Let's encourage them to implement this more quickly by using the argument that it's going to be better for Santa Monica as a whole over the next few years.
E.g. Santa Monica has largely escaped the sub-prime housing correction of the past couple of years due to the demographic make-up of the Westside. The same is not likely to be true, however, of the Alt-A / Option ARM crisis that will occur as the bulk of these mortgages reset in 2010-2011 (see
http://doctorhousingbubble.com/, etc., for more info), as these mortgages were offered to a more affluent level of homebuyer.
In order to avoid major corrections and maintain home values, communities are going to have to take steps to make themselves more usable by everyone. If people can ride city streets with their children in safe bike lanes, or shop easily on foot or by bicycle, knowing that unsafe drivers will be ticketed and that the city's support for non-car travel is growing, they will be more likely to remain in that community, rather than fleeing for cheaper, more family friendly suburbs elsewhere. This keeps home prices up, property tax revenues flowing in, and the community generally pleasant to live in.
The alternative, in which cars remain dominant, and Santa Monica gets absorbed into the surrounding sprawl, home prices and the associated property tax plummet, and people begin to bail rather than riding it out, is an ugly one for cyclists, homeowners, and city government combined.
Cycling, it's good for the WHOLE community. That's the argument I think we should push.
The sooner these things are implemented, the sooner Santa Monica avoids becoming the Inland Empire part 2.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laland/2008/07/analyst-sees-gh.html#comments (OK, that's a tad overdramatic, but there are significant benefits to non-cyclists from implementing this plan, and some big costs for not implementing them.)
A few thousand dollars worth of sharrows/lane markers/signs/concrete/etc. will benefit the city by orders of magnitude more than the cost of the minor additional infrastructure.
