HOLLYWOOD — The open-top vans that carry tourists past the movie palaces and up toward the Hollywood Sign have become a fixture of the boulevard, and, according to a stack of citation data before a city council committee this week, a persistent traffic problem at a handful of corners.
The committee took up a proposal to raise penalties on commercial tour vehicles that idle in traffic lanes, double-park to load passengers, or block bus stops and crosswalks along Hollywood Boulevard. Transportation officials presented data showing that citations against tour operators cluster tightly at a few chokepoints — near Highland Avenue, around Hollywood and Vine, and at the pickup zones outside several hotels — where vans stopping to load riders back up traffic behind them at peak hours.
The numbers gave both sides something to hold. Officials counted several hundred citations issued to tour vehicles in the area over the past year, evidence, they argued, of a real and repeated problem. Operators countered that a few hundred citations spread across dozens of vehicles making thousands of trips was, in fact, a sign that most drivers follow the rules, and that the fines already cost them plenty.
“We are not the villains here. We employ people, we pay the city for permits, and we move tourists who would otherwise be wandering into traffic on foot,” said Gareth Pallone, who operates a company that runs tour vans on the boulevard. “There is nowhere to legally load a van on some of these blocks. The city eliminated the loading zones and then writes us tickets for stopping where the loading zones used to be. Fix the curb, and the tickets go away.”
Councilmember Alicia Rendón, who represents much of the corridor, said the goal was not to drive the tour trade out but to keep it from seizing up the street. “The tour industry is part of how this neighborhood makes its living, and I have no interest in ending it,” Rendón said. “But a van cannot park across a crosswalk full of tourists because that is the convenient spot. If higher fines are what changes the calculation, we should look at higher fines. I would rather look at where the loading zones went.”
Residents and pedestrian-safety advocates who spoke at the hearing were less measured, describing near-misses at crosswalks where vans stop across the striping and force people on foot into the traffic lane to get around them.
The committee did not vote, sending the proposal back for more analysis, including a question several members raised: whether the answer is stiffer penalties, more legal loading zones, or some combination the data before them could not by itself settle. Transportation staff were asked to return with options and a map of where, exactly, a van is supposed to stop.
For now the vans keep running, and the citations keep landing at the same few corners, where the same lack of anywhere to pull over produces, week after week, the same tickets and the same backed-up block.