Why the Bike Lanes on Chandler Moved to the Middle of the Street

If you have driven South Chandler between Laurel Canyon and Colfax any time since June, you have seen the ghost stripes. The old bike lane along the curb has been ground off, leaving a pale scar in the asphalt, and a fresh white line now runs up against the landscaped median where the G Line buses go. "Bike lane closed" signs have been zip-tied to poles for most of the summer. Northbound traffic was squeezed to one lane on June 8 while crews poured a bus platform and pad.

None of that is maintenance. It is the last three miles of a 21-mile bike route, and Valley Village is the reason the route never existed in the first place.

The gap was always here

Two long, separated bike paths have been sitting on either side of this neighborhood for years. To the east, the Chandler Bike Path runs 2.8 miles toward Burbank. To the west, the Metro Orange Line path, now the G Line path, runs 15 miles out to Chatsworth. Between them sat a stretch of ordinary five-foot painted bike lanes on Chandler Boulevard, the kind that put a rider a car door away from moving traffic. Anyone who has tried to ride from Valley Village to the Sepulveda Basin without a break in protection knows exactly where the comfort ended.

LADOT calls the fix the Chandler Bicycle Connection. It runs from near the North Hollywood Metro B/G Line Station west to near Coldwater Canyon Avenue, and when it is finished it produces one continuous protected bikeway from Mariposa Street in Burbank to Lassen Street in Chatsworth. Councilmember Krekorian locked in the funding commitments back in 2022, and Adrin Nazarian, then in the Assembly, secured $1.9 million in state money on top of federal funds routed through Metro, according to Council District 2.

The project is about $7 million for roughly three miles. That is expensive for a bike project, and the price tag is the tell. Most of the money is not paint.

What $7 million actually buys

Read the scope and the priorities become legible. Crews are removing concrete median islands, reconstructing street pavement, curb and gutter, and rebuilding curb ramps to current accessibility standards. They are modifying traffic signals and pouring concrete transit platforms. The plan includes 33 upgraded crosswalks, 15 bike-signal intersections and 35 bike crossings, per LADOT's project description reported by NBC Los Angeles.

The bicyclists themselves get plastic. Protection along the new lanes is Class IV with raised rubber defenders and K-71 soft-hit bollards, the same low-cost hardware you see on Argyle in Hollywood.

"Protected bike lanes work," Nazarian said at a March press conference. "They reduce crashes, they slow traffic, they make it clear where everyone belongs on the road."

Here is the part most residents have not heard. Moving the lanes to the left side of the street, hugging the median, is unprecedented in the City of Los Angeles. Streetsblog LA reported that the center-running design is the configuration cities reach for when the main priority is preserving on-street parking, and it flagged that a broadly similar layout has struggled on Mission Street in San Francisco.

That is the trade Valley Village got. A conventional protected lane on the curb side would have cost parking spaces in front of houses and small storefronts along Chandler. The city chose the spaces. Whether you think that was the right call probably depends on whether you park on Chandler or ride on it, but it is worth knowing that the unusual thing about your street was a deliberate choice, not a drafting error.

Where the work stands right now

The construction has moved west to east and block by block, which is why one stretch looks finished while the next looks abandoned.

LADOT's weekly update on August 6 still listed active construction between Vineland Avenue and Leghorn Avenue and described the finished result as a continuous, protected 21-mile route from Burbank to the Sepulveda Basin, with the department looking to have it done ahead of the 2028 Games. No agency has published a firm completion date, so treat anyone who gives you one with suspicion.

Two practical notes from LADOT's own construction updates. Daytime lane closures are possible, but vehicle lanes are being shifted rather than removed, so there are no peak-hour closures. And when Streetsblog rode the corridor in July, it found the new median-side surface heaved and uneven in stretches from root damage under the trees. If you ride it before the work is signed off, ride it slowly.

What the corridor connects on either end

The reason this matters more than a striping project is what sits at each terminus.

• East, at North Hollywood Station. Metro is testing a ThermoShade heat-absorbing shelter at the east portal, which on a hot Valley afternoon in August read as pleasantly cool rather than dramatically different.
• West, past Coldwater Canyon. The Great Wall of Los Angeles runs along the Tujunga Wash on Coldwater Canyon between Burbank Boulevard and Oxnard Street, 2,754 feet of painted concrete listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.
• Beyond both. The full 21 miles reaches from Burbank to the Sepulveda Basin without a break in protection.

The Great Wall end is having a year. Judy Baca and SPARC are extending the mural to a full mile by the 2028 Summer Olympics, with new panels produced at the organization's Bergamot Station space because painting inside a flood control channel is genuinely dangerous. Half a mile of mural lighting and six interpretive stations are in production. In March, the LA Phil premiered a commissioned symphony named for the mural under Gustavo Dudamel. A neighborhood landmark most people drive past at 40 miles an hour is about to become something you can ride to, at night, with lights on it.

Running parallel the whole way, Metro's G Line Improvements are due to finish in 2027. That work includes grade separations at Van Nuys, Sepulveda and Vesper, a new aerial station, four-quadrant crossing gates, and resurfacing of the adjacent bike path with new striping, lighting, signage and fencing, plus bike lockers at selected stations. Metro projects the changes will cut about 12 minutes off the end-to-end bus trip, close to 22 percent, and allow five-minute headways.

The Magnolia stop that makes it a route instead of a commute

A protected lane is only as good as what you stop for. Two blocks south of the construction, Magnolia Boulevard has the errands.

Harvest Moon Kitchen and Marketplace sits at 12456 Magnolia, next to the Valley Village post office and the old Valley Camera storefront. It is named after the Neil Young record, it opened in the fall of 2012, and it exists because Chris and Rick Drapkin were cooking hot lunch for a nearby school and parents started asking whether they could take dinner home too. One family became five, five became twenty, and ABC7's Community Eats eventually came out to film the result. Up the street, Valley Photo Service at 12466 Magnolia still does film, restoration and transfers. Around the corner on Laurel Canyon, Village Pet Supply at 4838 remains the only pet store actually inside Valley Village, and mac-O-licious at 5217 has been feeding the neighborhood comfort food and catering film shoots for years, all of them documented by the Neighborhood Council's own business roundup.

Walk Score puts the corner of Laurel Canyon and Magnolia at 89 out of 100 while rating Valley Village as a whole at 77. That 12-point spread is the entire story of this neighborhood in one number. The commercial spine is extremely walkable. The residential blocks feeding into it are not, quite. A continuous protected corridor along the north edge is the first infrastructure in decades that narrows that gap without changing a single residential street.

What it adds up to

Valley Village was recognized as its own community in 1939 after residents petitioned the City Council for it, and roughly 26,000 people live here now. The Fourth of July parade and community breakfast still runs every year. The Neighborhood Council still meets the fourth Wednesday at 6:30. For a place that small and that self-defined, the Chandler corridor is the closest thing to a shared front yard, and it is being rebuilt right now around a specific bargain: your curb parking stayed, and the bike lanes went to the middle.

Knowing which trade your street made is the kind of detail that separates people who live somewhere from people who look it up. If you are thinking about what this corridor work means for your block specifically, or you want a straight read on your home's value in a neighborhood where the infrastructure is mid-change, Brandon Kaufman is happy to talk it through. Request a free home valuation or schedule a consultation, and you will get a clear answer without the sales pitch.