Commission sends draft 2025 Glendale Roadway Design Policy to council with commission comments

Glendale’s Transportation and Parking Commission voted July 28 to forward the draft 2025 Glendale Roadway Design Policy to City Council with the commission’s comments after a lengthy discussion about lane-reduction thresholds, lane widths and community outreach.

Public Works’ senior traffic engineer, Ari Carmondayan, described the policy as a single reference document to guide street design across the city, to accelerate projects and to prioritize safety while balancing traffic flow, emergency access and local context. Carmondayan said the policy includes a lane-reduction feasibility matrix and design criteria intended to reduce the need for repeated, project‑level analysis.

The presentation reviewed policy objectives, examples of cross sections for reallocated roadway space, and the community survey results that staff used to inform priorities. Staff emphasized the policy is meant to be “context sensitive” and a “living document” that will be updated as conditions change.

Discussion among commissioners and members of the public ran more than two hours. Commissioners pressed staff for additional detail and flexibility on several elements: the policy’s lane-reduction threshold (a cited rule of thumb of 15,000 average daily traffic), minimum lane widths (11 feet cited as a standard for emergency access; commissioners asked whether 9–10 foot lanes could be allowed in constrained locations), protected bike-lane widths and buffers, and treatment of cut‑through traffic when an arterial is reconfigured.

Commissioner Bartoszoff said he would not support the draft in its current form and outlined requests for additional analysis and cross‑jurisdictional comparisons, including examples from Los Angeles and Pasadena. Staff and the city engineer, Sarkis Oganeshyan, responded with practice-based explanations for thresholds and described lessons learned from recent pilots such as the North Brand demonstration.

A motion to send the draft to City Council without change failed. After subsequent motions and counterproposals, the commission approved a motion that the draft be forwarded to City Council with the commission’s comments incorporated. The motion passed on roll call.

Public comment included residents who said the matrix might lock in future design limits and asked that the policy remain flexible so dangerous corridors can be reconfigured when warranted. Staff said it will collect commission feedback, internal departmental comments and other stakeholder input; staff also noted the mobility element and other planning documents will be coordinated with the roadway design policy as it moves forward.

The commission asked staff to clarify graphics and chart formatting in the packet, to show more recent crash years where available, and to add clearer cross sections and explanations on how emergency response corridors are treated in the policy. Staff said it will include the commission’s comments in the report that goes to City Council.