It’s Green on the Ground Week, and we’re featuring green bike lanes and infrastructure across L.A. County. Today Cynthia Rose, Director of our Santa Monica Spoke local chapter and an LACBC board member, writes about the green and protected bike lanes around Santa Monica High School.
Cynthia Rose
Santa Monica has quite a few green bike lanes and is currently adding more so it’s hard to choose what to highlight!
Many of these lanes provide connections between heavily traveled infrastructure and some provide much needed connections where previously there was not as much infrastructure. The green bike lanes around Santa Monica High School (Samohi) are both.
They provide safer and more robust connections at the southern end of the Michigan Avenue Neighborhood Greenway (MANGo) to neighborhoods and destinations south of Pico Blvd as well as needed safe routes to school connections for Samohi students during the peak congestion times of student pick-up and drop-off.
The lanes around Samohi boast a grade and parking separated lane on Michigan Avenue connected to a green buffered lanes on 7th, which link to a block-long center bidirectional protected cycletrack on Pico Blvd.
This infrastructure now provides new connections south/west of busy Pico Blvd and is situated between east and westbound traffic lanes where previously there was no infrastructure or access to the south for bikes.
Sound a bit confusing? It used to be. In practice we now have robust and safer connections for bikes at the south / west end of MANGo and safe routes to school connections for Samohi students as well as other schools along MANGo. Combined with other bike lanes and bike facilities like Breeze Bike Share and the Santa Monica Bike Center, bicycling is growing in Santa Monica.
View more on Santa Monica’s connections and multimodalism in this Streetfilm:
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