Pike Project Brings Worry About Future Traffic Woes

As officials eagerly embrace a massive proposal to turn the old Pike Amusement Park site into the biggest single development ever built in this city, questions are emerging about the dramatic traffic increases that will accompany Pike and other planned downtown projects.

Concerns about future traffic woes proved the major reservation when the Planning Commission recently gave an impressively credentialed development team one of several key approvals needed to erect a mini-city by the sea.

In perhaps the most heated criticism cast on a development that has attracted profuse praise, a member of a citywide citizens’ group warned planning commissioners last month that they were propelling the city into a traffic nightmare.

Traffic Problems Unclear

“As things currently stand, the foreseeable impact of traffic over the next 10 years in the downtown area is gridlock,” contended Marc Coleman of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved. “I firmly believe that when the citizens of Long Beach understand the blank check that is being given to the Pike project through the lack of effective planning, a widespread outcry will develop.”

Indeed, traffic officials concede downtown developments are being built before the city fully knows what new traffic problems they will breed or how to solve them.

“We don’t have a good handle on the ultimate consequences of all the development that has been approved or is in the approval process,” Richard Backus, the city traffic engineer, noted.

While acknowledging that their blueprints for turning Long Beach’s sleepy downtown into a bustling urban center will bring thousands of additional cars to local streets, city officials say they are studying ways of coping with the traffic increases.

“There will be a problem, there will be a crisis if we don’t do something about it now,” acknowledged Robert Paternoster, the city’s planning and building director, who said the city is by no means ignoring the issue.

In anticipation of escalating traffic, the city has hired a consulting firm to design a computer model to predict traffic tie-ups associated with new development throughout the city and to indicate ways of averting them. City planners are also requiring the Pike developers to devise programs encouraging car-pooling and use of mass transit by the 8,000 employees eventually expected to work in the project’s office buildings, shops and hotels.

City’s Densest Development

Designed as the densest development in Long Beach, the 13-acre Pike complex of mid- and high-rises is characterized by large dimensions. More than 3 million square feet of office, residential and commercial space would be constructed in 11 buildings lining the shore on what is now a largely empty expanse of asphalt south of Ocean Boulevard.

The project, to be built over a 13-year period, represents 22% of the total office space planned for downtown, 19% of the hotel space, 8% of the residential space and 16% of the retail space. A quarter of downtown’s ultimate work force would be employed there.

Three garages would contain nearly 6,000 parking spaces. Drivers traveling to and from the Pike complex could make as many as 36,000 car trips a day, according to the proposal’s environmental impact report, which predicted significant increases in auto-related air pollution and traffic.

Nonetheless, the Planning Commission by a 6-1 vote on March 30 approved zoning and local coastal plan changes that more than double the site’s allowable density and increase the maximum building height by nearly 200 feet, to 600 feet. Only Commissioner Elbert Segelhorst voted against the proposal, explaining that he liked the project but could not approve it before traffic concerns were dealt with.

The City Council and the state Coastal Commission must still review the proposal, a venture of the Ratkovich Co. of Los Angeles and Enterprise Development West, a subsidiary of a company established by James Rouse, who is known for developing Columbia, Md., and popular waterfront complexes in Baltimore and Boston.

Bruce Hart, Pike’s project manager, said the environmental report’s estimate of 36,000 car trips a day “is truly a worse case analysis . . . and it is a scary number.” The estimate exaggerates the amount of traffic that will likely be generated by the new community, he said, adding that his planners are trying to come up with a more realistic figure.

Moreover, Hart said, such a naked statistic ignores the economic and social benefits of creating a new urban hub in Long Beach.

City traffic engineers say a more probable traffic figure for the Pike development is 27,500 car trips a day.

Whatever the Pike traffic count, it is only a part of downtown’s long-term traffic picture. Another 11 developments have been approved or are under way in the downtown area, including the World Trade Center, Landmark Square and the McDonnell Douglas office buildings.

In 1986, the city’s Strategic Plan for the year 2000 predicted that if all the development plans for the port, downtown and the airport come to fruition, traffic leading to those areas would more than double.

“God only knows what the solutions are,” said Planning Commissioner Patricia Schauer, who prefaced her vote for the Pike project with complaints that the city should have had a transportation plan in place before moving ahead with such a massive development scheme. “I don’t even know if there are solutions that are economically feasible.”

Rush-Hour Bottlenecks

Even now, Coleman, of Citizens Involved, said, there are rush-hour bottlenecks leading to downtown, such as at the intersection of Ocean Boulevard and Alamitos Avenue, “where I can state from personal observation, that many mornings, traffic is backed up . . . for eight-tenths of a mile all the way to Cherry Avenue.”

The city’s 2000 plan noted several other congested areas in Long Beach, a number of them along Pacific Coast Highway.

Paternoster, who said he has long advocated a traffic study but could not halt development until one is in place, said the computer traffic report should be completed in the fall.

Until the city gets a clearer idea of Long Beach’s emerging traffic scenario, Backus said, the door is being left open to require developers to adopt traffic control measures once the full impact of their projects is gauged.

While the light-rail system under construction between Los Angeles and Long Beach will take autos off Long Beach streets, Backus said, it probably will not improve the overall traffic situation in the city because the street-level rail line will slow the flow of cars.

The anti-congestion measures thus far asked of the Pike developers--subsidized mass transit passes, ride-sharing programs and the like--are “nothing real innovative,” Backus acknowledged, but, he said, such practices are not yet in widespread use in Long Beach.

The developers will also be required to install traffic signals and add turn lanes on some streets adjacent to the project, which will stretch from Pine Avenue to Queensway Bridge.

Hart mentioned other possibilities as well, such as establishing remote parking lots from which downtown employees could be shuttled, and starting some sort of a shuttle system along Ocean Boulevard.

Hart dismissed complaints that the city has been too slow to plan for the anticipated jumps in traffic volume. But the Pike team several months ago joined other developers in launching their own study of how best to transport workers and visitors along Ocean Boulevard and across the bay to the Queen Mary, near which the Disney Co. is considering developing a major resort hotel. The developers have even talked of building a privately financed monorail.