Much-needed change may be coming to City Hall: City Council today will consider a proposal to relocate transportation planning to the Community Development department and reorganize Public Works, the longtime home of the transportation staff, to handle capital improvement projects like building, paving, and water works. This is a step forward for Beverly Hills and could signal a turn toward creating safe streets more welcoming to those who choose to ride.

Beverly Hills is a focal point for Westside transportation issues: four important corridors pass through the city; numerous bus lines converge here with the region’s most heavily-traveled line plying Wilshire; motorists and cyclists navigate the Westside’s worst intersections; and we’re the missing link in the regional ‘backbone’ bicycle route network. Our streets and intersections are almost entirely untouched by contemporary safety improvements.

Why Do Our Streets Look the Way They Do?

Beverly Hills has been locked into mobility’s past. Until the retirement of longtime Public Works chief David Gustafson this spring, our transportation challenges were handled by only one planner. Our Deputy Director of Transportation, Aaron Kunz, is a public administration guy. To the extent that it occurs at all today, mobility planning has taken a backseat to street resurfacing. And while that’s worked out great for blacktop, it’s not been so good for our mobility responsibility: to move people safely.

State-of-the-art practices are unknown here. ‘Continental’ crosswalks? They make dangerous intersections safer but find no place here. Road diets calm motor traffic by re-prioritize the street for all users elsewhere, but find no application here. Bicycle lanes separate bicycle and motor traffic (to mutual benefit) but grace few streets here. Our streetscape looks like it did fifty years ago at the height of the motoring era.

Our policies also hail from mid-century. Despite legion auto congestion clogging our already-failing intersections, we continue to bait motorists with free two-hour parking in most city garages. Our development policies continue to require off-street parking minimums too high to allow for the commercial uses we need. (We work around them with ‘in-lieu’ arrangements or otherwise saddle new developments with high costs for underground parking.) The potential for encouraging cycling-to-work goes entirely untapped even as we see other cities use their codes to require bike parking and shower facilities for commuters.

In fact, we do very little long-range mobility planning in Beverly Hills at all. Instead we choose to react to issues as they arise. That’s why our Traffic and Parking Commission is inordinately focused on parking permits that mitigate residential district impacts. What goes largely unaddressed, however, is safety. We’ve seen an upswing in bike-involved collisions this year, yet the commission at their monthly meeting hardly raises the issue.

We argued for a new Public Works chief who would be cognizant of the safety concerns. At the very least, we said, shouldn’t we include a hiring criterion that the candidate be conversant with ‘complete streets’ principles? Merging transportation planning with land use planning in the Community Development is even better. It presents an opportunity to change our old-school ways and begin to think holistically about growth and mobility.

The Proposal

City Council tonight in the formal meeting [agenda] will consider separating the Public Works and Transportation department into a ‘Public Works Services Department’ and a ‘Capital Assets Department.’ The Capital Assets Department would oversee construction, reconstruction and rehab for buildings and right of way improvements. It would align project administration, civil engineering, and property management under a new ‘Deputy City Manager for Capital Assets.’ The Public Works Services Department would attend to infrastructure maintenance, parking, and utilities.

The key change for road users, though, is that transportation planning and traffic management will move to Community Development. The change, the City Manager promises, will “improve efficiency, coordination and offer better customer service.”

Two interesting things about the staff report outlining these changes. First, this major reorganization is presented as a fait accomplis: “Staff recommends that the City Council move to waive the full reading of the ordinance and that the ordinance…be introduced and read by title only.” Evidently staff presumes not much need for Council discussion.

The second thing is that we never heard of a “comprehensive review” (per the staff report) following the former chief’s retirement. It wasn’t presented to stakeholders or discussed in the media. So the claim that “feedback” shaped the current proposal begs the question: feedback from whom? From the City Manager’s office? From staffers? Not from the public, though.

We will be interested to hear how Council discusses the item because this reorganization presents a great opportunity to rethink how we plan for growth and mobility. We suggest to Council a few steps forward as guided by our own city plans:

• Truly integrate transportation planning into the city’s land use and development policy framework because “achieving a balanced transportation and land use pattern requires cohesive transportation and land use planning,” according to our General Plan’s Circulation Element (2010);
• Make complete streets principles the foundation of our transportation planning because if want to “encourage alternative forms of travel, especially to parks,” as our Sustainable City Plan (2009) advises; and
• Reconstruct key corridors and intersections to create the safe bicycle routes throughout our city that our Bicycle Master Plan of 1977 specified (let’s start with Santa Monica Boulevard North).

The larger goal is to “reduce vehicular use and encourage the use of alternate transportation modes,” the Sustainable City Plan says, and we agree. But we can’t do it without better policies to encourage multimodal mobility.

We’ll update with the Council discussion when it happens and suggest a few more opportunities for our newly-refashioned transportation organization as we look ahead to a multimodal future.

[Update: As part of the consent agenda, City Council changed the title of the Public Works chief to be ‘Director of Public Works Services’ and upped the pay to the existing Director of Community Development and also the Deputy City Manager in charge of Capital Assets. There was no discussion about the plan and no speaker addressed it.]