This could be a major transformation of the “car-only” city to the direction of a “Transit-Friendly” city!
Frankly, LA is quite an ugly city since it was built (or rather, RE-built) for cars, meaning – no decent pedestrian environment, safe places to hangout, or mass transit. Sidewalks are out-of-shape, with countless homeless folks, unattractive buildings and dirty streets. And – yes, buses will never attract people from cars!
But…
Streetcars, especially in Downtown, could change all that! Because – in addition to other numerous reasons why streetcars are always better than buses – is that launching streetcars always involves improving Landscaping and major Sidewalk enhancement, which is crucial for pedestrian environment!
Way to go, LA Streetcar!
I am looking forward to today’s meeting at the Bradbury!

Jarrett Walker posted a blog that got wide attention called “Streetcars: An Inconvenient Truth”

http://www.humantransit.org/2009/07/streetcars-an-inconvenient-truth.html

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As a follow-up, I’m throwing in Jarrett Walker’s follow-up on this. He discusses the difference between “mobility” and “access”.

http://www.humantransit.org/2009/07/what-i-meant-by-mobility-could-also-be-called-access.html

He references this interesting paper entitled “Traffic, Mobility and Accessability” by Todd Littman from the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute.

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Two paragraphs stand out for me:

- “As usual with transport planning concepts, Todd Litman has a friendly, readable paper carefully defining the mobility/access distinction. Mobility is how far you can go in a given time. Access is how many useful or valuable things you can do. If a new store opens up near your house, selling a particular product that you like, that doesn’t improve your mobility but it does improve your access. You can now get your product closer to home, so you don’t need as much mobility as you did before. Access is also improved by working at home, downloading music instead of going to a CD store, and moving in with your romantic partner. In other words, a lot of the work of access is simply about eliminating the need for transportation. Bravo.”

- “So my point remains: If you replace a bus with a streetcar, and make no unrelated changes, the map above doesn’t change at all. Your mobility (the area you can reach in a fixed time) doesn’t improve, but your access (the experiences, connections, transactions you can get to) doesn’t improve either, UNLESS — Unless the streetcar triggers redevelopment, so that solely because of the streetcar, new stuff gets built closer to you. That is the only sense in which a streetcar project improves access.”

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I still enthusiastically support the Streetcar Project on Broadway, but Jarret Walker’s blog is a great new find for me. Intelligent questions are asked and the comments are generally troll free and well-informed.

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thetransportpolitic.com/

I also like by Yonah Freemark. It’s a little more wonky. The High Speed Rail discussion is interesting too.

Streetcars do not necessarily move people any faster than buses, but they do attract riders who will not ride a bus. Call that classist, even call it “racist”, but it doesn’t make it any less true.

Streetcar trams are a good development or redevelopment tool. The future of Los Angeles will require several areas and transit corridors to densify and recentralize. Downtown is a great place to bring trams back to Los Angeles.

However, for mobility for not just downtown but the region as a whole we need the Regional Connector and that should ideally be fast tracked.