Santa Monica City Hall has been at war with itself for some time.  It aspires to make Santa Monica “a world class city,” and an “internationally recognized leader,” and a  “sustainable and/or green city,”  and a “creative capital,” and a “tourist destination,” and a “regional commercial hub.”

City Hall doesn’t see it as a war, of course. It sees it as progress. It’s a heavy load for a legendary beach town that rides lightly on the land, and is small, contrary, and very definite. City Hall’s  utilitarian additions are an awkward fit – like McMansionization of a simple, graceful beach house.

One of the unintended consequences of City Hall’s  effort to make Santa Monica everything is traffic, traffic everywhere, leading to  semi-perpetual gridlock.

Having locked the grid, City Hall doesn’t know how to unlock  it, without  turning the heat down under its   hyper-aggressive economic development policies, which it has refused to do.

It also refused, on the way to gridlock, to listen to resident traffic expert  Laurel Roennau who warned that its reliance on primitive traffic measurements would inevitably end in over-development and gridlock. And it did.

The City’s Latest “traffic expert,” Jeff Tumlin, flies in from time to time from San Francisco, and blames our traffic surfeit on the region, neglecting to  admit that when City Hall made and promoted its “regional commercial hub,” the region would come, and gridlock would follow.

When City Hall began its revision of the land use and circulation elements in the General Plan,  it billboarded them as “Shape the Future 2025” and “Motion by the Ocean.”

Thus far,  residents’ efforts to “shape the future” have been bootless, but  last Tuesday City staff presented the City Council with its $1 billion Capital “Improvement” list, which pretty much takes care of the future, but there is still no motion by the ocean.

Given all that, the City’s acronym for the revision, LUCE (pronounced “loose”) is apt. Residents’ belief that less is more has been trumped by the billion-dollar beast in our future. City n Hall  has thrown everything but a workable comprehensive plan at the traffic swamp we inhabit fleets of Big Blue buses and shuttles, synchronized traffic signals,  new bike lanes, wider sidewalks, new streets, shared  parking, etcetera.

But it’s clear that our traffic and planning wizards are counting on  the proposed Expo light rail line to solve  all the problems and free  the cars  hey have designed the  LUCE around it. .  Its stations are the focal points of the plan — veritable temples of transportation. Having spent $34 million on the site of the  western terminus of the line,  they propose remaking much of downtown Santa Monica and the Civic Center to
accommodate it.

Clearly, the light rail, which is scheduled to be complete in 2015, is a welcome addition. But it’s not THE answer. It may reduce some problems, but it will create some new problems, because that’s the nature of machines.

For decades, the operative word in City Hall has been MORE, overruling  residents’ belief that “less is more.”

All of the City’s essays at ending gridlock involve MORE, but” less is more” is the premise of  the  newest and most successful gridlock buster.

It’s called “Shared Space/”

According to Wikipedia, it’s “a traffic engineering concept involving the removal of the traditional separation between motor vehicles and pedestrians and other road users, and the removal of traditional road priority management devices such as kerbs, lines, signs and signals. The reasoning behind the idea is that it will result in improved road safety by forcing users to negotiate their way through shared areas at appropriate speeds and with due consideration for the other users of the space.

“This approach, which was pioneered and promoted by Hans onderman, is based on the observation that individuals’ behavior in traffic is more positively affected by the built environment of the public space than it is by conventional traffic control devices and regulations.

“…A major characteristic of a street designed to this philosophy is the absence of traditional road markings, signs, traffic signals and the distinction between “road” and “pavement.” User behavior becomes influenced and controlled by natural human interactions rather than by artificial regulation.”

Monderman is quoted in Der Spiegel as saying: “We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior, …The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”

Wilipedia lists a number of towns and cities that have “shared space.”

They include
New Road, Brighton, England.
“In Brighton, the City Council has recently transformed the whole of New Road, adjacent to the Royal Pavilion, into a fully shared space, with no delineation of the carriageway except for subtle changes in materials. The route for vehicles along New Road is only suggested through the location of street furniture, such as public seating and street lights. The re-opening of the street has led to a 93% reduction in motor vehicle trips (12,000 fewer per day) and lower speeds (to around 10 MPH), alongside an increase in cyclist and pedestrian usage (93% and 162%, respectively).

“In Seven Dials, London the road surface has been re-laid to remove the distinction between the roadway and the footway and kerbs have been lowered to encourage people to wander across the street. A scheme implemented in London’s Kensington High Street, dubbed naked streets in the press—reflecting the fact that the road has been cleared of markings, signage and pedestrian barriers, has yielded significant and sustained reductions in injuries to pedestrians. It is reported that, based on two years of ‘before and after’ monitoring, casualties fell from 71 in the period before the street was remodeled to 40 afterwards – a drop of 43.7%…

“In West Palm Beach, Florida planners are reported to have removed traffic signals and road markings and brought pedestrians into much closer contact with cars. The result has been slower traffic, fewer accidents, and shorter trip times…

“In the Netherlands….Drachten is one of the pioneer towns for such schemes. Accident figures at one junction where traffic lights were removed have dropped from thirty-six in the four years prior to the introduction of the scheme to two in the two years following it. Only three of the original fifteen sets of traffic lights remain. Tailbacks (traffic jams) are now almost unheard of at the town’s main junction, which handles about 22,000 cars a day.

“The concept, known as shared space traffic management, originated in the Netherlands more than 30 years ago…but it’s just started to really catch on in recent years, with various versions of shared space programs in place or underway in nearly a dozen cities around the world.
According to Wikipedia, people in the places with “shared space” report that its principal opponents were “traffic bureaucrats.”

In Santa Monica, among the multitude of  things City Hall likes MORE of are rules and regulations. It would strenuously object to “shared space.” We can already hear the staff reports, decrying not only the reduction of rules and regulations, but the loss of  revenue they collect from violators of all those rules a and regulations.

But if we converted our streets to “shared space,” we would have no further need for “traffic bureaucrats,” And that in itself would be be a major improvement.

Perhaps that’s why our alleged experts Haven’t bothered to tell us about ‘shared space.”