$225-Million Traffic Overhaul Urged to Help Long Beach Go With the Flow

A consultant has recommended a $225-million program to improve traffic flow in the city, including building overpasses at crowded intersections and either widening major streets or prohibiting parking on them during commute hours.

In a finding that could come as a blow to slow-growth forces, consultant Patrick A. Gibson of Barton-Aschman Associates Inc. of Pasadena said congestion on Long Beach streets will increase 30% during the next 20 years--even if new development is virtually halted.

That is because many commuters use Long Beach streets on their way to Orange County or other cities, a practice likely to increase as traffic on the San Diego Freeway worsens, he said.

The recommendations were the preliminary findings of an eight-month, $343,950 study aimed at predicting how much traffic would be carried by Long Beach streets in the year 2010.

Calls for Additional Lanes

In presentations Monday to the Redevelopment Agency board and the city’s Citizens Transportation Task Force, Gibson called for adding new lanes in each direction on the San Diego, Artesia, San Gabriel River and Long Beach freeways, and doubling the size of the public transit bus fleet.

He recommended widening major east-west streets, including Ocean Boulevard, Pacific Coast Highway, Broadway, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, Anaheim and Spring streets, or converting on-street parking spaces to traffic lanes during rush hours.

Similar measures are required on some north-south avenues to increase their capacity, Gibson said. Among them are Alamitos, Martin Luther King Jr., Atlantic and Clark avenues and Lakewood Boulevard. He suggested the same treatment for Los Coyotes Diagonal.

The only place in Long Beach where road widening would be necessary and would require the removal of buildings would be at a bottleneck on 7th street, just west of the intersection with Pacific Coast Highway and Bellflower Boulevard, he said. About 10 houses would have to be razed on the north side of 7th Street to improve traffic flow, he said.

That same intersection--known to commuters as the dreaded “iron triangle”--was one of three that Gibson believes are already overcrowded and in need of overpasses or underpasses to move traffic faster. The other two are the Traffic Circle and the intersection of Ocean Boulevard, Alamitos Avenue and Shoreline Drive. Future overpasses or underpasses will be needed at the intersection of Spring Street and Lakewood Boulevard, and Pacific Coast Highway and 2nd Street, the report said.

Seventh Street would remain the city’s premier east-west route. Gibson said that little-known DeForest Avenue, just east of the Los Angeles River, should be converted into a major link between 7th Street and Ocean Boulevard.

The rush-hour parking prohibitions and street widenings are among the cheapest and most effective solutions to Long Beach’s traffic woes, costing about $25 million, according to the study. Building the overpasses at major intersections could cost $110 million, the most expensive item on Gibson’s list of proposed improvements.

Additional parking garages could cost $20 million and various improvements to increase the traffic-handling capacity of streets would cost $25 million, according to the preliminary findings.

Could Double Bus Fleet

As another option, the city could spend $60 million to double the size of the Long Beach Transit bus fleet and a shuttle system to move downtown workers from parking lots to their offices. But even with a massive increase in carrying capacity, Gibson estimated that only 6%, up from the current 2%, of downtown employees would take buses to work.

He endorsed the idea of a downtown monorail, a concept being bandied about by Disney Development Corp., which is thinking of building a $1-billion theme park at the site of the Queen Mary, and a group of other major developers. “I think a monorail or fixed guideway system in downtown is eminently practical,” he said. Besides moving people around from building to building, it could serve to move people from remote parking lots to offices.

He said he will be working with Disney to consider the traffic effects of any project the firm may build.

To pay for the improvements, Gibson suggested a fee on developers to offset the congestion caused by their new buildings. The potential costs of making the improvements in Long Beach would be in the range of those paid in sections of Los Angeles by developers--and the rewards would be far greater, he said.

None of the recommendations will be easy to follow, he said. But the city will have to weigh its desire to conquer its traffic congestion against any inconveniences that might be created by the suggested solutions.

Sid Solomon, political action chairman of the Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, a group that supports controlled growth, said the report defies logic when it states that limiting downtown construction will not lessen demands on traffic.

Doug Otto, who is chairman of the transportation task force, said the study appears to be a “state-of-the-art” document that will receive a lot of consideration.