One-Way Pico and Olympic?

Imagine Pico and Olympic as one-way streets -- one heading downtown, the other heading west. It's possible. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is kicking around that idea as one way to improve the surface street crunch heading into and out of the west side.

Yarosklavsky makes his case in Steve Lopez's Sunday L.A. Times column, which centers on the continually worse traffic in and out of the Westside on most afternoons.

He theorizes that the hellish drive -- in some cases, over an hour to just go 10 or 11 miles -- is keeping affluent ticket holders out of the downtown music and theatre venues.

Lopez talks to several local figures, including Yaroslavsky -- who didn't help matters when he backed an ordinance that prevented any more tax money from a subway project. Even Yaroslavsky now would like to see some sort of a loosening of that restriction.

From the column:

The trip that sent Yaroslavsky over the edge was in October. After attending an event on Cloverfield Boulevard near Michigan Avenue in Santa Monica, he headed east at 6:30 p.m., expecting to be on time for a 7:30 Beverly Hills appointment. But by 7:20, he was just getting to the 405.

"I never even made it to the Beverly Hills event, so I went home to Fairfax. It took one hour and 41 minutes from Cloverfield to Beverly and La Brea."

It was only about 11 miles, Yaroslavsky said. He could have jogged the distance in less time.

Now Yaroslavsky has asked a traffic engineer to investigate the possibility of turning Olympic and Pico boulevards into one-way thoroughfares.

One-way Pico and Olympic Boulevards sound like a pain in the ass -- and a definite concern for people living on quiet North-South streets that would suddenly be choked with people trying to switch sides. Stay tuned.