The Chandler Bikeway Finally Connects Through Valley Village. Here's What Took So Long.

If you've walked or ridden the stretch of Chandler Boulevard near Laurel Canyon this summer, you probably noticed the cones. Starting in mid-June, crews reconfigured northbound traffic to one lane between Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Colfax Avenue to build a new bus platform, a job LADOT estimated would take six to eight weeks. It looked like routine road work. It wasn't. It was the visible piece of a bike path project that Los Angeles officially funded four years ago and only broke ground on this January.

That gap between commitment and construction is the real story here, and it explains something Valley Village residents have quietly understood for years: the neighborhood has been sitting in the one unfinished section of a bikeway that works everywhere around it.

Two Finished Ends, One Missing Middle

The Chandler Boulevard Bike Path started as the Southern Pacific Burbank Branch railroad line before it was converted to a trail in the 1980s. The eastern portion, running from Mariposa Street in Burbank to Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood, is a genuine Class I rail trail with separate lanes for bikes and pedestrians, landscaping, and public art the whole way. Its westernmost mile carries murals commissioned under Mayor Richard Riordan's Targeted Neighborhood Initiative Program, created by 19 local artists and honoring subjects from the movie industry to the region's farming history.

That finished end has kept getting investment. In 2019, the city put roughly $1.2 million into upgrades along the North Hollywood segment. In February 2023, then-Council President Paul Krekorian broke ground on two new recreation areas along the path at Satsuma and Cartwright Avenues, between Cahuenga Boulevard and Vineland Avenue, adding exercise equipment, new fencing, trees, lighting, and drainage improvements, funded by another $1.2 million he secured.

Meanwhile, the stretch that actually connects to Valley Village stayed exactly as it was: painted sharrows on a shared street, with cyclists and drivers occupying the same lane. The Chandler Bicycle Connection project, a three-mile Class III route linking the finished Burbank-to-Vineland trail to the Orange Line Bike Path, was completed in 2021 with an original projected finish date of 2023 for its upgrade to protected lanes. That deadline came and went. The segment sat unfinished for three more years while the neighborhoods on either side of it kept getting ribbon cuttings.

What Actually Got Approved

At the January 5, 2026 meeting of the LA Board of Public Works, the city approved a construction contract to close the gap between Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood and Leghorn Avenue in Sherman Oaks, the exact stretch Valley Village residents have had to share with car traffic. Both the Neighborhood Council Valley Village and the Greater Valley Glen Council flagged the vote as relevant to their communities, since this segment is the one their residents actually use to reach the rest of the bikeway.

The scope of work is specific: removing existing concrete median islands, reconstructing pavement, curbs, and curb ramps to current accessibility standards, modifying traffic signals, and installing Class IV bike lanes protected by raised rubber defenders and K-71 bollards rather than paint alone.

Here's how the funding actually built up over time:

Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian secured $1.9 million in state funds to supplement the federal dollars Metro put toward the project. As Krekorian put it when the funding was first locked in:

"Thanks to funding we received from Metro, and from the State of California through the work of Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian, we are closing the gap in this Bikeway so it will be one continuous ride all the way from Burbank out to the West Valley."

Four years passed between that funding commitment and shovels actually going into the ground. If you've wondered why "fully funded" transportation projects in Los Angeles can still take years to show up on your street, this is a clean example of why. Money gets secured, contracts get bid, environmental and engineering review happens, and construction slots get scheduled behind other city priorities. None of that shows up in a press release headline.

What Changes Once It's Done

Once complete, the corridor becomes a single, uninterrupted 21-mile route running from Mariposa Street in Burbank to Lassen Street in Chatsworth, linking directly into the North Hollywood Metro station on the B and G Lines. For anyone walking, biking, or running this stretch daily, that means no more merging into traffic lanes to cover the distance between the finished eastern trail and the rest of the Valley's bike network.

Practically, that means:

• A dog walk or morning run that currently ends at Vineland Avenue because the next stretch means sharing a lane with cars will instead continue uninterrupted toward Sherman Oaks.
• Kids biking to school along this corridor gain a physically separated lane instead of painted sharrows.
• The route connects into features already along the North Hollywood section, including a children's playground, a fenced dog run, exercise equipment, and, at Denny Avenue, a new crosswalk with ADA ramp improvements, plus the lighting and accessibility upgrades Krekorian added at Satsuma and Cartwright in 2023.

None of this changes the character of the finished sections. The murals stay where they are. The landscaping through Burbank stays intact. What changes is that Valley Village stops being the interruption in a path that has otherwise worked for years.

The Rhythm Around It

The bikeway isn't the only fixture drawing neighbors outside. Faith Presbyterian Church, at 5000 Colfax Avenue, has hosted the Valley Village Farmers Market for years, and last December it anchored one half of the Neighborhood Council Valley Village's Light Up Valley Village celebration, a two-part event that also included shopping, music, and a visit from Santa at Magnolia and Whitsett. Close to 400 people turned out for what marked the fifteenth year of that tradition.

Valley Village Park has its own recurring gathering. Last August, neighbors filled the park for the 41st annual National Night Out, which also marked NCVV's twentieth year organizing the event locally, with the Jimmy Dale Band providing the soundtrack for an evening built around checking in with the people who live nearby.

These events don't depend on the bikeway to happen. But they draw from the same pool of people who walk this corridor on an ordinary Tuesday, which is part of why a finished path matters here in a way a press release can't quite capture. It's less about a single ribbon cutting and more about whether the walk from your front door to the farmers market, the park, or the Metro station stays uninterrupted the whole way.

Worth Watching This Fall

If the current construction pace holds, the segment through Laurel Canyon and Colfax should wrap within the eight-week window LADOT has posted, putting completion sometime in late summer. Whether the rest of the Vineland-to-Leghorn gap follows on a similar timeline is worth watching, given how long the funded-to-built gap has already run on this project.

For now, the cones and the single-lane detour are a good sign, not an inconvenience. They're proof that a four-year-old funding commitment is finally turning into pavement.

Valley Village has always had a strong sense of its own rhythm, from the farmers market at Faith Presbyterian to the crowd that shows up every August at Valley Village Park. Understanding how a project like this actually gets built, who funds it, and why it takes as long as it does, is part of understanding the neighborhood itself. If you have questions about how a change like this fits into the bigger picture of living here, Tammy Jerome is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.