It’s been just under a year since the City Council addressed an agenda item on August 23, 2021, looking at opening the gate to the bike path on Jackson Avenue, and now that entrance is open.
Reaching as far back as 2017, the request to open the gate to bicyclists has taken a tremendous amount of effort. The request in 2021 brought out a lot of comments from the community, and ‘Letters to the Editor’ here on this news site, which led to many more meetings before being resolved.
With so much energy being brought to bear on increasing the use of the bike path, particularly for CCUSD students, opening the gate on Jackson gave a whole set of grade schoolers a safer, easier, and faster way to access the path.
Jim Shanman of Culver City Walk nRollers offered his thoughts. ” The opening of Jackson Gate will provide a much needed and easy-to access entry point for families East of Overland to the Ballona Creek Bike Path. With school starting and kids eager to bike to school, this will provide a safer alternative to Braddock and Overland for middle and high school students. Every survey we post and each time we meet with community members, we hear consistently that opening this gate would be the difference between biking or driving to school. We applaud the City’s efforts to create access and especially their intention to redesign the gate to mitigate community concerns.”
The gate, originally designated as an access way for maintenance vehicles, can be opened completely when that access is needed. Having one side unlocked for bike riders seems a very simple thing, but democracy takes work; this took five years, untold hundreds of hours of work by the city staff and two successive city councils listening to more than a hundred residents at half a dozen public meetings to come to the decision.
Judith Martin-Straw
Photo courtesy of Bike Culver City
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