Atlantic Boulevard Leads Shift Away from L.A.'s Car Culture

I'm up on Atlantic Boulevard in Long Beach pretty regularly. My buddy Greg lives in Bixby Knolls and we have lunch over there.

See the Los Angeles Times, "Atlantic Boulevard's New Stride Reflects Shifting L.A. Street Scene":

The 5600 block of Atlantic Avenue doesn't look like much at first glance, especially if you're zipping through at 45 mph. A dry cleaner, a pupuseria, a T-shirt shop and a medical marijuana dispensary line the low-rise street in the North Village Annex section of Long Beach. About a third of the storefronts are vacant.

But if you climb out of the car, you'll notice that this classic commercial strip — convenient for drivers, charmless and alienating for everybody else — is in the midst of a remarkable evolution.

A crosswalk cuts across the boulevard at mid-block, complete with a flashing signal for pedestrians. Orange and blue bike racks dot the sidewalks. Silk floss trees, lined up in a neat row along the median, frame a piece of tiled public art.

And the Brandon Bike Shop, which opened earlier this year behind a nondescript storefront at 5634 Atlantic, buzzes with activity. On a recent afternoon, Rodolfo Alcantara, a 19-year-old with a white stud in his lip, was working the counter while "Faded," by the rapper Tyga, thumped from speakers behind him.

He said the store caters to the growing number of teenagers and twentysomethings in the neighborhood, including him, who've become obsessed with riding and detailing their bikes.

"It's the new style," Alcantara said.

The changes along Atlantic are emblematic of the way urban planners, architects, shopkeepers and neighborhood activists are remaking the boulevards of Southern California, reversing decades of neglect.

The boulevard, in fact, is where the Los Angeles of the immediate future is taking shape. No longer a mere corridor to move cars, it is where L.A. is trying on a fully post-suburban identity for the first time, building denser residential neighborhoods and adding new amenities for cyclists and pedestrians.

In the process, the city is beginning to shed its reputation as a place where the automobile is king — or at least where its reign goes unchallenged. Cities across the U.S. followed L.A.'s car-crazy lead in the postwar era. This time around we might provide a more enlightened example: how to retrofit a massive region for a future that is less auto-centric.

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