Some Heavy Wrinkles in Street Face-Lift Plan : Little accord on how to improve Santa Monica Boulevard

The 50,000 motorists who travel Santa Monica Boulevard between Beverly Glen and Sepulveda boulevards each day know how sorely this stretch needs restoration. Once part of historic Route 66, that romantic link between Los Angeles and Chicago, the two-mile section long ago lost whatever glamour it had. Now potholes, weeds, a forest of billboards and grinding automobile congestion define the Westside roadway. And the congestion promises only to worsen; a daily average of 70,000 cars will jam through the corridor by 2010.

“Big” and “little” Santa Monica are two parallel thoroughfares that run through West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. For the better part of three decades, the future of the boulevard has been argued. Virtually everyone--commuters, merchants, office tenants, residents--wants expansion and/or renovation, but there is little consensus on what form the improvement should take.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s latest renovation proposal, unveiled in recent weeks, gives more emphasis to speeding traffic along than to accommodating those who live, work or wish to visit there. This well-intentioned proposal also illustrates the extreme difficulties, and perhaps irreconcilable expectations, facing the transit planners: how to unsnarl congestion while simultaneously nursing our collective fantasy of ambling along quiet, tree-lined streets, lingering over coffee at outdoor bistros and cultivating a sense of neighborhood.

That the Santa Monica corridor proposal fails to fully meet these seemingly contradictory objectives is not the fault of MTA planners, who maintain with some justification that their proposal would accomplish a bit of both.

The plan calls for 10 lanes (there are now six), including dedicated bus lanes in both directions, plus a bikeway down the now-blighted median. The MTA also wants to widen the sidewalks and to landscape the whole corridor.

The proposal has upset some residents, merchants and commuters. They note that it would eliminate on-street parking to allow for the bus lanes and that the 10 lanes would funnel back into six, creating potential bottlenecks at each end of the corridor.

The MTA staff should refine the proposal, as it plans to do, to address neighborhood needs while still meeting federal funding guidelines that call for “multi-modal” transit, simultaneous use by automobiles and buses. But the overriding reality remains: Traffic will worsen.

In years past, Westside residents have stonewalled reasonable mass transit alternatives, holding fast to the idea of one man, one car (and maybe one cellular phone). Neighborhood groups blocked creation of a light-rail line linking Santa Monica with Downtown along the abandoned Exposition Boulevard right of way, and Westside politicians unceremoniously killed the short-lived car-pool lane along the Santa Monica Freeway in the 1970s.

As the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reconsiders its plan to upgrade the choked stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, one thing is crystal-clear: There’s no free ride anymore in this region.