12:00pm | I have always stated — along with many residents — that there is one particularly frustrating thing about Long Beach: it is always “up and coming” but never ups and never comes. Last night, perched at the top of the Sovereign Building along Ocean and housed in its solarium, Nancy Pfeiffer expressed the same sentiment when introducing the event for the evening, “Re-imagining Urban Infrastructure.”
I know: the title can be a bit, ahem, dry if you’re not an urban design nerd — but it doesn’t diminish the fact that the evening was downright inspiring. Nor do I think anyone lacking interest in urban planning would be any less thrilled at the ideas presented.
While the lack of appearances by, say, the Mayor or councilmembers was astounding considering the subject matter, it did not diminish the fact that innovative thinking is not just coming but is finally here in Long Beach — and on a level deeper than one thinks.
The first speaker and fellow Long Beach Post writer, Brian Ulaszewski, discussed the massive altering of freeway and other urban spaces into re-usable, adaptive spaces in cities throughout the world. Ranging from the proposed Tempelhofer Park in Berlin to the Olympic Sculpture Garden in Seattle, Ulaszewski provided a plethora of examples of adaptive reuse — particularly freeway capping which, though having dated back to the 1930s, is becoming a rather hot commodity in urban design.
Pointing to possible places where this could happen in Long Beach, the most fascinating is that of Shoreline Drive. Here we have a four-lane/median/two-shoulder road which gets only about 17,000 cars a day; in comparison, the two-lane 4th Street along Retro Row gets a little bit less traffic. Even more fascinating: Shoreline Drive is owned by the city, therefore a capping project proposal wouldn’t have to go through the nightmare that is CalTrans to get approved (thank you but no, Governor Brown).
Up next was Rock Miller, a rather charismatic civil engineer who was not only responsible for the sharrow lanes in Belmont Shores and the bicycle lanes popping up downtown, but also had an obsession with… Roundabouts. Yes, roundabouts. And if you think roundabouts are a thing for those who drive on the other side of the road, you have another thing coming: they significantly help traffic and are safer than stop lights — as in 80% safer.
Lastly was a vibrant young woman from UCLA, Madeline Brozen, the program director of the Complete Streets Initiative in Los Angeles. Complete Streets is a nationwide project that defines a “complete street” as a street accessible for everyone — pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, and motorists. Ms. Brozen heavily focused on parklets — of which the first in Southern California were built right here in Long Beach — and car-free spaces. The latter will become a reality in the Silverlake neighborhood with a green polka-dotted pedestrian plaza lining Sunset and Griffith Park Boulevards.
Many often just talk about how they want something different and yet do not voice what they would do to make it different. In times when we are strapped financially, lagging socially, and not quite up-to-par design-wise, it is refreshing that people are presenting ideas that can and will make our city a better city — and avoid that horrific moniker of having “so much potential” without it actually following through.
The presentation was presented by the Los Angeles chapter of the U.S. Green Building Coucil.