Rosemead Boulevard Safety Enhancements and Beautification

Gruen Associates was the Landscape Architect and Urban Designer for the Rosemead Boulevard Safety Enhancements and Beautification Project for the City of Temple City, California, which celebrated the boulevard's grand opening on May 10, 2014. What began as a street safety enhancement project became the transformation of the two-mile stretch of Rosemead Boulevard into a newly-built, landscaped, multi-modal grand boulevard.

This street design project located in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles transformed a former Caltrans highway into a livable, walkable streetscape that serves as a catalyst for community development. An intensive redesign shows how street design can change the local environment and support the goals of sustainable design for future building projects. The project was made possible by Metro - L.A. County's transportation agency - the City of Temple City, CalRecycle and Caltrans.

Protecting the People
Major roadways are one of the largest public open spaces that can be found within a city. As development is maximized within city boundaries, opportunities for providing amenities and green spaces present a challenge due to limited space. The development of Rosemead Boulevard demonstrates how streetscapes can meet this need by improving the visual impact of streets while providing sustainable and healthful methods of transportation. This project shows how a street designed with only cars in mind can be transformed under the expertise of Landscape Architects, to mix vehicle, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic with landscape and bring a humanizing element to the street.

Addressing community concerns about the safety of bicyclists, Gruen Associates provided a physically-separated, seven-foot-wide cycle track so that bicyclists can now ride in bike lanes separated from vehicles by planted median islands. The number of vehicular lanes remained unchanged, though they were narrowed to allow for the addition of the bicycle lanes. Trees form a canopy over the streets and sidewalks and provide shade for pedestrians. New sidewalks, where in some cases none existed or were worn with physical obstacles, allow for pedestrian traffic to transit the entire length of Rosemead Boulevard as well.

Planting a Course
Responding to the existing conditions and City's goals, the design team re-envisioned Rosemead Boulevard as a destination as well as a piece of transportation infrastructure. Drawing on inspiration from Grand Boulevards around the world, the intent was to create a walkable, usable street that enhances the urban experience and forms a lush but modern park-like promenade. That, of course, meant developing a planting scheme of trees and groundcovers that can be maintained in the Southern California climate. It also meant evaluating the different transportation modes that needed to be accommodated (car, bus, bicycle, and pedestrians) and locating them to enhance the user experience.

Over 400 new street trees provide shade and help to reduce the urban heat island effect. Low maintenance, low-water-use shrubs and groundcovers are planted in all available parkways, medians and tree wells to help beautify the roadway streetscape. Planted medians between the travel lanes and the protected bike lane with slotted curbs allow storm water to be diverted and infiltrate into the ground. The roadway was repaved using recycled rubberized asphalt, a road paving material made by blending ground-up recycled tires with asphalt to produce a binder which is then mixed with conventional aggregate materials. This mix is then placed and compacted into a road surface. The recycled material helps to reduce tire noise on the street. New LED and high-efficiency metal halide streetlights reduce the energy demands of the street and lengthen the timing for the requirement for maintenance calls.

Influencing a Community
As the project's Landscape Architect-led design team, Gruen Associates' role in maximizing sustainable landscape design elements advances the practice of landscape architecture as integral to urban resurgence while influencing the use of this approach as a standard design solution for underused boulevards.

The traffic-calming design of Rosemead Boulevard is an innovative approach that creates inviting linkages for pedestrians and various modes of traffic. It impresses upon the idea that communities should not be passed through but instead explored, while adding to the local economic growth and sustained prosperity.

The two-mile Rosemead Boulevard Safety Enhancements and Beautification project and its major Class I (separated) bike path has become a landmark project and catalyst for new bike path systems that are emerging throughout the San Gabriel Valley.

The City officials were excited to present the new, modernized boulevard and encouraged people to rediscover the street in a new way-walk on the new sidewalks, bike on the new bike lanes, drive on the newly paved roadway, enjoy the new plant life including nearly 5,000 plants, see the City's first public art installments or visit favorite local businesses. Additional amenities, such as bus shelters, bike racks, seating areas and the "Art Walk" that will develop over time all bring character to the street and reflect the values of the community. "Temple City had ambitious goals to develop a highway into a place for the community," stated Jill Wagner, AIA, LEED AP, an associate partner at Gruen Associates. "The transformation of Rosemead Boulevard has been extraordinary and is only the beginning for the City."

The project has achieved numerous awards including a 2013 Planning Excellence in Implementation Award, Small Jurisdiction from the American Planning Association; the 2014 Quality of Life Merit Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects; the 2014 Merit Award for Urban Design from AIA California, and was voted one of the "Best 10 New Bike Lanes of 2014" from the PeopleforBikes organization.

Team List
Landscape Architect / Urban Designer - Gruen Associates
Traffic Engineer / Electrical Engineer - KOA Corporation
Civil Engineer - VCA Engineers, Inc.
Structural Engineer - Englekirk
Environmental Graphics - Selbert Perkins Design
Irrigation Design - Sweeney + Associates
Contractor - LA Engineering
Construction Managers - Vanir Construction Management & Transtech
Photographer - Michael Urbanek

As seen in LASN magazine, August 2019.