Los Angeles News

LOS ANGELES (CBS) ― Traffic signals that favor motorists going west on Olympic Boulevard and east on Pico Boulevard, coupled with new parking restrictions, will reduce motorists' commutes by seven minutes, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Monday.
  
The "Olympic-West Pico-East" initiative is the city's plan to reduce congestion on the two major boulevards between La Brea Avenue and Centinela Avenue in West Los Angeles. About 100,000 cars travel on those two boulevards between Centinela and downtown Los Angeles every day, according to the mayor's office.
  
"This initiative will significantly reduce gridlock on the Westside," Villaraigosa said at a morning news conference at Pico and Overland Avenue.
  
The plan "will not create one-way thoroughfares on the Westside. Olympic-West Pico-East will not block access to local communities but it will protect our neighborhoods from cut-through traffic by restricting left-turns on minor neighborhood streets."
  
The first phase of the plan will go into effect in January when the Los Angeles Department of Transportation posts new restrictions on Olympic and Pico limiting where drivers can park during the morning and afternoon rush hours.

The new restrictions are expected to improve travel speeds by 2 mph. The second phase of the plan calls for retiming traffic lights to give preferential treatment to westbound traffic on Olympic and eastbound traffic on Pico. Travel speeds on Pico and Olympic are expected to increase from 17 mph to 23 mph between La Brea and Centinela, saving motorists an average of six to seven minutes, according to the mayor's office.
  
LADOT officials will start that project in February or March. It will cost $600,000 to implement the first two phases of the plan.
  
If those projects are determined to be successful, the city will spent $1.5 million to add more westbound lanes on Olympic and eastbound lanes on Pico.
  
"The proposal today is not to turn Pico and Olympic into actual one-way streets. The proposal will turn Pico and Olympic into virtual one-way streets, with actual results for our commuters while at the same time protecting our residential neighborhoods," Councilman Jack Weiss said.
  
Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who represented Weiss' Westside district from 1975 to 1994, proposed a plan earlier this year that would have turn Pico and Olympic into one-way streets.
   
LADOT officials determined, however, that the plan was not feasible in the city of Santa Monica because of a landscaped median along Olympic. Transit officials also found Pico was too narrow to accommodate the plan east of Crenshaw Boulevard.
  
Following the news conference, the mayor and councilman were approached by a handful of Angelenos who were both in support of and opposition to the plan. David Vahedi, a member of the Westside Neighborhood Council who ran against Weiss in 2005, said the city has not reached out to Westside businesses whose customers will lose parking spots once the first phase of the plan goes into effect.
  
"We have a lot of businesses that have been here for 30, 40 years that are going to wake up to the new year without parking in front of their locations and it's going to be very hard for them," Vahedi said. "I think the bottom line is this -- Century City, as anybody knows, is overdeveloped. Because it is overdeveloped, there are 10,000 cars each year, that weren't coming just five years ago."

 A representative for the Greater West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce was not immediately available to comment on the plan.

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