LA Metro approved a Bus Rapid Transit project on a 12.4-mile stretch of busy Vermont Avenue roughly between 120th Street in South Los Angeles and Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood.
The project, which had received conceptual approval in September 2022, was approved for design and construction and exempted from further environmental reviews by a unanimous vote of the LA Metro governing board on Thursday, March 27.
Portions of the route’s right lanes have already been re-striped as bus-only lanes. Construction of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) along the right lanes of each side of the busy thoroughfare will be completed sometime in 2028, LA Metro reported.
A BRT has separate bus stations out of the traffic lane along the curbside and runs faster in dedicated bus-only lanes. The Vermont BRT will have 26 stations at 13 locations.
A combination of side-stations and median stations was ruled out because LA Metro designers said it would be difficult for pedestrians to cross half of the street to get to the median. Also, an end-to-end side-running BRT design preserves 94% of the on-street parking and preserves the median trees, Metro reported.
This stretch of Vermont Avenue is the busiest bus corridor in the LA Metro system, carrying about 38,000 daily boardings in a dense part of Los Angeles and unincorporated Los Angeles County with a high percentage of transit-dependent residents.
The upgraded rapid bus project will run through East Hollywood/Los Feliz, University Park/Exposition Park, Koreatown, South Los Angeles, Vermont Square, Chesterfield Square, Manchester Square, Gramercy Park, Westmont and Athens. In the north, it will connect with the Vermont/Sunset Metro B Line subway station.
Once complete, the BRT is expected to cut down on travel time by 24%, reducing the end-to-end time by 17 minutes, LA Metro estimated. By 2045, the agency estimates ridership will grow to 66,000 daily boardings, as more riders swap car rides for the BRT, which will travel at faster speeds and use dedicated bus lanes.
The project will serve riders going to USC, BMO Stadium, the museums at Exposition Park, Los Angeles City College, the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
The BRT can be used by other agencies, including the Los Angeles Department of Transportation DASH buses, LA Metro reported.
The group South Bay Forward, which advocates for better transit, affordable housing and active transportation methods, wrote in an email that the project should have dedicated bicycle lanes. As proposed, the bike lanes would be combined with the bus lanes.
Metro staff reported in a previous committee meeting that the addition of separate bike lanes would add millions of dollars to the project, require additional property purchases and cause significant delays.