MTA Releases BRT EIR and Brentwood Is All 'Huh?'

hasn't had time to read the documents yet.

s office promises a response later.

Almost everyone has nothing to say about the multimegabyte Environmental Impact Report released Friday by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—MTA's long-awaited EIR on the proposed Wilshire Boulevard dedicated rush-hour  bus lanes.

You'll need to download more than three dozen files to get the complete EIR.

As expected, the EIR says the project will reduce commute times, and the longer the bus lanes run contiguously, the better commute times will be.

Rosendahl and Freedman don't want dedicated Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lanes on the .8 mile Brentwood portion of Wilshire between Barrington and Centinela, which borders the City of Santa Monica, citing traffic congestion.

In February, Rosendahl secured a compromise from the City Council.

Rosendahl had called on his colleagues to "affirm support" for exempting all of the Westside from what's currently a 7.7-mile, non-continuous route from South Park View Street at MacArthur Park to Centinela Avenue, but  settled instead for a 5.4-mile route to East San Vicente Boulevard, the Beverly Hills border.

Rosendahl complained that the gaps in the 7.7-mile route—through Beverly Hills and "condo canyon" in Westwood—could worsen the already nightmarish traffic gridlock in the 11th District.

Now the MTA (also known as Metro or Metro.net) has taken the next, expected step in the sequence of events, the release of an EIR.

The MTA's PDFs provide evidence of the organized opposition in Westwood and organized support from the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. [See photos for two samples.]

Public transit booster Damien Newton of LA Streets Blog [photo] found a half-empty glass:

The “Rosendahl Exemption” drops the time savings from the original 10-15 minutes all the way down to a 6-9 minute savings, a 40 percent reduction in effectiveness.

One gem from the docs: Traffic counts used as the basis of the study consisted of one 30-minute survey at Wilshire and Barrington in 2008.

Another interesting find:

"The city of Santa Monica was not included as part of this project because it includes the tail end of the corridor (approximately 2.5 miles), where passenger demand drops off."

We're planning more analysis and reaction in an article Tuesday. Selected PDFs are available here on Brentwood Patch to view and download.  For all the PDFs, follow the link to Metro.net.

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