Venice Boulevard, former streetcar right-of-way turned extra-wide commercial corridor, will soon be returning some of its right-of-way to transit vehicles

Tucked away in a presentation to Metro's Westside Service Council, LADOT and Metro have announced plans to add bus-only lanes to Venice between Inglewood Boulevard in the west and Culver Boulevard in the east. That segment stretches roughly 2.5 miles between Mar Vista and Palms, stopping just short of Culver City Station.

At the same time, LADOT also plans to upgrade existing bike lanes along a longer 4.25-mile stretch of Venice between Lincoln and National Boulevards into protected bike lanes. That corridor also includes the Venice neighborhood, and feeds into the E (Expo) Line's Culver City Station at its eastern end.

Existing and proposed configuration for Venice Boulevard between Lincoln and National BoulevardsLADOT

According to the presentation, the project corridor is home to roughly 47,000 people, with Venice Boulevard seeing approximately 19,500 weekday bus trips on average. At the same time, Venice has emerged as a dangerous corridor having been identified as part of the City's High Injury Network, which refers to the roughly 6 percent of city streets that account for 70 percent of deaths and severe injuries for pedestrians and cyclists. Over the past decade on Venice, there have been more than 1,200 collisions where someone was severely injured or killed, with roughly 25 percent of those involving a pedestrian or cyclists.

Public outreach for the Venice Boulevard project starts this month, with a workshop scheduled for August 31 (learn more here: https://ladotlivablestreets.org/projects/venice). Design work is set to be finalized by October, with project implementation expected between November 2022 and February 2023.

Upgrades to Venice Boulevard follow the addition of peak-hour bus lanes to numerous other corridors in Los Angeles County over the past few years, as Metro pushes to speed up transit travel times. Lanes are currently in the works for Florence Avenue in South Los Angeles and on La Brea Avenue between Baldwin Hills and Hollywood. Projects have already been implemented on corridors including Alvarado Street, Flower Street, 5th Street, 6th Street, Grand Avenue, and Olive Street.

More on the Venice Boulevard project at Streetsblog.