Reimagining Lincoln Boulevard

In Santa Monica there are several key streets that act as spines, shaping and also subdividing the city. Lincoln Boulevard is one of those spines. Its uses, its built surroundings and its traffic volume have changed dramatically over the years, but it hasn’t aged well or successfully adapted to intensification of use over time.

It is not a very pleasant street to walk along. Cars roar, there's poor tree cover, and its development pattern is very automobile-oriented. Lincoln Boulevard can also be outright dangerous, sadly claiming the life of a man walking across it this past week, . Lincoln Boulevard is also technically a “Class III” bicycle route as well, but many cyclists who make their way along the boulevard flee the rush of the heavy car traffic, opting for the sidewalk, further complicating matters for those on foot.

Yet despite all the herculean efforts to accommodate the car on Lincoln Boulevard, it’s not a pleasant drive either, which I can attest to from my memories of driving it many times. At many hours of the day, it feels more like a linear parking lot, particularly at the junction with the 10 Freeway. Moreover, drivers are very aggressive on Lincoln. As a driver who likes to take things chill, it can be very stressful being pressured to go faster by drivers swerving around, and the general atmosphere of competition.

I think much of what Lincoln suffers from can be best described by Charles Marohn. He is a civil engineer who has taken up writing and speaking on urban- and town-planning issues through Strong Towns, an organization he co-founded. During his recent TEDx talk in Minnesota, he eloquently tackled the difference between a road and a street, with further elaboration in a follow-up podcast. As he defines it, a road is, in essence, simply a connection between two places, while a street serves many types of land uses and ways of getting around.

When the characteristics of a road and street become muddled, the result rarely serves either purpose well. Lincoln seems to be a perfect example of a street with an identity crisis, wondering if it is just a transportation throughway for a lot of cars, or something more than that. Lincoln has developed strip malls, supermarkets and various uses, but that all adds on top of the significant amount of traffic just trying to get to end destinations.

So it no longer flows smoothly as a road as Marohn defines it. But the driveway-laden mishmash of auto-centric development leaves a lot to be desired when walking as well, so it doesn't succeed as a street either. Lincoln is also a major transit corridor, with the frequently packed #3 connecting Santa Monica to LAX and communities along the way. But it’s a slow grind of a ride on the bus when the cars are gridlocked. The bus delays may be alleviated by proposals set in motion by the LUCE plans to consider a peak-hour bus-only lane, but that would likely come as a trade-off with parking during certain hours.

For decades, much of Lincoln has been controlled, maintained and operated by the California Department of Transportation (or Caltrans), and not the city of Santa Monica. State agencies like Caltrans are more concerned with operating highways for flushing down cars like pipes flushing waste water, not dealing with the subtleties of complex streets. When Caltrans-operated highways start to take on more street-like characteristics, they generally make a blunder of it, largely by not doing much of anything, letting the same old infrastructure serve changing uses.

After a decade of legal struggles, Santa Monica will soon be given ownership and upkeep responsibility of all of Lincoln Boulevard, within the Santa Monica borders, from Caltrans. That will give the city more flexibility in shaping its development and keeping road maintenance up to Santa Monica's standards of surface quality.

So how might we do things differently? I think we should look beyond the precedents of our own region and draw inspiration from other cities and countries of the world as well. As an American, particularly growing up in Southern California, one of the striking things to me about visiting Paris was seeing its grand boulevards. The broad streets are able to simultaneously carry an enormous amount of car traffic while also being delightful pedestrian spaces.

Lincoln Boulevard will probably never become something so grand and memorable as the Champs-Élysées, but if we are going to talk about boulevards, we might as well draw inspiration from those who do it best. It also sticks out in my mind because I used to think of Lincoln as unpleasant to walk on because all of the cars, but the Champs-Élysées carries far more automobiles per block, so there is more to it than that.

The Avenue des Champs-Élysées is 10 busy vehicle lanes wide, plus an additional occasional ramp that carries drivers into subterranean parking. Despite this incredible volume of cars traffic, the real estate to live right on the boulevard is very attractive. That’s because moderated speed, and a formal pattern of buffering trees, keeps the roar and fumes of the cars from overly diminishing the quality of life of those living near by. Those same buffering characteristics, combined with ample sidewalks, allows for vibrant pedestrian flow and outdoor café seating.

Even though the Champs-Élysées carries more cars than perhaps any surface street I’ve seen, every single business is oriented to attract the Parisian foot traffic mingling on the grand sidewalks.

So where do all the cars go? Side streets lead to some parking garages, and a few mid-block ramps lead to subterranean parking entrances without crossing pedestrian paths. Some Parisian boulevards also use medians to allow more rows of on-street spaces, calming traffic speeds, separating parking traffic from through traffic and reducing the need for as many expensive off-street garages.

One thing you will not find in Paris that we seem to be so fond of with boulevards in America is sticking curb cuts everywhere we can, breaking the pedestrian space to make room for cars to roll into all the parking lots we spread around like buckshot. The various high-capacity garages in Paris absorb countless vehicles, and typically without creating any significant conflict with the pedestrian realm. That's unlike the mess we have around many of our parking-garage entrances and exits.

Significant changes to Lincoln Boulevard won’t happen overnight, and the public process for major street redesign is sometime off. But new developments are being built on Lincoln all the time, and each one is an opportunity to influence the changing character of the street. But if we want the whole to become greater than the sum of its parts, we need to start imagining how each new step can build toward a new vision for Lincoln Boulevard in its entirety.

Let’s make Lincoln Boulevard a street that serves all users better and more safely, and is more human in character. Incidentally, all of this is ultimately better for local commerce too. As any merchant profiting from doing business on one of our more pedestrian-friendly streets will tell you, regardless of how someone gets around the city, in the end, it’s the foot traffic that is driving sales and powering our local economy.