MetroRiderLA

[tags]los angeles, urban planning, bill fulton, joel kotkin[/tags]

Pasadena’s beautiful City Hall is one of many beautiful buildings in a city that arguably is the one to be emulated by urban planning. Find more images in Flickr’s Pasadena photo pool. 
Credit: Lush.i.ous via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

It only took a week for Bill Fulton to rebut Joel Kotkin in the same pages of the Los Angeles Times that L.A. is not “Manhattanizing,” but more, umm … “Pasadenaizing.” Kotkin chided Los Angeles for, gasp, too much density and it spawned a small dust storm of a meme.

Fulton, who maintains a blog on the California Policy & Development Report web site, is president of Ventura-based Solimar Research Group, a senior scholar at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development and most famously, author of such books as “The Reluctant Metropolis” and “California: Land and Legacy”. In this week’s op-ed, Fulton points out that L.A. has multiple centers stemming from a planning vision in the 1970s to disperse small high-density commercial centers throughout the city. And density clustering like barnacales on a ship outside of the city’s general plan had to do with developers subsidizing City Council races in exchange for building “outside of the box.” Even other municipalities are growing up with low-rise buildings and walkable communities, with Pasadena serving as the prototype.

In the past week, here’s how the Fulton vs. Kotkin meme evolved:

1. Kotkin: Why the rush to Manhattanize L.A.? (linked above)
2. Fulton: It’s time to de-Kotkinize the planning debate
3. Curbed LA was burning up with this feud
   • Joel Kotkin: What you’re for, I’m against
   • Joel Kotkin defenders UNITE!
   • Friday morning linkage on August 24, 2007 plugging to our site’s two cents.
4. Fulton in the L.A. Times: “We’re Pasadena-izing” (linked above)
5. LAist: How LA became, well, LA — A Partial Planning History

[tags]joel kotkin, urban planning, bill fulton, jane jacobs[/tags]

Joel, you are no Jane Jacobs.
Credit: Kotkin photo from Curbed LA, Jacobs photo from Wikipedia

Joel Kotkin had another article published in the Los Angeles Times, wagging his finger at us for daring to “Manhattanize” our city. And it has gotten the urban-leaning urban planning set hot under the collar.

Curbed LA, the tip-off for this piece, calls Kotkin “increasingly delusional” and further links to a California Policy & Development Report riposte by Bill Fulton, who says he’s finally had it with Kotkin. He also has little love from Clueless and Slightly Slack blogger and Trojan Peter McFerrin, whose also had choice words about Kotkin.

Kotkin’s pieces regularly draw heated criticism for essentially the same theme. And the criticism tends to be the same rebuttals, though the critics themselves flirt with emotionalism when they take on Kotkin.

But Kotkin, who regularly speaks and writes ex cathedra, so to speak, has to work an angle if he wants the access of mass media. Kotkin can make very sound, scholarly-grade arguments for his position. When descending from the ivory tower, Kotkin adopts the persona of the anti-Jane Jacobs. Kotkin believes, academically, that he should be the polymath and the voice of suburbia in the way Jacobs is linked inextricably with cities.

The difference is, though, that Kotkin approaches the role as an impressionist rather than an actor cast for a biographic portrait, complete with pathos. The impressionist has a far easier job: portraying a serviceable rendition of a subject where caricature is acceptable and often preferable. Kotkin understood Jacobs’s work and chose to emulate that, while ignoring how Jacobs got to be associated with her work.

(more…)

[tags]los angeles, wilshire boulevard, laist, bus rapid transit[/tags]

Remember the Metro Line 920 ride report from June? An afternoon trip took 75 minutes to go on Wilshire Boulevard between Santa Monica and Koreatown – with 40 minutes of that time just passing through Beverly Hills. Using the distance calculator on Google Maps and the methods outlined in “Another handy Google Maps tool for transit”, this trip on the fastest Wilshire bus traveled a blazing 10.18 miles per hour for the 12.72-mile journey. And the Beverly Hills leg — actually 2.22 miles between Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards  – averaged 3.33 miles per hour!

LAist finds the same conclusion. The headline says it all: “19 minutes to drive just one mile of Wilshire…”. It’s taken from a passage citing Metro research showing a drive on Wilshire near I-405 can take as long as 19 minutes to travel a mile, or about close to 3 miles per hour, a rolling idle.

LA Map Nerd posted a lengthy but excellent explanation on how the 405 ramps at Wilshire cause bottleneck ripple effects on the freeway and surface streets.

[tags]public transit, sacramento, sacramento rt, rt rider[/tags]

Transitarian.

Credit goes to the Sacramento equivalent of this site, RT Rider. The definition, as coined by the blogger:

A transitarian is so enamored with transit, so invested in the good that comes from leaving the car at home, that he takes light rail … and then walks nine blocks in the rain to get to an important appointment … . [Edited to remove local references.]

A transitarian, therefore, often resembles a drowned rat, his jacket soaked through, his slacks wet from midthigh down to his squishy-wet shoes. But inside, beneath that wet exterior, is a proud transitarian … .

So far, the meme has stayed local within Sacramento, spread by the efforts of a kindred spirit to the RT Rider site, RT Driver. Although, Blogger users who dig reading profiles can find the original article via a link on John’s (RT Rider blogger) short bio.

There’s more than a fair share of transitarians in L.A., too. Many of them are probably reading this site as we speak.

[tags]washington dc, wmata, dcist, john catoe[/tags]

A Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority subway station.
Credit: dbking via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

One of Angelenos’ many gripes about Metro Rail is that the trains stop running before last call. Now train riders in the nation’s capital may share in our angst. WMATA is planning to cut weekend owl train service and replace service with buses.

Something else L.A. and D.C. share in common: transit leadership. John Catoe, WMATA’s CEO, returned to his native Washington D.C. after forging his career in Southern California transit agencies. He was Metro’s number two man, and prior to that, he was general manager of Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus and operations director at Orange County Transportation Authority.

It’s not that Catoe thinks what’s good enough for the L.A. goose is fit for the D.C. gander. WMATA is facing its own financial shortfall, buses might be cheaper to operate for light late-night crowds, and the maintenance department can use the downtime to repair trains and stations.

On DCist — LAist’s sister site — announcement of the cuts drew a considerable amount of commentary. Also, a poll on the site drew 970 responses, and only 6 percent chose taking the replacement buses. Thirty-five percent said they would consider driving or having a friend take them home after a night at the pub.

[tags]los angeles, google maps, fade in[/tags]

Click on map to go to a Google Map of a proposed Olive Line, looping through the San Fernando Valley via Ventura Boulevard and Sherman Way.

Google Maps makes transit geeks of Fade In. It proposes the Metro Olive Line, a loop across the San Fernando Valley via Ventura Boulevard and Sherman Way.

It would bookend the Orange Line, for which the writer has little love:

Apparently, a few homeowners decided long ago that buses were the answer to the public transit question for the SFV. Fast forward to 2007, and the Orange Line “transitway”delivers passengers along some obscure route through the Valley at break-neck speeds of….. 14 mph.

The inspiration for the Olive Line came from Damien Goodmon’s Get L.A. Moving.