It’s stunning that, while downtown retailers are looking to activate their streets and are using the word experience, City Council voted last Saturday to put Park Plaza on the back burner—the one no-brainer experience our community wants and needs. Back in March of last year, Council voted unanimously to move the concept of a pedestrian plaza forward in tandem with improvements to Coast Highway, with options for a permanent plaza to be presented within 18 months. Now, 11 months in, they decided to decouple it from the traffic improvements in progress and kick it down the road to other pie-in-the-sky discussions like traffic scrambles and making Ocean Avenue one way. In other words, buh-bye plaza.
Park Plaza was a fantastic win for everyone except a few people who use it as a shortcut. That’s why we were happy to wait until the left turn lane at Legion was extended, to help mitigate their inconvenience. Every box was checked: safety, shade, view, tranquility, entertainment, and, most importantly, community (with no adverse traffic impacts). Councilman Dicterow marveled at how many people he ran into, and how successful it was at bringing community together—in the dead of winter, no less. It’s already recommended in the Downtown Specific Plan. In other words, vetted and teed up.
The many volunteers who birthed this trial and donated hundreds of hours of their time to improve the community deserve better. It would be nice to see a public statement from the city assuring us the planning options for a plaza will continue in concert with Coast Highway improvements as voted on by our representative government. If you really want to know if it will work, here’s an idea: just install some hydraulic bollards immediately. Put them at Park, Forest, and Ocean. Raise them up when you want to close a street and test a pedestrian concept. Lower them when traffic flow is more important. Then start testing closures on different streets at different times and days of the year—with diverse concepts like art fairs, music, movies, and mid-week farmers’ markets. Let the community vote with their butts. Then, instead of talking about what might or might not work, we’ll know for sure.
Billy Fried, Laguna Beach
That was disappointing news about the CC’s decision to punt the Park Plaza pedestrian plan into the future–especially after all the hard work from a group of residents who worked so hard to pry open the imagination of city leaders so they could envision the community-building power of these types of dynamic, outdoor gathering spaces.
Everyone is hand-wringing about the need to revitalize the downtown. What better way to breathe life into an area than creating a vibrant, inviting space to hang out, explore, mingle and enjoy?
I love the idea of the retractible hydraulic bollards, and testing out various scenarios to close the streets to pedestrians and various events, as you mentioned. These are used with great success in forward-thinking cities all over the country and world. If they are truly flexible, why in the world not give them a try?
The communal vibes of these plazas attracts people, families, shoppers, walkers, locals and tourists who then flock to the adjacent shops and eateries. Isn’t that what the merchants say they want–more people to buy their stuff and use their services? At the same time, they get those polluting, traffic-clogging vehicles off our streets and incentivize visitors to use public transit or Uber (or walk!) to get downtown.
We sure could use a true leader with vision on our CC who would champion this progressive concept in town. Anyone?