I love that West Hollywood is at the center of everything – with Hollywood and downtown LA to the east and Beverly Hills, Century City and Santa Monica to the west. 

However, the downside is that our city bears the brunt of traffic coming and going. Traffic is a regional issue and without reliable mass transit, it’s always going to be a concern. 

My Solution:

My hope is that we do anything and everything we can to manage our own city's traffic.

One way to do this is to adopt innovative traffic management solutions such as synchronizing traffic lights on our major corridors: Santa Monica, Sunset and Beverly.  When the City of Los Angeles did it, they reduced trip times by ten to fifteen percent.

We need to be smarter about development. “No feasible mitigation” is not an acceptable response to our residents’ concerns about traffic impacts. 

We need to look at traffic circulation in our neighborhoods -- many of our residential streets are narrow, and we have a lot of cut through traffic.  We should consider the possibility of one-way streets, and some back alleys should be one way with alternating directions each block to stop alleys from being used as speedways.  

We also need to make local transit options more viable by making Cityline and the Pickup bus more practical to use and more focused on the needs of residents (for example, expanding Cityline to include “express” buses down Santa Monica and Sunset, extending the route of the Pickup bus to the east side).

Last but not least, we need to encourage the sustainability and growth of neighborhood-serving businesses.  This will result in more pedestrian traffic and will reduce the need for car trips. If you can walk to drop off your cleaning a few blocks from your home rather than drive to a cleaners outside the city, that’s one less trip. This will also give us more economic diversity and serve our local needs, which will help if there is another economic downturn that can hurt tourism (our hotels, restaurants and clubs). 

Thank you for reading and if you’d like to discuss further with me, let’s schedule a coffee!