MetroRiderLA

At any rate. The New York Times reports a great real estate deal in NYC: Look what you can get for merely $225,000:

A parking space.

All of this talk about transit-oriented development and NIMBY obstructionists and everything else, and at the end of the day, this article explains why what should be patently obvious to basically everyone in the Western Hemisphere: LA is not New York.

We have two separate issues, which often mistakenly get conflated into one.

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[tags]jane jacobs, urban planning[/tags]

 
Credit: Wikipedia

It was a year ago today that Jane Jacobs, a community activist who unintentionally became an authority on urban planning and even anthropologist of cities, passed away in her adopted home of Toronto.

She rose to prominence by fighting a proposed expressway in Manhattan, New York. She was never a professional planner, but studied a variety of courses in her life and brought them to her theories on the social and economic origins and roles of cities. Her closeness to communities, and in turn cities, led her to theorize later on the economics of cities. She had also argued that cities were able to grow and thrive based on “import replacement,” adding productive value to goods and services and spawning alternative value-added markets. She went as far as to say that cities, not nations, are the sources of economic wealth.

Jacobs’s Wikipedia entry contains links to interviews she gave and synopses of some books she has authored. She has 659,000 entries when her name is entered on Google. She’s granted several interviews, and her thoughts have made it impossible for any political movement to label Jacobs as their own. Her insights are nothing short of fascinating.

Anyone picked up that “Green Line Destinations” brochure yet? I grabbed one after work a couple days ago because, sadly, I needed a good laugh. It’s great to know that I can take over an hour to get to a McDonalds or an El Pollo Loco, if I’m ever feeling deprived and in need of a pleasure tour along the Century Freeway.

What do people know of the green line? My understanding is that the travel industry lobby (e.g. taxi drivers, LAX garages, area hotels) advocated for the green line to stay out LAX, in order to keep it from being easy to get out of the area. So that makes that part of the Green Line kind of useless. But my further understanding is that, when it was built, there was a hope that the aerospace industry would be a huge employer on the western edge, and that folks would commute from the eastern edge of it, and thus create independent demand for the line. I’ve also heard rumors that the BRU advocated for the line, which would explain why it’s the runt of the MTA litter.

But instead, the military-industrial complex collapsed under its own weight after the Cold War, and now I have trouble seeing the use for it. It follows the freeway medians, which isn’t exactly the most comfortable way to wait for a train, Hollywood/Vine it ain’t. Frankly, I fail to grasp why we didn’t simply split the blue line into two branches, west and east, so that you could at least get a one-seat ride to LAX and Norwalk. A flying junction at Imperial/Wilmington would be annoying but not impossible, and by the time you’re building a flying junction, you could put in switches that would allow the Norwalk-Redondo service that currently exists. Sort of like the NY/NJ PATH, where at peak hours you can go from almost any station, to almost any station, in a single ride.

So, any thoughts on the green line in its current state?

Photo by Peter Ehrlich, hosted by the NYC Subway fan site.

[tags]los angeles, saving la conference, brady westwater[/tags]

 
The historic Los Angeles Theatre downtown hosts a sure-to-be history-making event
Credit: Jimw via Flickr (license)

From what?

Better yet, why?

Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council member and L.A. Cowboy Brady Westwater will tell you:

If you want to save Los Angeles’ history, preserve the historic character of your neighborhood, discover more about your ethnic or cultural roots or find out more about the history of your family – you need to attend the first annual SAVING LOS ANGELES Conference.

It happens Sunday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., at the Los Angeles Theatre, 615 S. Broadway, in downtown Los Angeles. 

Westwater started up a separate web site, Saving L.A., for the event. It has a list of city officials scheduled to attend. Los Angeles Transportation Headlines even gives it its own entry apart from other news items, which only emphasizes its importance.

Connecting transit service: Metro Red/Purple Line and a short walk from every local and express bus line serving downtown Los Angeles; LADOT  DASH downtown lines Downtown Discovery, E and F; Foothill Transit Silver Streak (first day of service); Gardena Municipal Bus Line 1; and Montebello Bus Line 40 (east and west).

Steve Lopez’s column in the Los Angeles Times recently wrote a piece about mega-civil engineering contractor Tutor-Saliba.

Tutor-Saliba is one of the most prominent construction firms in the world, and it is responsible (or irresponsible) in building our Metro Rail system, as well as other Southern Projects including Coliseum restoration, LAX, water treatment, UCLA’s Santa Monica and Westwood hospitals, and the San Diego Convention Center.

For a firm with the ability to win so many nine-plus-digit contracts, Tutor-Saliba almost always gets into trouble with its clients.

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Over at Blogdowntown, the ever inquisitive Eric discovered that the MTA was created in 1952 in order to construct a monorail from the Valley to Long Beach. Matt Barrett, the Metro Librarian (who hooked me up with some great links to some MetroMovies you’ll be viewing the in future), chimed in to clarify some facts about the beginnings of the MTA:

“The first MTA was formed by the State in 1951 for the expressed purpose of STUDYING, not constructing, a monorail line from Long Beach to Panorama City. That first MTA failed at public relations when the monorail lobby moved in (like the MagLevers are doing now) and offered to build systems for “free” in exchange for the next 40 years of farebox revenues…”

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