There's a new plan in the works to make the nine-mile stretch of the LA River between Riverside Drive and Atlantic Boulevard more bike-friendly in an extremely awesome way. Right now the span is sort of a "missing link" and a path there would complete a continuous route for 31 miles of the river, from Griffith Park to Long Beach, but geo-engineers at Geosyntec and wHY Architecture have come up with a scheme that would allow for a bike path in the waterway. Bike enthusiast Yuval Bar-Zemer, the principal at Downtown developer Linear City, is driving the scheme (and paid for the designs), reports KCET. Nothing's official or finalized yet, but the engineers have worked out a design that would have concrete panels hovering over the water, which they believe would keep the path above-water all but five days a year.
Designs also call for five new bike access points, at Riverside Drive, Main Street, Sixth Street, and Washington and Atlantic Boulevards. "It's interesting. Downtown, where the community started next to El Pueblo, is the most inaccessible part of the river," Bar-Zemer points out.
The idea's been proposed informally at some community meetings and so far seems to have the support of all the right people—the Army Corps of Engineers, Friends of the LA River. The next step is to find an estimated $300,000 for the environmental studies. (We can't expect the guy to foot the whole bill, right?)
· A Bike Path in the L.A. Riverbed Proposed for Downtown [KCET]
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