedestrians and bikes, and freeing up space for urban development, is appealing, the worst g/C ratios approach 1 at both interchanges. More traffic study would certainly be required to see if these plans are viable.

Politically, any plan to eliminate loop ramps is going to have to win the support, or at least the grudging tolerance, of drivers. Unfortunately, these interchanges are not the best candidates for the first project, because if the first project doesn’t go well, there won’t be any more. Back to the lab again. . .

 The sausage-making behind this rough traffic analysis: I assumed the ramp volumes have the same peaking as the through movements on the 10, and 1,700 veh/hr capacity for each lane at the intersections. The critical conflict group at La Cienega was assumed to be Offramp EB – La Cienega NB – La Cienega SB left turn. At Venice, Onramp EB (from the La Cienega SB left turn) – Venice EB – Venice WB left turn. No volume was available for the last movement so it was a wild guess. The critical conflict groups at La Brea were assumed to be Offramp EB – La Brea NB – La Brea SB left turn, and Offramp WB – La Brea SB – La Brea NB left turn.

Random Thoughts on La Cienega

So the other day, I found myself walking on La Cienega between La Cienega/Jefferson Station and the corner of La Cienega and Washington.

This area is surprisingly industrial, which makes walking on the west side of La Cienega a little bland – there’s just not a lot there. We’re not talking about the huge factories or distribution warehouses you find in the IE; this is all small scale industry – small businesses and workshops. I have no problem with urban industrial districts, quite the opposite; for example, in my post on the Union Station area, I noted that progressives have a weird proclivity for waxing nostalgic about well-paying industrial jobs in theory, and regulating them out of existence in practice. From a selfish point of view, the world would be a little less magical if I didn’t get to smell See’s Candies making chocolates from the Expo Line when the wind blows the right way.

Industrial uses, by their very nature, have a high ratio of square footage to employees. If the west side of La Cienega is industrial, it’s kind of a border vacuum, so the east side really needs to pick up the slack. The blob of SFR zoning between La Cienega and Clyde (in yellow) really doesn’t help in that regard. The areas that look like they’re zoned for multi-family (in orange) are mostly zone RD1.5 and RD2, which require 1,500 SF and 2,000 SF of lot area per unit, making them relatively low density. Really, there shouldn’t be any zoning this light on the Westside.

For its part, Culver City has both sides of La Cienega zoned industrial, and the residential neighborhood to the west is zoned Two-Family Residential, which only allows SFRs and duplexes. Again, this is ridiculously low for the Westside.

But really, I wanted to write about two specific locations on La Cienega, not general land-use (hey, I said this was a random post).

La Cienega and Fairfax

This first one should be uncontroversial. If you’re walking on the east side of La Cienega (the more interesting side to walk on), there’s no crosswalk for you at Fairfax.

This means that in practice, if you wanted to be safe, you’d have to detour all the way to Adams.

I’m aware that legally, there’s an “unmarked crosswalk” at Fairfax (as well as crossing Fairfax at Smiley and Perry). But let’s be real here. None of those locations have curb cuts. Crossing Fairfax at an unmarked crosswalk is dangerous, and probably nearly impossible at rush hour. It was Saturday morning, so my friend and I dashed across during a gap in traffic, but I wouldn’t want that to part of my day on a regular basis.

What’s really weird here is that at the signalized part of the intersection, they give you a crosswalk and pedestrian lights to cross to the traffic island – a place that, once you’re there, you have nowhere to go but back where you came. The problem for pedestrians on La Cienega could be fixed relatively easily: just add a repeater off the signal heads for La Cienega northbound on the ramp to Fairfax northbound. When La Cienega northbound is red, turn that light red too, and let people cross. There’s no need to add a new phase to the signal. Just a couple hundred feet of trench, a mast arm, two ped signal heads, and maybe three traffic signal heads. With luck, there’s spare room in the lamp drivers. I’d even accept a beg button here to placate traffic concerns (ped volumes are pretty low, but check out the Google Street view if you think no one walks here).

Now the other issue is less obvious: if you’re walking south on the east side of Fairfax, and you want to cross to the west side of La Cienega, this is a very roundabout path. Same goes for walking north on the west side of La Cienega and wanting to get to the east side of Fairfax.

You could still solve this without changing the signal timing. Drop another crosswalk on Fairfax, with the signals showing the same thing as the ones at the first crosswalk. Add a crosswalk on La Cienega on the south side of Fairfax, which would run concurrently with the signal phase for Blackwelder. This one would require a beg button; I think the phase for Blackwelder is actuated (i.e. only comes up when a car is on the detector). This one might require some new hardware in the case.

A longer term option would be to eliminate the high-speed geometry for the turn onto Fairfax, and tighten that move up into the main intersection. That would free up some space for a pocket park.

La Cienega/Jefferson Bus Loop

This idea will probably be a little less popular, and I’m not sure about it, but I’ll throw it out there anyway.

When the Expo Line was built, the La Cienega/Jefferson station got a 5-story parking garage on the southeast side and a bus loop off of Jefferson on the east side. The connecting bus services are routes 38, 105, 217, 705, and Culver City 4. The 105, 705, and Culver City 4 are just passing by on La Cienega, so in the interest of not delaying through passengers, we don’t want them to turn into the bus loop – they should just stop on La Cienega. The 38 runs from the Washington/Fairfax transit hub to downtown via Jefferson – a route not much different from Expo Line itself, and I wouldn’t expect many transfers. Turning into the loop would be trivial but unnecessary for the 38 eastbound, but would cause delays for the 38 westbound.

The only service for which using the loop really makes sense is the 217, because many trips originate or terminate at La Cienega/Jefferson, and it’s a time point for the route. The 217 never runs headways less than 12 minutes, so the traffic light for the bus loop is really only going to be used by 5 vehicles per hour.

On the other hand, the driveways for the parking garage are unsignalized, so your only option is to turn right onto La Cienega northbound or Jefferson eastbound. The former is fine, but pretty much no one wants to go east on Jefferson – they just came from downtown and probably want to go west on Jefferson or south on La Cienega. Want proof? Go hang out there in the afternoon, and watch how many cars come out and flip a u-turn in the middle of Jefferson. With minimal onsite work, the garage driveway could be reconfigured to use the bus loop traffic light so that traffic can turn left (there’s no current aerials, you’ll have to take my word for it).

A lot of people are probably not happy that the garage was built in the first place. The 476 parking spaces provided probably added something in the vicinity of $10-12 million to the cost of Expo Phase 1. To recover that cost, even with generous assumptions (5% interest rate, 50-year return period, each spot used 330 days a year), you’d have to charge over $4 per day for parking. Currently, the garage is pretty full, so it is being used, but Metro is giving the parking away for free. It’s unfair to subsidize parking for people who can afford a car, considering that the median income of LACMTA rail riders is about $26k and 55% don’t have a car.

I’d have no problem charging for parking, though note that since the garage doesn’t fill up, the marginal value of parking is currently $0. As ridership increases, charging for parking should become more viable. I’d also be pretty excited to see what someone could do in terms of adaptive reuse, and that might be a faster way to recoup the cost of building the garage. But until one of those things happens, why not make the best of things as they are today, and make it easy for drivers to turn left on Jefferson? I’d rather see people drive to a transit station than drive the whole way.