Century City boom times: Is it a smart facelift or buildings gone wild?

I wanted to call your attention to a story about the latest big development in Century City -- an expansion of the Westfield mall and a 49-story residential building that will replace an older office. My colleague Martha Groves wrote the article, which appeared in today's online and print editions.

Excerpt:

Century City in particular has been a hotbed of construction, with projects including 2000 Avenue of the Stars (which replaced the ABC Entertainment Center) and Westfield's $170-million first-phase redo of the outdoor shopping center, including a rooftop dining deck, enlarged movie theaters and, most recently, a parking system that directs patrons to available spaces (green light overhead) and away from occupied spaces (red light overhead).

Also underway is Related Cos.' 39-story condo tower at the site of the former St. Regis Hotel on Avenue of the Stars. Down the street at the corner of Constellation Boulevard, JMB Realty Corp. of Chicago plans three condo towers.

In nearby Beverly Hills, the Montage resort hotel is scheduled to open this month. And the Beverly Hilton is hoping that a final vote count on Measure H will allow it to proceed with a 12-story Waldorf-Astoria hotel and two luxury condo towers.

Some residents say that the accumulation of projects will inevitably exacerbate traffic problems. Westfield's environmental impact report concluded that the expansion would indeed worsen traffic.

The story also notes that Westfield has been generous with campaign contributions, particularly to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and 5th District Councilman Jack Weiss, whose district includes Century City. Martha quotes David Tyrone Vahedi, one of six serious candidates vying to replace Weiss on the council in March's election.

Vahedi lost to Weiss in the 2005 election and was a supporter of an effort to recall Weiss in 2007 in a dispute stemming from a mitigation fund for the JMB project. It appears that he's aligning himself with residents concerned over Century City, a move that may be politically deft.

I think the story raises a host of great questions. If the older version of Century City was a shapeless blob of office buildings, will the new version be better?

Can the area -- sans the Beverly Hills Freeway that was never built -- handle any increase in vehicular traffic?

Would a subway extension from downtown to Century City via mostly Wilshire Boulevard help traffic or just provide an alternative to it?

With most of the projects adding a lot of parking spaces, does that just guarantee that everyone is going to keep driving to Century City?

And, finally, does anyone out there have an idea how to fix the awful Santa Monica Boulevard exits from the 405 Freeway? The northbound exit merges with Pontius Cotner -- basically a glorified access road -- and requires traffic trying to head to Century City to crawl across three lanes of traffic to try to make the right turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard.

Feel free to leave a comment. Please try to be brief. Here's a link to a Google map with a satellite view that shows the residential neighborhoods bordering Century City.

-- Steve Hymon

Photo: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times
 

Battle lines drawing in NBC Universal subway project

I posted back in August about the draft environmental impact project for the proposed NBC Studio/office space/hotel project above the Universal subway stop. To make a long story short, this is emerging as the major traffic battle in the San Fernando Valley, with NBC Universal and the developer Thomas Properties proposing 1.5 million square feet of development and nearby residents saying something that sounds like 'uh-oh.'

Several community groups have been monitoring the project and have now merged into Communities United for Smart Growth. They're holding a community meeting Wednesday night to discuss how to respond to the draft EIR -- they're concerned about traffic generated by the project. Clearly the battle lines are starting to be drawn. Press release for the meeting after the jump.

On a related note, it always piques my interest when a group says they're for something "smart" because I tend to suspect it's code for "elsewhere." There's currently a group on the Westside called "Neighbors for Smart Rail," by which they mean they would really rather the Expo Line be smart and not go through their neighborhood. Not that there's anything wrong with being smart, of course.

--Steve Hymon

The charts tell the story in Rand's traffic study

The Rand Corp. released a study today that focuses on what can be done in the short term to reduce traffic congestion in the Southland. I have a story in today's editions of The Times, and the study is online at Rand's website.

The gist of it is that Rand researchers believe that pricing strategies such as toll lanes and higher parking fees will help reduce demand at the busiest times of the day on area roads. They also suggest that employers sell deeply discounted transit passes to workers, and recommend that more streets be converted to one-way thoroughfares because those move traffic more efficiently.

There were a couple of charts in the study that I thought Bottleneckers may enjoy (if you click on them, you can see larger images). The first:

This chart shows the volume of traffic on local roads versus that road's capacity. Check out the Westside! Nearly all the local roads (the ones in red) are at 95% or more of their capacity. Ouch. The data for this chart was collected in 2004, by the way.

The second chart:

This chart was compiled using data from across the metropolitan area. The reason that L.A.'s population density is high is that it reflects the sprawl across that giant metro area. It's not that we have higher densities than Manhattan -- it's that we have population spread out over hundreds of square miles. And, as the chart shows, we also drive a lot on a per capita basis.

Mix those two factors together and what do you get? You guessed it: pretty awful traffic.

--Steve Hymon

National Parking Day roundup: I couldn't make it out to chronicle the miniature parks that sprung up around town, but Damien Newton spent 10 hours pedaling about, notebook and camera in hand. He has a great roundup of many of the event over at Streetsblog Los Angeles. Check it out.

--Steve Hymon

Johnny Law cracks down on parking day

Here's a nice pic just sent over by the folks at CB Richard Ellis and Valleycrest Landscape, who teamed up to build a parking day spot in downtown L.A. Looks like the long arm of the law wasn't pleased -- lighten up, officer!

Full press release after the jump. I have to add my own commentary here: I love how a national event that started with a bit of anarchy -- let's dump the car -- is getting the attention from big business and real estate firms.

--Steve Hymon

photo: CB Richard Ellis

National Park(ing) Day gets a foothold in downtown L.A.

I posted earlier that today is National Park(ing) Day -- when parking spaces are converted to other uses -- and the firm Torti Gallas and Partners sent over this pic of its newly refurbished parking spot.

"As an urban design and architecture firm based in downtown and focused on responsibly shaping the city, Torti Gallas and Partners has commandeered a parking space and staked it out with a For Sale sign, a picket fence, and a welcome mat," the firm says in a news release. "Our concept for Park[ing] Day acknowledges the potential of a parking spot not only as a green space, but also as a place that can be reprogrammed with a variety of more valuable and dynamic uses."

The full release is after the jump. There are some good arguments about other ways space to use space that's set aside for cars. Realistic? Pie in the sky? Comment board is yours for the taking.

-- Steve Hymon

What can Portland teach Los Angeles about transportation?

I recently spent a long weekend in Portland, Ore. The trip was for fun, but it was hard not to look and sometimes marvel at the many things that Portland does well on the transportation front and wonder if they can be applied here.

Of course, comparing the Portland area to the Southland is a bit unfair. The city of Portland has a population of about 537,000 (about 10% larger than Long Beach) and the metro area has about 2.1 million people. Los Angeles County alone has about 10 million people.

In other words, they've got the advantage of being smaller and in the world of urban planning, smaller usually translates to getting things done faster.

CYCLING

Census Bureau numbers from 2006 show that 4.1% of commuters in Portland use bikes to get to work compared with six-tenths of one percent in the city of Los Angeles. Portland transportation officials say that their own surveys show that actually 6% of the city's residents are pedaling to work -- tops in the nation for a large city.

I'd be skeptical of that number ordinarily. But on a Monday afternoon I sat on my rental bike watching the number of bike commuters heading out of downtown on the Hawthorne Bridge at rush hour. It was one bike after another on the bike lane on the bridge. Upon reaching the east side of the bridge, some cyclists used a special bike exit ramp to reach a bike path running along the Willamette. Amazing.

It's Shanghai -- in mini (scale) mode

A source forwarded me this neat link that shows a massive built-to-scale model of what the city of Shanghai will look like in the future. The model is at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exposition Center and covers 800 square meters. There are more good photos on the neatorama website, via flickr, and there's a video at YouTube that pans across the model.

I'm posting this because unlike regular maps, such a model gives you an idea of density and urban geography -- and what a perfect tool in transportation planning. Wouldn't it be great if there was such a model of Southern California or even Los Angeles? Someone, anyone, please build one of these! The tourists would gobble it up. In fact, Southern California residents would eat it up too.

It also reminds me of something similar I saw on a visit to the Bay Area last year. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers years ago built a warehouse-size hydraulic model of the Bay Area that it used to study tides and other water issues. It covers 1.5 acres and is worth checking out if you're in the Bay Area. Directions and hours are on the Army Corps website.

-- Steve Hymon

Top photo: Shanghai

Bottom photo: Army Corps of Engineers

Density maps help explain traffic

Someone recently asked me a simple question: Why is there traffic? I babbled on for a while trying to give an answer that involved many elements: cheap land, the freedom autos afford, historically cheap gas, zoning efforts that segregated housing from commercial and industrial areas, lack of coordinated planning, lack of investment in mass transit. And so on.

Yet, instead of a treatise, I think there are two maps that explain it pretty well. The one above shows employment density -- the number of jobs -- in Los Angeles County in the year 2030, with the projection based on today's numbers.

The colors represent job density of different areas in the above map.

white = 0 to 5,000 jobs per square mile
green = 5,001 to 10,000 jobs per square mile
yellow = 10,001 to 50,000 jobs per square mile
orange = 50,001 to 100,000 jobs per square mile
red = 100,001 to 244,918 jobs per square mile

The map below is of population density per square mile in the county. In the map below, the darker the color, the higher the density:

light tan: 142 to 563 people per square mile
dark tan: 4,390 to 5,787 people per square mile
lightest green: 6,468 to 7,742 people per square mile
medium green: 8,934 to 10,178 people per square mile
dark green: 12,258 to 12,499 people per square mile

The two maps together show that a lot of the job density and people density are in different places. Thus, people have to drive to get where they're working, and back.

It also should be noted that Metro is using the top map to justify expanding mass transit on the Westside. If the information is correct -- and it seems intuitive that it's on base -- there's a huge number of jobs from downtown to the ocean, most notably in Beverly Hills, Century City and Westwood.

That's also why it's likely that Metro later this summer or early fall will say the best way to serve the Westside is to build a subway. The train, if the stations are located well, has the potential to get people to a lot of jobs -- provided, of course, linkages to the subway are provided from other transit lines.

Given all the talk right now about mass transit and the planning of future lines, I'm curious what you think these maps show. What's the best place to put transit? Where shouldn't it go?

-- Steve Hymon

Top map: Metro / Southern California Assn. of Governments

Bottom map: U.S. Census Bureau

Guest blogger visits Curitiba, home of the busway

Jeff Jacobberger, chair of the transportation committee of the Mid-City West Neighborhood Council, just traveled to Curitiba, Brazil. Curitiba is perhaps best known in these parts for its busways, which were the inspiration for the Orange Line busway in the San Fernando Valley.

Jacobberger is known here for being a mass transit advocate. He lives on the Westside and has also earned a reputation for being independent-minded -- as you'll see from some of the things that he writes below in the captions for the three photos. He's working on a master's degree at USC in transportation planning and took summer courses in Rio de Janeiro. He traveled to Curitiba, he said, mostly out of curiosity because the city has earned a reputation for its urban and transit planning. 

I thought Bottleneckers would find them interesting and may perhaps want to discuss or argue about them on the comment board. (Bottleneckers, of course, are a breed known for their highly intelligent comments that are both civil and civically inclined).

The policy question that most interests me involves density around transit corridors. While urban planners commonly say that density needs to be greatly expanded to support transit lines, I wonder how that will play out here in coming years. Yes, residents want more mass transit. But will they tolerate the upzoning that comes with it? If I was a gambling man, I would bet that the real controversy over the Westside subway extension won't be over the project, but attempts to add thousands of residential units near the subway stations.

Enough of my bloviations. Take it away, Jeff:

The first is a photo taken from an observation platform (hence the weird reflections).  It shows that, along the rapid bus routes, there are narrow ribbons of very tall, high density buildings that drop off very quickly to much lower density. 

The closest equivalent I can think of in L.A. is along parts of Wilshire in Wilshire Center and the Miracle Mile, or the stretch of Wilshire from Beverly Hills to Westwood (if all those buildings were mixed-use).  But even Wilshire doesn't have the nearly solid line of high-rises that Curitiba has. 

It seems L.A. could benefit from the same -- very high-density along true transit corridors (instead of the current planning which allows medium density on any local bus line that runs every 15 minutes during rush hour). 

From what I observed, much of Curitiba looks like much of the Los Angeles area, with Super Wal-Marts and other big-box retail, drive-through fast-food restaurants, gated communities of single-family homes, and a lot of automobile traffic. People who want that sort of development can have it, but those who want a more urban lifestyle have that choice as well. 

The second photo is of a block-long bus transfer terminal. Passengers pay to enter the terminal, and then can board any bus.  Because people don't need to pay fares or show bus passes, they not only board faster through the front door but also are allowed to board through the rear door. 

It was surprising how little time buses had to stay stopped, even when large numbers of passengers were boarding. By necessity, there is a free transfer policy within these stations. Given the numbers of bus lines that converge downtown, it would seem that creating a couple of these stations downtown (say, one on Bunker Hill and another closer to 7th or 8th) could make a lot of sense. 

Metro has some of these transit stations already, such as at San Vicente/Pico, the West L.A. Transit Station under the I-10 at Fairfax, Artesia, LAX, etc., although I don't know that any of those stations actually generate enough riders to make a trial worthwhile there. 

The third is of a street that is configured much like [L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's] Olympic-Pico proposal. A close look at the photo shows that, while there is parking on both sides of the street, there is no center turn-lane. L.A. is the only major city I know of where making a left turn anywhere one pleases is seen as a God-given right. The real choice isn't extra traffic lane vs. curb parking, but rather empty-95%-of-the-time left turn lane vs. curb parking.

Intro: Steve Hymon

Captions and photos: Jeff Jacobberger