Burbank Residents Divided Over Metro BRT and Olive Ave Changes
Burbank residents and officials are split over Metro's Bus Rapid Transit plan, with debate centering on lane reductions along busy Olive Avenue.
Metro’s plan to bring Bus Rapid Transit through Burbank this summer has residents divided, with the debate sharpening around a single question: what happens to Olive Avenue?
The North Hollywood to Pasadena BRT will cover roughly 19 miles, threading through the Entertainment District and Downtown Burbank before continuing through Glendale and ending in Pasadena. Metro has completed about 85 percent of the project design, according to Anthony Defranza, a deputy executive officer at Metro and the project’s manager. The agency has packaged the design by segment for review by each jurisdiction along the route.
Metro held an open house Monday at the Buena Vista Branch Library to walk residents through the plans and field questions. The room reflected a community that is not uniformly opposed but is not uniformly on board either.
The lane configuration on Olive Avenue is the flashpoint. Metro’s current design would remove one traffic lane in each direction to create dedicated bus-only lanes. David Donahue, president of Vision Burbank, argued that Olive is too critical a corridor to absorb that reduction.
“Olive Avenue is a very highly trafficked artery that goes through the city of Burbank,” Donahue said. “If you take it down to one lane in each direction, I think it’s going to really dramatically affect how quickly people can get from one side of the city to the other.”
Other residents pushed back on that framing. Phillip Dezonia, who said he lives within walking distance of Downtown Burbank, described the project as a connectivity upgrade he’s been waiting for. “I could walk to downtown Burbank, catch a line to the Gold Line and then I can see my friends in Torrance,” Dezonia said. He added that half-measures could undermine the whole point: putting buses in mixed-flow traffic defeats the purpose of building BRT in the first place.
Hunter Gibson, a cyclist who turns to the bus in bad weather, echoed that view. His current commute requires two connections. “This will be one set ride,” Gibson said. “It’ll drive super close to my office.”
The lane debate, though, may be secondary to a newer legal concern that has surfaced among some Burbank officials and community voices.
The Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act, known as Senate Bill 79, passed last October. The law ties increased residential density to transit stops, and critics argue that the BRT project’s environmental review did not account for what that means along the Burbank corridor.
Former Burbank mayor Emily Gable-Luddy put it plainly at the open house. “SB 79 specifically says that if there’s a BRT stop, the density around that BRT stop for a half mile will significantly exceed the densities that exist in our four cities today,” Gable-Luddy said, referring to Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, and Los Angeles. “That particular environmental impact that will occur as a result of each station stop has not been adequately studied and it wasn’t disclosed or discussed when this bus line was originally promised.”
Donahue raised the same concern, suggesting the city could face significant land-use changes along the route without residents having had a meaningful chance to weigh in on those implications when the project was first presented.
The City of Burbank has sent a letter to Metro requesting further review, a sign that local officials are not yet satisfied with the process even as construction planning moves forward.
The tension here is real but also familiar. Burbank sits at the intersection of two competing pressures: a region-wide push for transit infrastructure that reduces car dependency, and a city that has historically guarded its low-rise character and manageable traffic. The BRT project, if built as currently designed, touches both nerves at once.
Metro has not announced any changes to the Olive Avenue design. With construction targeting a summer start and design nearly complete, the window for Burbank to influence the outcome is narrowing. Whether the city’s formal request for further review carries enough weight to shift the timeline or the lane plan is the question local residents will be watching through spring.
