Glendale commission notes draft mobility element after lengthy public discussion on safety, outreach and timelines

The Glendale Transportation and Parking Commission on Sept. 15 formally noted and filed a staff presentation of the city’s draft Mobility Element and invited further public comment and technical review ahead of environmental analysis.

The draft element, presented by Vilia Zonotaitis, deputy director of long range planning in the Community Development Department, lays out seven themes — including complete streets, active transportation, public transit and goods movement — and a new multimodal roadway classification system. Zonotaitis said the draft was released Sept. 3 and is part of a larger update that also includes a land use element and a newly required environmental justice element.

The commission’s action was procedural: commissioners voted to “note and file” the informational presentation so the draft and public comments can be considered as staff prepares a program-level draft environmental impact report (EIR). The commission did not take any regulatory or policy votes to adopt the element.

Why it matters: The Mobility Element sets the policy framework the city will use to guide transportation investments and street design for the next decades. It will be folded into CEQA review (including vehicle-miles-traveled, or VMT, analyses required under state law, commonly identified by SB 743) and will guide projects ranging from bicycle and sidewalk investments to designation of truck routes tied to AB 98 (state law addressing freight/logistics impacts).

What staff said: Zonotaitis told the commission the mobility draft reframes Glendale’s circulation element around multimodal person throughput rather than vehicle level-of-service, and that it will be implemented alongside the city’s roadway design plan and an updated bicycle transportation plan (BTP). She said the environmental analysis for all three elements is being prepared as a single program-level draft EIR scheduled for release in early January, and that staff expects to return to commissions for formal recommendations before City Council consideration in 2026.

A consultant with the project, Tim Ernie of Kittleson (transportation consultants), described the technical basis for travel forecasts: the city’s travel-demand subregional model was updated to 2024 counts and run to a 2045 buildout scenario using the proposed land-use designations provided by planning staff. Ernie said the model includes projects already in the capital improvement and transit pipeline that staff provided and that the model did not explicitly incorporate speculative changes such as autonomous vehicles.

Public concerns raised: Several residents and business owners urged clearer outreach materials, plain-English summaries of impacts and cost estimates, and concrete data on emergency response and evacuation impacts. Beth Brooks, a frequent commenter on planning matters, said the document was not written in “plain English” and asked where the VMT reductions from lane reconfigurations would actually go and how emergency responders’ travel times would be affected. Gigi Garcia, a Montrose business owner, and Melanie McKinnell, a Shirley Jean Street resident, raised similar concerns about evacuation routes, fire access and the difficulty for many residents (in particular seniors) to find or interpret on-line material.

Substantive technical and policy questions from commissioners included: how the travel model treats the 2045 projection (staff said it is a maximum buildout scenario used for CEQA), how the mobility element will be reconciled with the forthcoming updates to the Bicycle Transportation Plan and the Roadway Design Policy (staff said the mobility element would be amended to remain consistent with adopted implementing documents), and whether the document’s lane-width and facility prescriptions create inflexibility for future corridor-level design decisions (staff said many table figures represent minimums and can be adjusted through project-level engineering).

Items of note from the draft element: staff described a new four-group multimodal classification (major mobility thoroughfares, collector streets, local streets and a signature-streets overlay), subclassifications for bicycle- and transit-priority corridors, policies to integrate VMT analysis into CEQA review, and actions that include updating the city’s TDM ordinance and creating a citywide parking management strategy. Staff also cited AB 98 requirements to identify truck routes that avoid sensitive populations.

Next steps and timing: Staff said the draft EIR is expected in early January and that the mobility element, once revised after public comment and environmental review, will be returned to commissions for formal recommendations and then to City Council, with adoption anticipated in later 2026 depending on the schedule. Staff identified the long-range planning contacts (email glendaleplan@glendaleca.gov and phone (818) 548-2140) and said the full drafts and comment forms are available at glendaleplan.com.

Formal action: A motion to note and file the Department of Community Development presentation passed on a roll call vote; the record shows five affirmative commissioner votes and no recorded dissents. The motion was procedural and did not adopt or change policy.

What the record does not show: The commission did not adopt the Mobility Element, set funding commitments, or finalize corridor engineering details at this meeting. Staff repeatedly characterized the presentation as informational and said final decisions will follow the environmental review and later public hearing process.

The commission’s review and the public comments will be part of the administrative record for the draft EIR and for subsequent commission and council deliberations on the mobility, land use and environmental justice elements.