Unsnarling traffic can be a mess

It’s probably not a neighborhood in which you’d want to spend a lot of time. Not that it’s dangerous. It’s just 11 gritty blocks of small enterprises on West Pico Boulevard on the Westside.

There’s a charter school, a couple of strip clubs, a mattress store and one that sells grand pianos. A couple of restaurants offer valet parking, but for the others, customers have to find a meter. It’s a neighborhood where shops that repair autos, shoes and even golf equipment can afford to operate. So can a Mexican grocery and a secondhand record store where the treasures include a Wilson Pickett album ($3) and a complete recording of Maria Callas singing “La Boheme” ($2).

The problem is that this little stretch of Pico Boulevard between the Santa Monica city limits and the 405 Freeway is a traffic bottleneck. So it’s sitting squarely in the gun sight of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s plan to ease congestion, pitting the two most-affected council districts against each other.

Originally, the mayor wanted to turn Pico and Olympic boulevards into one-way streets. But fierce neighborhood opposition forced him to retreat to the scaled-back, but complicated, plan that gets underway Saturday -- unless a court grants an injunction sought by a group of Westside businesses to block it.

The new plan turns Pico, from the Santa Monica city limits to Fairfax Avenue, into a mostly eastbound one-way street, and Olympic into a mostly westbound one-way street, for three hours each morning and late afternoon. In April, signals will be timed to speed up traffic flow, and later this year, the streets will probably be re-striped to make the added eastbound and westbound lanes permanent. Street parking will be largely forbidden along both boulevards during rush hours.

Opponents of the plan argue that turning curbside parking spaces into rush-hour traffic lanes may speed up the traffic marginally -- but that it will also cause untold economic harm to West Pico businesses. Villaraigosa’s plan, they say, cannot be justified as serving the greater good for the greatest number.

Which bring us back to the 11-block stretch on Pico. It is one of L.A.’s most gridlocked, and one of the few that allows on-street parking during rush hour. Most of the remainder of West Pico has long banned such parking during rush hours. Merchants say that ending meter parking in the area in the morning and late afternoon would hurt their small businesses because there is no off-street parking. They argue that the city is planning for the benefit of people who drive through the area every day, not for those who live and work there.

Despite 14 meetings on the plan with the public that mitigated the original proposal, Councilman Bill Rosendahl, whose 11th District includes the stretch of Pico most affected by the plan and who is its most vocal critic on the City Council, told me that city officials “did the neighborhood studies all right. They just disregarded what the people in the neighborhoods wanted.”

Rosendahl contends that studies show that the plan will only cut an average of seven minutes from the commute from Santa Monica’s city limit to the 405 Freeway, which can now take more than 30 minutes. “For this seven minutes’ difference, you are putting business and jobs at risk,” he said

Councilman Jack Weiss is, along with the mayor, the traffic plan’s major supporter. His 5th District includes Pico running east from the 405 to Fairfax. Although some merchants in his district object to the plan, most businesses don’t have to rely on meter parking because there is an ample supply of off-street parking lots and structures.

To Weiss, the seven minutes shaved from the commute in the 11-block stretch of West Pico would benefit commuters all across the Westside. “You have to balance the equity,” he told me. “Hundreds of thousands of daily commuters will benefit. You take seven minutes off a trip -- that’s 15 minutes a day, more than an hour a week. You add that up to hundreds of thousands of commuters and what do you get?”

Weiss’ view is utilitarian, and it would bring the kind of traffic relief that Villaraigosa, who still hasn’t found the money to build his promised “subway to the sea,” could take to the bank. As the mayor’s staffers correctly point out, ideas about changing L.A.’s traffic flows emerge in the city Department of Transportation, which reports directly to Villaraigosa. And because the Pico-Olympic traffic plan basically affects only two council districts, there isn’t enough City Council discontent to attempt a plan override. Certainly, the number of commuters who pass through the affected Westside areas surpasses the number of those who live or do business there.

This is what makes the plan appealing to Weiss. “In the past, local representatives have stressed what is good for individual neighborhoods. That’s why we have this gridlock problem. It is about time that we thought of what is good for the whole of the city.”

It’s hard to argue with Weiss’ contention that past politicians saw this problem coming and generally ignored it.

Banning on-street parking on West Pico during rush hour is going to hurt the small businesses on that stretch between Santa Monica and the 405. Some could go under, costing a few jobs. In the Record Surplus store on the corner of Pico and Federal Avenue that his father helped found 30 years ago, Mike Colestoc told me, “I’m afraid this is going to hurt my customers; I wish we could find some other solution.”

Unfortunately, creating more off-street parking is not a solution because there isn’t the money or room to build parking structures in the area west of the 405.

Many Record Surplus patrons shop on the way home from work. When street parking on West Pico is banned to ease traffic congestion, they’ll be competing with customers of four businesses nearby for the five metered spaces on Federal Avenue that will remain legal during rush hour.

For some, creating that competition will be a bad idea. But not for those who commute downtown every day.