CRA Has $20 Million Vision

The CRA envisions Figueroa Street with more pedestrians and bikers. This image depicts the street across from Staples Center, with a flex lane for bikes, walkers and local-access cars. Rendering by Gehl Architects

Imagine car-choked Figueroa Street lined with trees from Downtown to USC, with wide sidewalks and protected bike lanes.

Picture the thoroughfare teeming with pedestrians: People walk their dogs. Students jog down the sidewalk. Cyclists cruise wide-eyed, safe from cars that normally keep them on edge. With all the street life, new retailers have popped up.

It may sound like a cyclist and pedestrian's fantasy, but if the Community Redevelopment Agency has its way, it will be reality by the end of 2013. This week the CRA, working with a team of landscape architects and design consultants, and armed with a $20 million state grant, will present preliminary streetscape improvement options for the street.

The plans were developed over the past three months, following meetings with stakeholders on how they use Figueroa Street, and key points along the corridor between USC and Downtown.

''Pedestrians feel very secondary there,'' said Melanie Smith, a principal with the urban planning and landscape architecture firm Melendrez, one of the consultants working on the plan.

The grant comes from the state Department of Housing and Community Development and is intended to re-think the Figueroa Corridor, which runs through a patchwork of densely populated residential neighborhoods and the Downtown Auto District. It also connects the economic nerve center of Downtown with the academic and recreational hub around Exposition Park and USC.

''All the new residents in South Park or in USC housing or in affordable housing up and down the corridor need places they can walk to do their errands, take their kids to school, to parks,'' said urban design consultant Debora Murphy, who wrote the grant for the CRA. ''The funds are all about supporting new housing.''