Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) planning staff, working alongside engineers from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) seek to make improvements to the Metro G Line (Orange) busway to address a number of operational problems with the popular line. The Metro G Line is the backbone of transit in the San Fernando Valley, serving more than 22,000 pre-COVID-19 pandemic weekday boardings. Part of the problem for public transit in a chronically traffic congested place like Los Angeles is that buses typically have to compete for road space with private automobiles. As a result, buses get stuck in traffic. Light rail vehicles, when travelling on surface streets with cars, get stuck in traffic as well. The G line busway thus has a significant advantage, as it runs on its own dedicated route. Efforts to further separate the G line from nearby traffic, such as grade separated over- and under-passes or railroad-style gate arms at street crossings, will require complex planning and take considerable time and resources to implement. However, speeding up the G line with current infrastructure is possible by improving transit signal priority (TSP). TSP prioritizes a direction along a roadway by extending green time at signals so priority vehicles (in this case buses) can pass through an intersection without stopping.This report explores the current signal regime along the G line alignment, some of the history of the TSP system, and draws on case studies to develop applicable lessons to the Metro G line.

Cities nationwide have adopted so-called road diets to improve traffic safety, though they are sometimes met with intense opposition from motorists who fear that road diets will increase traffic delays. Road diets typically convert four-lane roadways with no left-turn lanes into streets with a center left-turn lane, two through-traffic lanes, and (often) bicycle lanes and right turn pockets at intersections. The resulting safety improvements are often dramatic. The Federal Highway Administration currently recommends that road diets should be applied to roadways with fewer than 20,000 average daily trips, but that cities should carefully consider whether to apply road diets above 20,000 average daily traffic (ADT). However, study of higher-traffic-volume road diets to inform decisions about them has been limited. In particular, there is scant evidence that safety benefits erode and traffic delays increase meaningfully above this threshold, though this is implied by the 20,000-ADT threshold. To address this literature gap, we examined the safety and traffic outcomes of high-traffic-volume road diets in Los Angeles, CA. To do this, we compared collisions on five high-traffic-volume road diet corridors with 16 similar multilane, untreated street segments. We found that collisions, injuries, and deaths were lower by 31.2% to 100%, depending on the measure, whereas traffic speeds were lower by about 6.7% (peak) to 7.9% (off-peak). We concluded that in Los Angeles higher-traffic-volume road diets appeared to significantly increase safety with only minor effects on traffic speeds.

This interim report began in order to develop a guide of suggested practices for responding to, managing, and deterring encampments on the right-of-way. The suggested practices will address the challenges for state departments of transportation in the design, construction, and maintenance of pavements and consider social equity, environmental impacts, safety, legal issues, coordination with other agencies, and other relevant issues. This interim report documents the research approach; present findings and analysis from the literature review, industry scan, and two surveys; and identifying existing and new practices.

This research synthesis consists of a set of white papers that jointly provide a review of research on the current practicefor setting speed limits and future opportunities to improve roadway safety. This synthesis was developed to inform thework of the Zero Traffic Fatalities Task Force, which was formed in 2019 by the California State Transportation Agencyin response to California Assembly Bill 2363 (Friedman). The statutory goal of the Task Force is to develop a structured,coordinated process for early engagement of all parties to develop policies to reduce traffic fatalities to zero. Thisreport addresses the following critical issues related to the work of the Task Force: (i) the relationship between trafficspeed and safety; (ii) lack of empirical justification for continuing to use the 85th percentile rule; (iii) why we need toreconsider current speed limit setting practices; (iv) promising alternatives to current methods of setting speed limits;and (v) improving road designs to increase road user safety.