Council OKs Plan to Avoid 21st-Century Traffic Jams : Transit: Plan is hailed by merchants and residents who had fought an earlier proposal.

After years of study and heated public debate, the City Council has unanimously passed a transportation blueprint designed to keep cars moving steadily on city streets through the year 2010.

The newly revised traffic plan’s passage Tuesday night represents a victory for local merchants and residents, who had long complained that an earlier plan would have created cross-town freeways in Long Beach, hurting businesses and ruining neighborhoods.

“We’re pleased about it,” said Rick Fukamaki, founder of the Long Beach Coalition of Neighborhoods, a group of merchants, residents and homeowners. “The plan has come a long way from the original document. There’s a lot more in the way of ensuring the integrity of neighborhoods in Long Beach.”

Within a year, the city plans to make Pacific Coast Highway the main east-west route through town to divert traffic from such heavily traveled thoroughfares as Ocean Boulevard and 7th and Anaheim streets.

The city plans to radically alter the traffic circle at the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Lakewood Boulevard to allow for a steady flow of cars. By the end of the decade, Pacific Coast Highway may be elevated over Lakewood Boulevard to help clear up traffic jams. Eventually, the city may remove the circle entirely.

Within the next decade, parking would be prohibited all day on downtown streets, including Ocean Boulevard, and Broadway, 3rd, 6th and 7th streets. Alamitos Avenue would be widened from Pacific Coast Highway to Ocean Boulevard, and 7th Street would be widened at several major intersections.

City staff will be assigned to work with businesses and residents along Anaheim and 7th streets to ensure adequate parking.

The plan also includes incentives to get people out of their automobiles and into car pools and public transportation. Officials will double the bus fleet, experiment with electric buses and pressure the state to construct car-pool lanes on the Long Beach segment of the San Diego Freeway.

In separate action Tuesday, the council tentatively approved a plan to synchronize signals along the Ocean Boulevard, Livingston Drive and 2nd Street corridor for traffic traveling at speeds of 30 m.p.h. and on 7th Street from Park Avenue to Pacific Coast Highway at 35 m.p.h.

The city expects to spend $207 million on capital improvements to implement the master transportation plan, said city Planning Director Robert Paternoster, with private developers providing 53% of that amount. The rest of the money will come from state, federal and city redevelopment funds, along with special funds earmarked for transit.

Councilman Les Robbins, who helped engineer the plan, answered critics who accused the council of diluting the original proposal. “We’ve addressed an overwhelming number of concerns,” he said, “and created a transportation element that’s more sensitive to the needs of the community.”

For years, Long Beach officials have been trying to figure ways to cope with the hundreds of thousands of cars predicted to clog city streets daily in the years approaching the next century. As a result of various downtown development projects, one study predicted, downtown traffic will increase 170% over the next 20 years, from roughly 102,000 cars a day to 276,000.

Many residents have complained that the majority of drivers on such major streets as 7th were outsiders taking short cuts to and from other cities in Los Angeles and Orange counties. But city officials dismissed that notion Tuesday night.

A city study showed that 95% of the drivers on 7th Street either come from Long Beach or have the city as their destination. It also showed that only a small percentage of vehicles on Del Amo Boulevard and 7th, Anaheim and Market streets are trucks.

“It’s our love affair with the automobile that created the majority of the problems all of us have been attempting to deal with,” Robbins said. He and other council members repeatedly applauded the democratic process for helping bring to Long Beach a “cutting-edge transportation plan.”

But resident Joseph Sopo offered a different perspective. “They can talk about democracy all they want, but they wouldn’t even listen to us until we paid a ton of money for a high-priced attorney,” said Sopo, a member of the Long Beach Coalition of Neighborhoods. “We got their attention and they gave us virtually everything we wanted.”