Long Beach Protected Bike Lane Grand Opening
April 28th, 2011 
7 Comments
By Mihai Peteu
This past Saturday, the city of Long Beach took a ground breaking step towards making their downtown area safer for cyclists. While not perfect, their protected bike lane design is considerably safer than most options seen in Southern California thus far.
Before and after photos of 3rd Street
Headed westbound on 3rd St
Westbound on 3rd St, near the Promenade
Author Info
I love that you’re giving protected bike lanes the attention they deserve! Even when implementation is imperfect, as is the case in Long Beach, it is a major step up from what the situation was before. I hope they make tweaks in the future to make the lane more safe- who knows, maybe even remove some of the driveways along the path! (yeah right….) Thanks for the comparison pics and video!
I am just trying to spawn discussions about improving the status quo. Until we figure out what works well, we must be willing to give pilot projects like this a try.
Here’s a more detailed description of the protected lanes, plus photos:
http://la.streetsblog.org/2011/04/21/another-wonderful-long-beach-first-protected-bike-lanes/
Another lively discussion (on a more antagonizing post):
http://www.lbpost.com/news/allison/11508
Bottom line – to current riders, they’re at least acceptable. To new riders, they “feel” safe – that automatically means more people will be out there riding. Unless motorists are dumb as doorknobs, they will eventually adapt, and the perceived safety will turn into real safety. I’m hoping projects like this are the tipping point for turning skeptics into cyclists.
At least one comment mentions making the bike lane too narrow for a car to pass. That’s a no-brainer.
I use to ride my bike up that street almost every day, from Belmont Heights to city hall and some days, it was a struggle. One time, the bus kept passing me and stopping in front of me so many times that I gave up and got on the bus.
I love how progressive Long Beach is with traffic engineering!
I have been riding to UCLA on the same two streets for the last 5+ years, and I’m fairly disgusted by the lack of bike facilities leading to Westwood. It’s nice to be able to keep moving past the big parking lot of cars that is the Westside traffic, but that gets old after a while. I can also relate to that nagging feeling that I absolutely have to stay vigilant the entire time.