Flipping Out Over Parking

I grew up a block from Larchmont Village, LA’s closest approximation of a Middle American small-town Main Street–though considerably hipper, with restaurants from world-class to casual, an indie bookstore of many decades’ standing, coffeehouses, bagels, innumerable boutiques, and lots of entertainment industry folks strutting or slouching about according to their stylistic preferences. Also, Jerry the Barber, who has been trimming heads and chins since time immemorial, and who snipped my ever-grayer locks this morning, shortly after my hangout with fellow cyclist John Vu at bike-friendly Bricks and Scones on the next block up.

That next block is slated to receive bike lanes soon, according to our LADOT’s interactive bikeways map, to help cylists from points north find their way to the Village–which already sees a degree of bike traffic from the nearby Windsor Square neighborhood, and even from Hancock Park a few blocks south.

And Larchmont itself is well-equipped with bike racks, having been the first ‘hood to benefit from a pilot program using adapters to convert parking meters to racks after paystations go in, making the standalone meters obsolete.

However, once cyclists arrive at the block-long heart of Larchmont, they are confronted with rows and rows of automotive buttockses. Yes, the dreaded Angle Parking dominates, which is rude, unsightly, and unsafe–not only to cyclists, but to pedestrians and even other motorists as well.

While angle parking is an attempt to allow more customers to crowd their ungainly vehicles into a given length of street, in order to support its retailers, cars are so spatially inefficient that the effort fails. In the picture below, you see a crowd of cars nosed up to the curb like hungry pigs, blotting out sight of everything else on the left, while rows of restaurant tables sit empty to the right:

Because, of course, every car generally arrives with only one small person in it.

Now, in the center of the picture, you see a better solution: a bike, which also arrives bearing one small person, yet takes up so little room….

But riding a gantlet of metal behemoths that may at any second blindly back up into your face does not make Larchmont, or any other street, attractive to cyclists…and no bike lane leading riders to Larchmont will make them more comfortable once they arrive in search of those excellent bike racks and the shops and restaurants across the sidewalk from them.

Still, you can’t get rid of the angle parking, since even with it supplemented by a surface lot and a parking structure (both of which, by the way, occupy space that would otherwise host more businesses), there’s still “not enough” parking. People don’t yet understand how making less room for cars makes orders of magnitude more room for bikes and the customers they bring. This exchange has benefitted every city that has tried it, but LA is still a little immature in this regard, so we have to leave room for lots of motorized baby carriages.

But there is something we can do with angle parking that can make it friendlier not only to cyclists, but to motorists themselves, and that is flip it!

Yes, I say we ought to try back-in angle parking on Larchmont.

You flip the white lines and require folks to back into the parking space. Nothing changes but the paint. Except that now, when someone’s pulling out of their precious slot, the driver’s side window faces oncoming traffic, be it bikes or cars–and it’s much safer to ease into traffic that you can actually see!

Read what Burlington, Vermont, discovered when they explored the issue here.

Well, LA’s never been first with anything, except congestion and sprawl, but at least we could be early adopters of this win-win-win configuration of onstreet parking.

Are you listening, LADOT? City Council? Hello? HELLO?

Let’s give it a try.