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ChineseJust how congested is Wilshire?
[tags]los angeles, wilshire boulevard, laist, bus rapid transit[/tags]
Remember the Metro Line 920 ride report from June? An afternoon trip took 75 minutes to go on Wilshire Boulevard between Santa Monica and Koreatown – with 40 minutes of that time just passing through Beverly Hills. Using the distance calculator on Google Maps and the methods outlined in “Another handy Google Maps tool for transit”, this trip on the fastest Wilshire bus traveled a blazing 10.18 miles per hour for the 12.72-mile journey. And the Beverly Hills leg — actually 2.22 miles between Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards – averaged 3.33 miles per hour!
LAist finds the same conclusion. The headline says it all: “19 minutes to drive just one mile of Wilshire…”. It’s taken from a passage citing Metro research showing a drive on Wilshire near I-405 can take as long as 19 minutes to travel a mile, or about close to 3 miles per hour, a rolling idle.
LA Map Nerd posted a lengthy but excellent explanation on how the 405 ramps at Wilshire cause bottleneck ripple effects on the freeway and surface streets.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
It’s time we fact the fact that Wilshire is this city’s Market Street.
It would be useful to know how much time was spent “driving” versus stopped for loading.
Robert, if you are talking about dwells for 920, each stop took about a minute to clear.
Most of the bus route is driving. It only has stops at its layover and Fourth Street in Santa Monica, Westwood Boulevard, Beverly Drive, Farifax Avenue, Western Avenue and Vermont Avenue.
And Beverly Drive took only a minute to clear. That’s the only stop it made in Beverly Hills. The rest of the time, it was stuck in traffic witb the cars.