February 25th, 2024

Opportunity Corridor BRT

Bus Rapid Transit and additional housing are combined as a winning combination for improvement in the LA Basin with the use of the LA City Program called “Opportunity Corridors”. This transportation improvement is with transit also to be used to support the additional housing called for by the Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA, both of which can redevelop communities and create socio-economic benefit for people in the LA Basin and for those that commute to work or visit there.

The corridors can use the newly invented multi-modal (all kinds of vehicles) roadway improvement called Flow Boulevard, to serve and provide additional capacity. Over the long term additional capacity is needed for the additional commuters and the growing corridor travel demand from higher density within the communities that they serve.

The Flow Boulevard is low in cost and able to be quickly made to meet the Opportunity Corridor time schedule of having enough zoning to be building housing by 2029, if not sooner. Because the corridors will use existing streets, the FB system is perfect to provide the communities with the called for greater efficiency of mobility, and the greater capacity with less CO2 emissions, which makes this the right improvement to be made. The Bus Rapid Transit is the outstanding element within the Flow Boulevard system because it is mixed in integrally within this newly discovered traffic improvement system without separate dedicated lanes for BRT buses which is the efficient use of the narrow boulevards in the LA Basin.

The innovation of the Flow Boulevard system is that it has both a continuous flowing traffic phase and a normal stop and go traffic phase within the basic traffic signal cycle that structures traffic on the Flow Boulevard. There are also two kinds of street configurations that allow the Flow Boulevard system to be used in a single street within low density land use areas and a couplet configuration to be used in high density land use areas which are formed in a grid of streets. Here it is found that two parallel one way streets separated by a city block or more provides the desired traffic in two directions which accepts the Flow Boulevard two phases of traffic where each one-way street has progressive signalization allowing the continuous flowing traffic phase and the stop and go traffic phase to co-exist. The matching of the signal cycle phasing allows the two different roadway types to be connected for the proper flow of traffic between the two different land use areas and their roadway configurations.

First the corridor must be secured by planning and zoning so that there is continuity of traffic operation through the communities so that gridlock does not occur now or in the future.

The corridor that now needs the planning for the Opportunity Corridor to occur is the fourteen mile corridor that connects DTLA with the Westside which runs through Hollywood on the old Route 66 alignment. Each community would participate in the zoning, planning and defining of the socio-economic opportunities that would be derived by the corridor transportation and urban area improvement.

Most of that corridor would use a Single Street FB configuration as shown in LA Basin plans and in the animation that has been made on this website. In the area between Vermont and La Cienega a Couplet Flow Boulevard would be used through that grid of streets. All of the major crossing boulevards are on a one mile distance separation which is the module that the Single Street FB in based on, so it all works just right. And each community plan with community participation would shape the zoning and planning of adjoining streets and land use areas to preserve their desired livability character and avoidance of traffic problems.

Over time the Flow Boulevard builds a highly integrated system of local bus service along with its special continuous flowing BRT service which is the main long distance bus service in the Flow Boulevard emerging network. The result of the fast uncongested bus service is a very convenient way to move about the urban setting without a car and any need for places to park it. And the large number of commuters to work in the LA Basin that arrive by rail would have the convenience of fast bus service throughout the Basin area. So the FB system is indispensable in the LA Basin to interrelate rail and freeway commuter users with the multi modal distribution of person trips in the basin and return trip home without congestion ability.