Plan to Prevent Gridlock : 6 Additional One-Way Streets Urged in L.A.

In one of their most visible and controversial proposals yet to prevent traffic gridlock in downtown Los Angeles, city transportation planners are proposing that six major north-south thoroughfares in the central business district be converted to one-way streets.

Under the proposal, parts of which came under fire during a City Council committee public hearing Wednesday, only northbound traffic would be allowed on Figueroa, Olive and Broadway. Flower, Grand and Hill would become southbound streets.

The first and least controversial phase of the project--converting Figueroa and Flower streets to one way--advanced Wednesday when the council’s Transportation and Traffic Committee ordered an ordinance drafted that would make the change. The ordinance would have to be approved by the full City Council and the mayor.

Despite the action, a key committee member, Council President Pat Russell, voiced reservations about the entire plan. She criticized city planners and business leaders for not coming up with a “comprehensive, in-depth” plan for moving both cars and pedestrians downtown. “I’m not sold that one-way streets are the way to move more traffic,” she said. “We seem to be looking at that in isolation.”

City traffic planners, warning that traffic generated by huge new high-rise buildings could overwhelm the Central City, say the one-way designations will boost the capacity of clogged streets by up to 50% and significantly speed the movement of cars and buses.

Generally, the expansion of one-way streets--several downtown streets running east and west have been one-way for years--has received support from major downtown business and development interests. “Just about every major city in the country has a one-way downtown street grid system,” said Ileana Liel, planning manager for the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

But there has been intense opposition from Broadway merchants, who do not want the city tinkering with their street. Large, steady streams of Latino shoppers have made the a seven-block district one of the most lucrative retail centers in the nation. The merchants fear that speeding up traffic would make the street less hospitable to strolling customers.

“It’s the only true urban shopping mall in the city,” Ira Yellin, who recently bought Broadway’s Grand Central Market, told the council committee. “The purpose of one-way streets is simply to speed the movement of traffic and cars. It has nothing to do with the shopping experience.”

The Southern California Rapid Transit District is concerned that bus service, which brings an estimated two-thirds of the shoppers to Broadway, would suffer. One-way streets cut the number of bus stops in half, meaning the remaining loading zones could become crowded with both passengers and buses, RTD officials say. Many bus lines, including several on Broadway, would have to be rerouted to other streets to fit the one-way pattern.

“It makes (getting to Broadway) more difficult,” said Morton Bowman, chairman of a Broadway merchants group. “We’re talking about habits. When those habits get broken, people look other ways.”

City transportation officials argue that the improved traffic flow will make getting to downtown businesses faster and easier, thereby helping sales. And a recent redevelopment agency study concluded that businesses would not suffer because of one-way streets.

Opposition among Broadway merchants, who have hired veteran City Hall lobbyist H. Randall Stoke to help plead their case, has been growing and they have won the support of downtown Councilman Gilbert Lindsay. The merchants also hired former Olympic traffic “czar” William Forsythe to prepare an alternative one-way street network that excludes Broadway--a plan that city planners say is not feasible.