Move Culver City

Culver City experiences some of the worst congestion in the Los Angeles region. Anticipating future growth, and understanding that the municipality cannot build its way out of gridlock, Sam Schwartz and the MOVE Culver City team (including Street Plans and TY Lin) were tasked with designing, building, and monitoring 1.3 miles of tactical, multimodal mobility lanes connecting the E Line station to Downtown and the Arts District as part of a pilot project.

This project offers a new model for how to transform key corridors quickly. Over the 70-day design phase, 33 unique public engagement events were hosted where more than 325 public comments were received. The Community Project Advisory Committee (CPAC) was deeply involved in guiding the project; the CPAC was responsible for developing success criteria, recommending design options and guidelines, participating in the planning of the project launch, and representing the ideas of their respective community groups.

The final design introduced a protected mobility lane (shared by both buses and bikes) along the downtown corridor and a protected separated bike lane and dedicated bus lane on portions of the corridor where space allowed. Painted curb extensions, many featuring asphalt art depicting local flora and fauna, were added at intersections to improve pedestrian experience, and vertical delineators were installed to separate vehicle traffic from bus and bike traffic and to provide protection for curb extensions. To bolster existing transit service, Culver City introduced a Downtown Circulator service that runs along the MOVE Culver City Downtown Corridor every 15 minutes.

Once the mobility, bike, and bus lanes were open, the project team closely monitored traffic conditions in the corridor and incoming public feedback to identify any adjustments that needed to be made. The Mid-Term Pilot Report, released in Autumn, 2022, found that MOVE Cuver City has produced the following results: bus ridership increased by 50%, cycling by 30%, and micromobility trips by 100%.

Services / Transit