The Chandler Bikeway Isn't Getting a Straight Extension. Here's the Actual Route.

Most weekday mornings, the Chandler Bikeway is doing exactly what it's always done. A retiree walks a leashed dog past the murals near Mariposa Street. A couple of e-bike commuters glide toward the North Hollywood B Line station. Someone stops on one of the benches lining the corridor to check a phone, unbothered, because this stretch of Burbank has never really been about speed. It runs down the median of Chandler Boulevard on what used to be Southern Pacific's Burbank Branch railroad track, and it has spent decades being the kind of path locals use without thinking about it.

That's about to change, and not in the way most people who use the path every day probably assume.

For twenty years, Burbank has talked about extending the Chandler Bikeway east from its current dead end at Mariposa Street to the Downtown Burbank Metrolink station. Last November, the city council finally voted to move it forward, 4 to 1. If you heard about that vote and pictured the bikeway simply continuing straight down Chandler in a clean line to the station, you pictured the wrong project. The real route does something stranger, and the reason why explains more about how this corridor actually works than any press release does.

The Turn Nobody Expected

At the November 18 council meeting, Councilmember Chris Rizzotti said out loud what a lot of Chandler regulars probably assume: that the extension would run east along Chandler Boulevard until it hit the existing bikeway on Front Street, which connects to the downtown station. Instead, the approved alignment makes a right turn onto North Victory Boulevard, then a left onto West Cypress Avenue, working through city streets rather than a dedicated rail bed the whole way.

The reason traces back to the rail line itself. David Kriske, the city's assistant community development director for transportation, told the council his team had worked through a long list of alternatives before landing on this one, including relocating the rail spur that still sits on Chandler past Mariposa. Union Pacific still holds that stretch of track. It's not available to convert into a bike path the way the western section was decades ago, and moving it turned out to be the kind of expensive, impractical option that gets crossed off a list rather than funded. So instead of a straight shot, the path has to route around active freight infrastructure using city streets, which is a very different design problem than paving over an already-empty rail corridor.

That single fact, an active Union Pacific line still occupying part of Chandler Boulevard, is why the extension bends the way it does. It's also why the project comes with tradeoffs the original rail-trail sections never had to make.

What Actually Disappears on Cypress

Rerouting a protected bikeway onto working streets means giving up something those streets are currently used for, and in this case that something is parking. The Cypress Avenue segment alone is expected to remove more than 50 parking spaces, with the corner of Cypress and Varney Street among the areas likely to lose curb space entirely.

Nobody on the council spoke against the project outright. Rizzotti still voted no, and Councilmember Zizette Mullins voted yes while echoing his concern that businesses along the route hadn't been looped in early enough. Rizzotti put it directly during the meeting:

"We haven't heard from the majority of those people until it's going to be too late and they're going to come here and say, 'What the heck happened?'"

Vice Mayor Tamala Takahashi, who described herself as an avid biker, saw the same tradeoff and landed somewhere else entirely, calling the current crossing at Victory a genuine hazard and the new alignment about as good an outcome as the city was going to get given the constraints.

Both things are true at once. The rerouted path solves a real safety gap at Victory Boulevard. It also means a specific set of Cypress Avenue and Varney Street parking spots that exist today won't exist once construction wraps.

The Timeline, In Plain Terms

Here's where things actually stand, based on what the city and its project manager have said publicly:

• November 18, 2025: Council approved design plans for the extension on a 4-1 vote.
• Mid-2026: Design work was targeted to wrap around now, this summer, according to Kriske's timeline given to the council.
• January 2027: Tentative start date for the 18-month construction phase.
• End of 2028: Target completion for the full 0.6-mile extension.

The project carries a $3.3 million budget, funded through a Metro and Caltrans federal grant along with Measure R Highway Operations Funds, according to the city's own project page. Kriske was candid with the council that the number might not hold. He said flatly that the city could come up short and have to return for additional transportation funding before construction wraps.

If you walk or ride Chandler today, none of this touches your routine yet. The path still ends at Mariposa the same way it has for years. But if you're the kind of resident who plans a Saturday ride around this corridor, January 2027 is the date to keep in the back of your head, because that's when Cypress Avenue construction starts changing what's available on the street.

The Other End Is Already Changing

While Burbank's extension sits in design, the Los Angeles side of the same path has quietly moved faster. The Chandler path runs through two cities, and the section east of the North Hollywood Metro station has had informal, unofficial gaps in its fencing for years, the kind neighbors use anyway even though they weren't built for it. City of Los Angeles crews, working under successive council offices, have spent the past couple of years formalizing those gaps into concrete, wheelchair-accessible ramps under a project called the Chandler Bicycle Path and Recreational Area Project.

As of February 2026, new ramps were finished at Satsuma Avenue and Cartwright Avenue, with a third access point at Strohm Avenue underway.

That's a smaller, cheaper project than Burbank's extension, and it shows in how much faster it moved. No parking to negotiate, no active freight line to route around, just concrete ramps replacing informal dirt cuts in a fence. It's a useful contrast for anyone trying to understand why identical-sounding "bikeway improvement" headlines can mean wildly different timelines depending on which side of the municipal line they're describing.

What This Means If You Use the Path Today

Nothing about your daily walk or ride changes this year. The murals are still there. The benches are still there. Dog walkers, joggers, and families still have the run of the median between Mariposa and the North Hollywood station, and that's not going anywhere before construction actually starts.

What does change is the mental map you should be keeping for 2027 and beyond. The Cypress Avenue corridor is going to lose curb parking permanently once construction begins, and if you currently park along Varney Street near that intersection, that's the specific block to watch for updates as the design phase closes out. The eventual payoff, a protected connection all the way to the Downtown Burbank Metrolink station instead of a path that just stops at Mariposa, is a real upgrade for anyone who bikes to the train rather than driving. It's just arriving by a more complicated route than the one most people assumed, for a reason that has more to do with a freight easement than with city planning preferences.

That's the version of this project worth knowing if you live along it, not the press-release version. The path you use every day is about to get more useful and more disruptive at the same time, and both of those things trace back to the same stretch of track Union Pacific never gave up.

If you're weighing what infrastructure changes like this actually mean for a home's daily livability along the Chandler corridor or elsewhere in Burbank, Craig Strong has spent years tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood-level detail. Reach out for a confidential market consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.