TITLE
Recommendation to authorize City Manager to execute all documents necessary with Urban Innovations (Urban), based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to enter one or more agreements and to submit one or more applications to seek pre-application and pre-development grant funding from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Federal Transit Agency for the preparation of an Alternative Transportation Analysis. (District 2)
DISCUSSION
Long Beach faces a mixed transportation challenge in the downtown area. The convergence of needs for parking, congestion management and mitigation, and connectivity between critical commercial and retail nodes calls for alternative transportation solutions. These critical nodes include the Pine Avenue retail and entertainment district, the Promenade, the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, Shoreline Village, The Pike at Rainbow Harbor, the Aquarium of the Pacific, and the Queensway Bay area including the Marriott and Maya Hotels, Queen Mary and the Carnival Cruise Lines terminal, among others. Physically connecting these various and disparate nodes in a cost-effective, efficient and creative manner would provide operational synergism and provide unquantifiable benefits to the City. In addition, within the downtown and Queensway Bay area, there are opportunities to foster and enhance additional economic development that has been constrained or hampered by limited accessibility and increasing congestion, preventing the attainment of the needed critical mass to ensure success. Potential solutions include additional bus and waterway routes and non-traditional approaches such as ground-based cable drawn trams and aerial gondola ropeway systems.
On August 4, 2010, the Tidelands and Harbor Committee (Committee) received an unsolicited proposal from Urban for a Tram & Aerial Gondola System stretching from Downtown Shoreline to South Shore Areas. The Committee requested that this item be presented in a timely manner to t...
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