LOS ANGELES — A City Council committee deadlocked Thursday over a plan to install protected bike lanes along a mile of Vine Street, sending one of Hollywood’s most contested street-safety projects back for further study and leaving both cyclists and merchants claiming the momentum.

The proposal, part of the city’s long-delayed mobility plan, would convert Vine between Sunset Boulevard and Franklin Avenue from four travel lanes to three, adding curb-protected bike lanes in each direction and removing roughly ninety metered parking spaces. Supporters call it a modest fix on a corridor with a documented string of injury collisions. Opponents call it a solution in search of a cyclist.

“I have watched three people get hit on that stretch in two years, and I have filed the reports,” said Councilmember Alicia Rendón, whose district includes the corridor and who introduced the measure. “We can keep studying it, or we can stop pretending the current design is neutral. It isn’t. It’s dangerous by default.”

Councilmember Whit Bogardus, who represents a neighboring district and voted to hold the item, said he supported bike safety “in the abstract” but could not endorse pulling parking “from small businesses that are barely hanging on after the pandemic and the strikes.”

The hearing room filled with the two familiar camps: cyclists in helmets clipped to backpacks, and merchants who had closed shops midday to speak. Nadia Constantino, who runs a florist near Vine and De Longpre, told the committee that her delivery drivers already circle for parking and that “a flower is not a thing you carry half a mile in July.” A few chairs away, bike commuter Emile Duffy held up a photograph of his bent front wheel and said he had “already paid the toll this street charges.”

City transportation engineers projected the redesign would add between forty and ninety seconds to a peak-hour drive along the mile while cutting injury collisions by an estimated third — figures both sides quoted, in opposite directions, as vindication. The engineers also noted that Vine carries fewer vehicles per day than it did a decade ago, a point Rendón pressed and Bogardus disputed.

Much of the two-hour hearing turned on parking mitigation. Staff floated a shared valet program, a nearby structure with underused evening capacity, and a loading-zone plan for delivery vehicles. Merchants were unconvinced. “Every one of those ideas asks my customer to do more work to give me money,” Constantino said.

The committee split 2 to 2, an outcome that under its rules holds the measure rather than killing it. Staff were directed to return within sixty days with a revised parking plan and updated collision data. Rendón, leaving the chamber, said she would bring it back “in sixty days, and sixty after that if I have to.”

Outside, the two camps drifted toward the same parking structure, where, by long civic tradition, everyone had trouble finding a space.