Vitality City to make Manhattan Beach more walkable
Walkability expert Dan Burden points out to residents ways to make the city more walkable and bike-able. Photo by Jake Rome
Motorists breezed down North Ardmore last Wednesday night while roughly 25 residents crowded onto a nearby sidewalk to hear a walkability expert discuss ways of making the intersection at 15th Street less about cars and more about bikers and pedestrians.
They listened wide-eyed and intently as the lively man in the gray walking shoes, khaki pants and beige fishing vest with multiple pockets pointed out details that he says are keeping the city from being as walkable as it can be.
“Why isn’t that a raised island?” he asked, pointing to the middle of a crosswalk.
“Why do we need four lanes here?” “Does this meet American Disability Act requirements?” “You see what I’m saying? You should have curb extensions here” “Can you see how much pavement there is here? I’m not sure this is serving pedestrians the way you want it to.”
“We built a huge amount of America that doesn’t support people going out to walk and socialize,” he added.
Dan Burden, executive director of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute – and internationally recognized walkability guru — has assessed the walkability of more than 3,000 cities in the country and has been called by Time magazine one of the six most important civic innovators in the world.
He typically charges about $1,000 per head to hear him speak at conferences.
Last week, he came to Manhattan Beach to give advice for free.
“We might want to do more with this crossing than we normally would largely because of this signal,” he said of the 15th/Ardmore/Valley Drive nexus. “You’re asking this intersection to do more than it can do.”
Burden has come to the beach cities as the walkability and bike-ability consultant for the Vitality City project, a cutting-edge public health campaign that aims to promote healthy living and longer, higher-quality lives through a community-wide health makeover. The project, put on by a company called Healthways, kicked off last month after the Beach Cities Health District was awarded a bid to be the next Vitality City.
In recent weeks, a variety of community-based focus groups and audits, such as the one Burden led last week, have been held to begin a comprehensive evaluation of the community’s health practices. Burden led similar walking and biking audits in Hermosa and Redondo.
“Communities that are more walkable and bike-able are healthier,” said Healthways’ Joel Spoonheim, director of the Vitality City initiative. “It makes it easier for kids to get to school and keeps elderly people from being isolated in their homes.”
Burden said that the intersection at 15th and Ardmore is an example of a poorly designed junction that is not pedestrian-friendly.
He said the “bizarre intersection” discourages walking and biking due to its complex arrangement, wide lanes and lack of safety features, such as raised islands in crosswalks, which Burden said make pedestrians more visible to drivers. An awkward westbound turn onto 15th from Ardmore presents special safety concerns, Burden said. Resident Audrey Judson pointed out that joggers going through the greenbelt often jaywalk because the path is not demarcated on 15th.
And if Burden had his way, the city would altogether do away with buttons at crosswalks that pedestrians must push for a signal to cross, and instead program pedestrian crossing signals into the signal’s regular cycle.
“We shouldn’t be requiring pedestrians to do what we’re not requiring motorists to do,” he said.
Burden’s ace in the hole?
“Make this intersection into a roundabout.”
The use of roundabouts was one of many suggestions Burden proposed to encourage walking and biking in the city. He said that roundabouts are safer than traffic signal intersections, with fewer possible collisions and increased traffic flow, and reduce personal injury crashes by 90 percent.
“The pedestrian goes without any delay and people in cars don’t stop. They get home faster,” Burden said.
He estimated the installation of a roundabout at the 15th, Valley and Ardmore junction would cost roughly half a million dollars.
Burden also said that cutting roads with four lanes down to two would increase traffic flow from 800 to 1,800 cars per hour, while making room for sidewalks, bike lanes, greenery and angled car parking which could buffer pedestrians from traffic.
“And if we want to be in a place where we want to have children and grow old, then reducing speeds is also something we need to think about,” he said.
Several residents expressed concern over difficulty walking and biking across Sepulveda Boulevard. Resident Nancy Paulikas, who lives on the east side of Sepulveda, said she walks all over the city and is often concerned about pedestrian safety.
“We have a neighborhood with no sidewalks, narrow streets and barely enough room for parking,” she said. “As a pedestrian, I get incredibly defensive about cars. I think having [Dan] here is great for the community.”
Vitality City has also teamed with the South Bay Bike Coalition, which secured a $240,000 grant from the Los Angeles County Department of Health to implement a master bike plan linking Manhattan, Hermosa, Redondo, El Segundo, Torrance, Lawndale and Gardena.
“We were lucky when we showed up and learned there was a grant for biking in seven cities,” Spoonheim said.
“We want to make sure we put together a plan that’s responsive to the needs of the community,” said Sam Corbett, project manager for SBBC.
According to Burden, 70 percent of home buyers want to live in a walkable and bike-able community.
And for the next three years, the duration of the Vitality City project, he will be working with residents and community leaders to turn the beach cities into just that.
“You build your streets to build your communities,” he said, “and then people will walk.”
For more information, see bchd.org and southbaybikecoalition.org. ER