Livingston Drive
11:45am | The other day I found myself in an unlikely situation: driving my car with a bit of free time between meetings around the Wardlow Road Blue Line Light Rail Station. As I traveled along Wardlow toward the I-405 Freeway underpass, I enjoyed a view of downtown Long Beach three miles away.
While the view was certainly a nice discovery, what really stoked my curiosity was the expansiveness of the vista. Pine Avenue is a neighborhood street at that point, but, nonetheless, it is fully 80 feet wide from curb to curb—double that distance if you measure all the way to the homes on either side. Upon further investigation, I realized there are a half dozen streets in the Memorial Heights neighborhood that are just as excessively wide. Despite this fact, most of these streets lacked sidewalks, a strange state of affairs considering the proximity to major public transit.
While not ubiquitous, wide streets and the wide public right-of-ways that accompany them are quite numerous in Long Beach and represent lost value for the city in the long term. Between maintaining unused infrastructure, unwelcome effects (like speeding cars), lost potential property taxes and unrealized public benefits, there is cause for investigating alternative futures for these overly wide streets. On a cursory level, many potential ways of addressing overly wide streets in Long Beach would represent win-win scenarios for all involved. This is particularly the case because in many cases narrowing the street would not result in any actual or perceived loss of street capacity for drivers.
In the Memorial Heights neighborhood, Pine Avenue has a 120-foot-wide “right-of-way” (which in this technical sense includes all land between private properties: the street, adjacent sidewalks, landscaped areas, and any public utilities above or below the surface). The right-of-way for a typical neighborhood street, between 50 and 60 feet, provides ample area for car lanes, parallel parking, sidewalks, and parkways for street trees. Most Long Beach streets fall within these standards (though narrower examples exist in a few areas, including Belmont Shore and Central Long Beach). Using the 50 – 60 foot standard as a benchmark, we find that the overly wide rights-of-way in the Memorial Heights area consume around seven acres of excess land, three-quarters of which are asphalt.
In fact, streets in this neighborhood are so wide that the opportunity exists to build sidewalks, parkways, planted medians and even bike lanes, all within the existing road bed. The remaining land could then be formally vacated by the city and turned over to adjacent property owners for incorporation into their existing lots. In many cases the perception is that the land is already part of those properties, but formally ceding this land will legally expand the size of the adjacent properties by 15 percent. The city would have less land for which they have the responsibility for maintenance and liability; in turn, property owners would get additional land for their personal use, which would add to the resale value of the homes (and thus, in turn, greater property tax revenue).
It bears noting that disproportionately wide streets like those in the Memorial Park neighborhood often result in speeding and cut-through traffic due to the perceived ease of flow. Another current example of this problem exists in the Bluff Park neighborhood, where residents have been fighting cut-through traffic on First and Second streets as commuters seek alternatives to Ocean Boulevard and Broadway. That commuters might get this idea is on some level understandable considering that First at this point is as wide as Ocean, and Second and Broadway are approximately the same width.
The Bluff Park Neighborhood Association has long advocated for traffic-calming measures to ameliorate this problem. The excessive street width on First in particular could certainly accommodate landscaped medians without negatively affecting its capacity to handle local traffic. Indeed, medians exist on Mezzanine Way on the east side of town and have been added successfully on similarly wide Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue north of Pacific Coast Highway.
On First, adding 2 miles of new planted medians would calm traffic, reduce pedestrian crossing distances and add more than 3 acres of new landscaping. A similar treatment could be implemented along Spring Street west of Pacific Avenue where traffic demands drop. Such changes would improve livability for residents, beautify the respective neighborhoods and increase property values all while taking advantage of underutilized public rights-of-way.
Another example to consider is Livingston Drive between Second and Ocean. At present, this is an over-engineered street, facilitating freeway speeds despite the homes and apartments that flank it. The excessive width of Livingston at this point (the legacy of a long-lost rail line) means that the street has more travel lanes than the streets feeding into it even though it carries less traffic. While the posted speed limit is 35 miles per hour, cars regularly travel in excess of 50 due in large part to the extra and wide lanes on the street and the lack of traffic lights for the whole half-mile length between Second and Ocean. In fact, the traffic on this stretch of Livingston could be accommodated by just the northern half of the road by re-striping the length to add a lane.
The excess land could then become a continuation of the Livingston Green Belt that lies to the northeast, providing a vital pedestrian and bicycle connection between Belmont Shore and the pier area near the Olympic Swimming Pool. To thereby create 4 acres of new park space in one of the most expensive communities in Long Beach could not be more fortunate.
In all these cases, beneficial transformations could be implemented that would take advantage of excessive street widths without significantly impacting car-carrying capacity. In the future we might encounter cases where decisions have to be made that weigh various competing interests, but there are many true win-win scenarios for Long Beach now.
The long-term benefit will outweigh the short-term investments needed for these transformations. Excess street space would become landscaping, bike infrastructure and better accommodation for pedestrians. Opportunities to transfer public rights-of-way to private ownership would reduce the city’s burden for maintenance and liability while increasing land value and the accompanying property taxes. I do not mean these examples to represent the full range of possibilities in this regard, only some opportunities to consider and a principle regarding the idea that wide streets constitute a real lost value for our city.
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