MetroRiderLA

• After a century long bender on oil, Americans are finally facing the inevitable hangover. Thank goodness I’m a teetotaler.
• People are driving less and less, which unfortunately means there’s a lot of people stranded in the suburbs.
• The Daily News reminds us that gas is only a small part of the overall costs of car ownership. And prices are going up.
• Charge market rate for street parking in Los Angeles?
• Private commuter rail may be coming to Seattle.

It seems there’s never enough parking.

A reader over at Curbed LA was stressing over the loss of his street parking spot and one particularly bitter commenter chimed in with this cheery response:

Nevermind that there is no public transit, and that parking is a basic amenity provided in abundance just about anywhere in America that’s not SF/Manhattan/L.A.

You have no rights, the city planners have spoken.

Of course, with the middle-class fleeing this city like rats from a sinking ship, one would think that making this place user friendly and offering MORE parking might be a priority, so that people will get out more and use more goods and services and bolster the economy. But it seems like our city government is hell-bent on driving all but the most masochistic individuals and companies out of state.

Which got me thinking. Parking most certainly is a basic amenity in this day and age, it clearly takes precedence over many other amenities like, say, public restrooms, water fountains, or benches. And it is very much offered in abundance, according to Donald Shoup there are at least 3 parking spaces for every vehicle in the United States. In Tippecanoe County, Indiana, according to Salon, there are 250,000 more parking spaces than there are vehicles. Let’s hope L.A.’s fleeing middle class heads to Tippecanoe, because they’ve clearly got a surplus of parking. Los Angeles, on the other hand, has got to be hurting for parking.

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• Hey Prius driver! You can’t park for free anymore! Haha!
• Local congress members join the fight to make the Foothill Gold Line extension a reality.
• Los Angeles drivers need more roads, not taxes on their gasoline to fund… ugh… alternative transportation.
• Riding the all-night bus to Long Beach, a tale for night owls.
• Zoning laws prevent cities from being walkable, which is great because walking is like, really really hard. [via CarFree USA]

• “We’ve widened and widened and widened . . . over and over again,” yet the Costa Mesa Freeway remains one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the country.
• Palmdale Airport and Metrolink connected by new Palmdale Flyer Express Bus, modeled after the FlyAway.
• Parking problems at Los Angeles Coliseum are nothing new.
• Sidestepping Metro to bring Green Line to LAX? Maybe, but funding still the main problem.
• Line 256 is on the chopping block and Councilman José Huizar hopes to save it.
• Los Angeles the third densest city in the United States.

It’s not uncommon to see expressions of bewilderment on the faces of others when you tell them you live a Transit Oriented Life, especially in Los Angeles. People will assume you have run into a major financial crisis, lost your vehicle to accident or crime, got caught driving under the influence, or that you’ve just gone batshit crazy. After reassuring them that everything’s okay and that you indeed came to the decision through personal choice and reasoned logic, not faulty wiring or Acts of God, your auto-addicted friend is likely to wonder what possible logical reasons there could be for you to make such a choice. Ben W. over at the Seattle Transit Blog faced this very question, and decided to put an end to the confusion by listing five benchmarks that set him on his way from car-dependent to car-free.

Here’s what did it for him:

1. Using transit to get to work
2. The ease that Google Transit provides when planning transit trips
3. Taking part in Seattle’s One Less Car Challenge.
4. Finding out about Flexcar (now Zipcar) and becoming a member.
5. Taking transit to someplace new.

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Bike racks in front of the L.A. Times Building in Downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of Payton Chung.

Many many square miles of Los Angeles are devoted to parking and securing the private automobile.  The options read like Bubba’s shrimp recipes from Forest Gump: there’s surface parking lots, underground parking garages, multi-story parking buildings, street side parking, valet parking, and parking lifts, to name a few.  Bicyclists aren’t so lucky.  Usually they get nothing.  But that’s not to say that there isn’t a wide variety of bike racks to choose from, it’s just that if there were as many parking lots are there are bike racks, auto drivers would have little to do.

Anyhow, over at the Cool Hunting blog, there’s an article the references a design competition to build a better method of parking bicycles in New York City. Inspired by this competition, the author lists five bike racks that represent the creme de la creme of bicycle parking as it stands today.  These include: the “Arlington”; the Velib from Paris; Cyc Bicrac by Madrax; the witty car shaped rack by Adrien Rovero;  and the Horsehoe Rack by Creative Pipe.  What’s great about all these racks is that not only are they functional, they’re also aesthetically pleasing and add to the built environment in pleasant way… a stark contrast to the urban wastelands that are parking lots.