Car Wars

Car Wars

An Interview with Bill Pope

Mar Vista View: Well Bill, how goes the battle with L.A.’s traffic?

Bill Pope: Which battle, and in which war? I’m actually waging two wars —an Offensive war to force the City to stop dumping more unmitigated traffic on our roads, and a Defensive war to protect our residential streets in case I loose the Offensive war. It’s the unmitigated traffic from new and density-increasing land development projects that causes both arterial congestion and cut-thru traffic. Right now, I am loosing the Offensive war, but your association can help turn the tide.

Back in 2000 to 2004 when I was fighting the Playa Vista project, I learned that the City is pretty lax about making developers mitigate the impact of their traffic increases. I got real excited when Bill Rosendahl was elected to the City Council and announced his plan for a citizens’ Transportation Advisory Committee. I volunteered and began studying the City’s Traffic Study and Mitigation Policies. What I discovered is really infuriating!!

1. The traffic study and mitigation policies actually being followed internally by the City are NOT the policies published in the City’s General Plan and Mar Vista’s Community Plan. For you lawyers out there, this in itself may be grounds for a law suit, because not following published General Plan policies is a violation of State Code 65300, the laws which dictate how California cities are to behave.

2. Our Community Plan, which is part of the City’s General Plan, says the City is not to approve density and traffic increasing development projects if the roads and intersections cannot accommodate the traffic to be generated by the project. But the City allows traffic increases anyway.

3. Our Community Plan says the City is to maintain a “Satisfactory Level of Service” (LOS) on our roads and intersections, and specifies LOS “D” as “satisfactory”. An intersection graded LOS “D” is one where the congestion that’s already there causes you to sit through at least one extra traffic signal cycle before getting through the intersection. 60% of Mar Vista intersections are predicted to be “Unsatisfactory by 2010.

However the City’s internal policies still allow a developer to build about 84 condos today without even having to do a Traffic Study showing how many more signal-cycles you’ll sit though once their traffic is added. And by 2010, a developer will be allowed to build 105 condos without producing a Traffic Study. You can not “Maintain a satisfactory Level of Service” if you don’t address the impact of every new development project and require mitigation to prevent Level of Service from deteriorating further.

Mar Vista View: So Bill, what did you do?

Bill Pope: I, and two other traffic-savvy members of Rosendahl’s Transportation Advisory Committee, sent months developing a set of Traffic Mitigation Policy Reforms. Our philosophy was that today’s density-increasing developers should be required to provide the transportation infrastructure required by their project’s inhabitants, just as the original developers had to do for their project buyers. L.A.’s original developers built the roads and passed the cost on to their project’s buyers by including it in the price of their houses. Today’s density-increasing developers should be required to fund the mass transit systems required to accommodate the increased circulation demand created by their projects.

Our Reforms were approved by all twenty members of the Councilman’s Transportation Advisory Committee and sent to the Rosendahl’s staff liaison to the Committee. The feedback we received was that our reforms “would never be adopted by the current City Council”. I guess political campaign contributions from developer’s are just too tempting for politicians to resist. Therefore, I have given up seeking diplomatic solutions to this problem and I’m now focused on legal action.

Mar Vista View: What is the next step and what can we do to help with the Offensive War?

Bill Pope: ReACT [Residents Against Cut-thru Traffic] has recently joined a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles. The City has gotten away with over-development because the average citizen can’t get the information they need on current Level of Service grades to challenge a development project or the City’s internal policies. A coalition of homeowners and neighborhood associations known as the La Brea-Willoughby Coalition discovered that the General Plan requires the City to publish this information annually in a report called the Annual Report on Growth and Infrastructure. The report is supposed to show the remaining capacities of all the City’s infrastructures, such as transportation, water, power, waste-water treatment, etc. The report is to be used to adjust City growth approval policies if things are getting out of hand. This annual report has not been published for the last ten years, not since the 1998 report. And the City has approved hundreds of thousands of projects since then. So the Coalition has filed a lawsuit and ReACT joined with them.

When the City is forced to publish by the court to publish infrastructure report, we will then have the ammunition to file a second suit proving that the City is not following the official General Plan policies discussed above, and is consequently in violation of State law. You can learn more about this suit at www.labreacoalition.org, www.citywatchla.com/content/view/1376/ and http://ronkayela.com/2008/07/crime-against-the-people-how-c.html.

Mar View View: Besides the issues with the City of LA, what about our neighboring city of Culver City?

Bill Pope: That question brings us to the Defensive War. While winning the La Brea case will help stop over-development by the City of L.A., it will not stop Culver City from continuing development along Washington Boulevard and Washington Place along Mar Vista’s southern border. At present I have heard of eight development projects that will impact Mar Vista:

1. Washington Blvd. & Marcasel – 54,311 SF Office and Retail. Will widen Inglewood near Washington .

2. 12095 Washington Boulevard - between Inglewood and Grand View

3. 12099 Washington Boulevard - between Inglewood and Grand View

4. 12101 Washington Boulevard - between Inglewood and Grand View

5. 12803 Washington Boulevard - 48-foot high commercial, between Meyer and Moore near Beethoven.

6. 12402 Washington Place – 5-story 42,000 SF of offices at corner of Centinela & Washington Place

7. 3898 Inglewood Boulevard - 30 apartments with only one on-site parking space per unit.

8. Olsen Homes, hundreds of new four and five-story condos covering about 80% of the area between Grand View, Centinela, Washington Place and Washington Boulevard.

These projects will drastically increase cut-thru traffic on Inglewood, Grand View, and Beethoven-Rose. Traffic from these Culver City projects can’t go more than a few hundred feet before impacting Los Angeles City streets. And since the only two north-south arterial streets serving these projects (Centinela and Lincoln) are already jammed, their traffic will end up on Walgrove, Beethoven, Grand View, and Inglewood, and the street you live on.

To fight this impact, I first went to the Traffic Planning Section of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT). They said there was nothing they could do because the first Mar Vista intersections impacted by these projects were on Venice Boulevard, and Venice is controlled by Caltrans, not the City of Los Angeles. I have yet to find a Caltrans person who admits responsibility for mitigating these impacts on us.

Next I asked the Neighborhood Traffic Management Section in LADOT to ask Culver City for money for traffic control measures to protect Mar Vista residential streets. They said they could not help and suggested I go directly to the developers. So I approached the developer of the Washington/Marcasel project near Inglewood Bl. for money to prevent his project’s traffic from using our residential streets. You can imagine his reaction!!

Mar Vista View: Bill, how can Mar Vista residents support the Defensive War?

Bill Pope: If we can’t make L.A.-area cities behave responsibly, our only fall-back position is to protect our residential neighborhoods from speeding and cut-thru traffic. While no one likes speed humps and traffic flow restrictions, they have become necessity to project ourselves, our children and pets, our property and our neighborhood.

Cut-thru traffic reduces our property values, damages our curb-parked cars, and deteriorates our quality of life. Cut-thru-street residents incur damage to their curb-parked vehicles a hundred times more frequently that non-cut-thru-street residents. I personally have had two vehicles “totaled” and $2700 damage to a third. My neighbor has had two vehicles destroyed. Another neighbor was injured getting into his car when a speeding cut-thru commuter hit and ripped off his car door. The commuter even had the gall to sue my neighbor for opening his car door “on a busy street”.

Cut-thru traffic also brings noise, air pollution, trash, grime and crime, yes crime, to the entire neighborhood. There are numerous studies, including some by the U.S. Department of Justice, showing the direct correlation between cut-thru traffic volume and the amount of crime in a neighborhood. This is because criminals who pass through your neighborhood then “integrate that locale into the offenders' orbits of activity,” (Rengert and Wasilchick, 1985).

One of the things we are learning firsthand is that the crime happens most often, not on the cut-thru streets themselves, but on the quieter side-streets where police rarely patrol. The recent string of burglaries on, and drug rings using, Mountain View and Stoner bear this out.

Non-cut-thru-street residents can support the Defensive War by being tolerant of the speed humps required to control speeders, and traffic control measures that will be required in the future to control cut-thru traffic as it builds back to and exceeds 2006 levels.

Mar View View: Bill, what is the status of the cut-thru traffic control solutions ReACT proposed to the City?

Bill Pope: Our Mar Vista Community Plan says that the City is to “Discourage non-residential traffic on residential streets.” For years, Cut-thru street residents have been asking the City to fulfill this promise. These residents began meeting with LADOT back in January on solutions. LADOT says the best way to stop cut-thru traffic is to close the entrances to the cut-thru streets. If commuters can’t enter a cut-thru street, they can’t cut through the neighborhood. While this would be effective, it would mean closing four to six of the neighborhoods nineteen entrances. It would also be somewhat burdensome to neighborhood residents, especially those living on the Inglewood and Grand View. So ReACT has proposed several additional possibly strategies for residents to consider.

The solutions proposed by ReACT focus on controlling the flow of cut-thru traffic through the neighborhood, not on their speed. ReACT’s solutions do not call for more speed humps. The use of speed humps to control speeders is a matter between the residents of a particular block and the City.

For instance, one cut-thru traffic control strategy might be to block Inglewood and Grand View at a couple of places inside the neighborhood with mini parks or gardens so regional commuters could not use these streets as alternatives to Centinela. Residents could enter their neighborhood unimpeded and travel though it in serpentine fashion as in “planned communities”. The mini-parks or gardens that would have special “paths” that the Police, Fire and Sanitation trucks could drive over, but not other vehicles. ReACT also suggested narrowing the wide, “commuter-friendly”, north Inglewood entrance and south Grand View entrance with Residential Gateways to make our neighborhood look like a gated community. This would add real class to the neighborhood.

We are still waiting to hear whether LADOT will approve our suggestions. Once we do, the possible solutions will be presented to the Mar Vista Community Council for certification and then to affected neighborhood residents for selection of which to implement. We will keep you posted.