The Santa Monica City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a nearly $2 million design contract for a protected bikeway on 14th Street, advancing a project first included in the city’s 2020 Bike Action Plan.
The proposed 1.3-mile route would run from Washington Avenue to Pico Boulevard, connecting the 17th Street Metro E Line station, Santa Monica College, Lincoln Middle School, Memorial Park and the Michigan Avenue Neighborhood Greenway. It would also add safety improvements where the route crosses Broadway, Santa Monica Boulevard and Pico Boulevard.
The $1,999,205 design contract is largely backed by money already committed to the project, including $749,205 from a state Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities grant, $1.15 million from a Metro subregional grant and $100,000 from the St. John’s Hospital development agreement. Design and public engagement are expected to take approximately two years, with construction targeted for fall 2028.
The vote came as Santa Monica and the entire Southern California region baked through punishing heat and humidity. A rapidly intensifying “super” El Niño is shattering historical records and pushing global weather into uncharted territory, offering another glimpse of an increasingly unlivable future. At a moment like this, it is hard to fathom elected officials treating the work of getting people out of cars as anything less than an emergency. Transportation remains California’s largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions. Safe, connected routes to schools, jobs and transit are not recreational perks – they’re essential climate infrastructure.
And yet, the haters were out in force against this project. Opponents urged the Council to delay it over concerns about parking, traffic and emergency access. Former Mayor Phil Brock, who is running for City Council again, compared the proposal to the protected lanes on 17th Street and argued that narrowing 14th Street could slow fire, police and paramedic vehicles. That argument is both premature and misleading. Tuesday’s contract begins a two-year design and public-engagement process. It does not commit the city to a particular street configuration. Questions about emergency access can be addressed as engineers determine lane widths, intersection treatments and placement of physical barriers.
There is also little basis for treating protected bike lanes as inherently incompatible with emergency response. A 2024 peer-reviewed study of four-to-three-lane street conversions found no measurable change in emergency-response times, even though many first responders surveyed believed such projects caused delays. The relevant question is how to design the street safely for everyone, not whether every inch of pavement should be devoted to cars.
Brock’s resistance to protected bike lanes isn’t new. In April 2023, he met with residents objecting to the newly installed 17th Street bikeway. That June, Brock and Councilmember Oscar de la Torre brought forward a motion seeking another staff report and possible changes before the project was fully completed. Brock withdrew the motion after safe-streets supporters mobilized and other councilmembers challenged its premise. Seventeen months later, Brock lost his reelection bid while Dan Hall, Ellis Raskin, Barry Snell and Natalya Zernitskaya swept all four available City Council seats. All four had been endorsed by Streets for All, with several explicitly supporting protected infrastructure and full implementation of Santa Monica’s Bike Action Plan.
For Westside residents, the significance of Tuesday’s vote extends beyond one Santa Monica street. Anyone who regularly crosses from Los Angeles into Santa Monica can feel the difference as soon as they cross the city line. Streets feel calmer, crossings feel more deliberate and people walking or riding bikes are treated as legitimate users of the public right-of-way. Santa Monica is far from perfect, but it shows what Westside streets can feel like when a city begins treating safety as a responsibility and not just an inconvenience to drivers.