Glendale’s Mobility Element Needs Work 

When the City’s 2025 Community Satisfaction Survey results were published in June, perhaps it shocked no one to see that the number one concern for Glendale residents is that of reckless driving, speeding and traffic safety. 

As a lifelong Glendale resident and two-term Transportation and Parking commissioner, I have been echoing this sentiment for a very long time, with mixed results. Ever so slowly, we are making some progress on safety improvements through design and engineering that reinforce safer driving. We have also made significant strides in planning having adopted the Pedestrian Master Plan in 2021 and Local Road Safety Plan in 2024. I served on the Advisory Committee for both of those plans and I can assure you a lot of good research and work was put into these plans despite mostly sitting on the shelf waiting for implementation. 

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the draft Mobility Element or Roadway Design Guidelines, a section of the City’s General Plan that establishes a framework for mobility policy in the City. As I stated during my Commission’s Sept. 15 meeting, the Mobility Element touches on important goals like traffic demand modeling, transit use, pedestrian safety and complete streets for everyone. But when you get into the details of the Element, it becomes clear that the proposed guidelines are overly prescriptive and would ultimately box staff into very specific design requirements that shut out potential safety improvements in our communities. 

For example, the draft Mobility Element requires a 12-foot center turning lane on most streets. While that guideline seems reasonable, many streets simply do not have room for that – maybe they have room for 11 feet or 10 feet, common widths in cities all across the nation. A center turn lane provides a huge safety benefit by providing refuge for drivers who are wanting to make left turns, preventing rear-end collisions and queuing in the fast lane to get onto a side street. City staff, with community input, should decide whether its appropriate to reduce lane widths to advance safety benefits. With these proposed guidelines, we are preempting these discussions from ever happening – I think that is bad policy. 

I encourage the public to familiarize themselves with the Mobility Element and submit comments. If we want safer streets, we must get involved and engaged in these decisions. If the Mobility Element is adopted as is, planners will have their hands tied without access to the full suite of options when making context-specific improvements to our streets. 

More information can be found at the City’s Mobility Element website, including a link to the comment form, at https://www.glendaleplan.com/mobility-element.

Alek Bartrosouf
Glendale

Alek Bartrosouf served as a former chair of the City’s Sustainability Commission, currently serves on the Transportation and Parking Commission, lives in Glendale and is a City Transportation Planner by profession.