Nothing clarifies a sense of place like a long-distance run. One recent Sunday, I ran 14 miles. More than two hours of pounding the pavement is plenty of time to take in our urban landscape and city streets. In the course of that run, the principle of complete streets came home to me in a new way.

Complete streets are roads designed and operated with multiple users in mind. Who are those users? Pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, motorists and, yes, runners. Incomplete streets, by contrast, show a design bias for cars alone. They make walking, bicycling and taking public transportation inconvenient, unattractive and sometimes unsafe.

The concept took center stage at a recent forum by the Southern California Planning Congress, which I attended, along with a few dozen small-business people and urban planning specialists. The forum highlighted the Figueroa Corridor, due to become downtown L.A.’s first complete street after an ambitious $20 million multimodal streetscape project. I expect the project to stimulate the downtown economy, increasing foot and bike traffic as well as giving a boost to restaurants and other businesses. I hope future routes of the L.A. Marathon include it.

Distance running offers expansive and intimate views of our neighborhoods in ways that routine drives down the same routes rarely produce.

Strikingly apparent are the virtues of some places and the sore spots of others. Running came late for me, in my late 20s, when I was working in housing finance for the federal government in Washington. I decided to run the Marine Corp Marathon as part of an AIDS fundraising drive. I finished. That’s all I can say.

When I returned home to Los Angeles, running became an important part of my reconnection with the city. Now, six L.A. Marathons later, and after a two-year hiatus due to my run for state Assembly in 2012, I’m back at it.

Besides the regular annoyances – barking dogs, cramping muscles, unyielding motorists – what is reassuringly familiar is that feeling of being both observer and actor on the streetscape.

There’s the dark, intimidating underpass along Fletcher Drive where any passerby endures a 4-foot-wide sidewalk, three of which are covered in pigeon droppings on the east side. The occasional pigeon carcass serves as a visual aid. Who walks here? Kids getting to and from school? Shoppers going back and forth from a store? As I wonder about this and the public health issues at stake, I get a distinct feeling it is not safe for me to be here. Cars whiz by at 50 miles an hour. Pedestrians and runners are truly not welcome. But the presence of the sidewalk indicates otherwise.

Onward I charge.

Then I emerge. I cross over the Los Angeles River into Silver Lake and, literally, greener pastures.

Welcoming space

After a right turn off Glendale Boulevard, the Silver Lake Meadow unfolds before me with the reservoir as backdrop. Carefully designed and lushly landscaped, it’s nothing short of glorious. The space is welcoming, and not just for me. Dog walkers, bicyclists, kids on scooters, parents and grandparents with strollers, families picnicking, and people stretching and jogging are all out enjoying the open space. The nearby stretch of Silver Lake Boulevard is active and vibrant with people window-shopping and patronizing local businesses. It clearly invites everyone, not just motorists.

I hit Sunset Boulevard, among the most renowned of urban thoroughfares anywhere in the Southland. The street scene is dynamic, a little chaotic.

Buses loom large – some roaring, some gliding past. Movement is constant: Pedestrians zip in and out of storefronts, procuring services from hair styling to carryout seafood. Bikes stream past, in and outside of designated lanes. Litter dots the street and discarded belongings loom curbside. But the street is accommodating multiple users in various modes of transportation.

I keep going. My midway point is Echo Park Lake. I marvel at this redone park with its beautiful fountain in the middle of the lake – a public works project that beautifies and engages, and finally got done. I think about how long it took for this persevering project to be completed. Back in 2005, I was serving on a city parks oversight committee that allocated Proposition K dollars for this project. That memory makes the lesson clear: It requires time and a lot of money in addition to a fair share of patience to achieve a human-scale spectacle with wow factor.

In an era of tight budgets, improving our quality of life and our right-of-ways with complete streets is possible if we share in the vision and make it a priority.

Turning around, I head back seven more miles to my own community of Rock. As I run on the sidewalk, I see the buffered bike lanes that mark a step in the right direction of complete streets. Now, bicyclists don’t have to compete with cars quite as doggedly, or dangerously, for use of public pavement. This took years of consultation and coalition-building to accomplish.

I finally finish, exhausted, and unable to contemplate how I could possibly run even one more mile. But I know that in a day or two I will feel differently. I will confront the exertion and its promise of exhilarating reward once again. And I will take up the dual challenge of all those miles of pavement. There is running them. There is also the potential to improve them, to complete our streets.

Luis López is a non-profit health care director. He also is a former Los Angeles city planning commissioner and now is a board member of the Eagle Rock Association.