Street Designations and the End of Car Culture

So after listening to Josef Bray-Ali spout off about the most technical of assaults on the DOT's wet-dream come true (AKA North Figueroa St in Highland Park) I decided to actually do my homework, now that I'm a staff member of the LACBC and gearing up for a "four corners of the north east" bike advocacy campaign.

If you look here you can find the designations for pretty much every large street in Los Angeles. You'll notice that this is over at the Department of City Planning's website, which is who sets street designations. I learned from Joe Linton that changes to street designations have to be approved by the City Council, which makes sense, because it would be an ammendment to the Transportation Plan, which is a part of the General Plan. I also learned that DCP, like always, does pretty much whatever the DOT tells it to do.

But the whole reason for looking at this issue is in our attempt to make Figueroa St more bike friendly we've discovered that Fig is designated a Class II highway (south of York that is, North of York it's a Secondary Highway) meaning it is designed to take 30,000-50,000 Vehicle Trips a day. However if you look at the DOT's traffic count Data for York and Fig, probably the most bust intersection along the entire stretch, the count is 26,435--that's 3,565 trips short, or nearly 12% under it's designated capacity.

So what does all this jargony nonsense mean? It means the Figueroa is running under the capacity that its giant car lanes and extra wide medians are built for. To those of us who want to see the road reworked, with more space for bikes and smaller lanes to slow down traffic, we have a great appeal to make. Figueroa doesn't need to be as big as it is because there aren't enough cars driving there to justify it's size. Plus, if we knocked down its car lanes a little, and re-designated the street as a Secondary Highway, we'd still be well within the Secondary highway's prescribed peak hour trips--the DOT prescribes 1400vph in each direction during peak hours, and Figueroa only has a mesely 1087 in the morning, 1085 in the afternoon (and that's only Southbound in Downtown, northbound during peak hours comes in way under at 878 in the morning and 995 at night).

Of course, Josef has a bunch of other attacks but this is just one of them. I'll try to get the rest out of him and line them up in a super article.