MetroRiderLA

This Earth Day, April 22nd, the Wilshire Center Business Improvement Corporation(WCBIC)in collaboration with The City of Los Angeles will close off four blocks of Wilshire Boulevard, from Western to Harvard, to show off the possibilities of “green urbanism” that Wilshire Center and other parts of Los Angeles offer. Although so far only Wilshire Center will be closed off the car, the Car-Free Day is a city-wide motion [PDF].

Starting at 10 AM and going until 5 PM on Tuesday, April 22 2008, Wilshire Center’s Earth Day Celebration will include:

• Live music performance (with acoustic set by Michael Franti)
• Bike raffle
• Reusable grocery bag give-away
• Tours of Metro Rapid Bus
• Organic food vendors
• Screening of “An Inconvenient Truth”

The WCBIC really seems committed to the eco-goals that led them to this event, with a whole section of their website dedicated to addressing ecological sustainability. They have a vision of Wilshire Center as a transit oriented urban village, where people can live work and play in a densely populated area without the need for a car. I hope more neighborhoods in Los Angeles follow Wilshire Center’s example and close of their streets on Earth Day… and if the message gets out, permanently.

From the LA Times:

The Federal Transit Administration announced today that it would award $23.3 million over the next two years to help fund bus lanes on a portion of Wilshire Boulevard through the heavily congested Westside.

The lanes will be used during the morning and evening rush hours and would stretch from the Santa Monica-Los Angeles boundary to Valencia Street, which is just west of downtown Los Angeles.

At which point our resident anti-rail ideologue promptly starts cheering. But wait, my dear ideologue friend…

The project does not include the part of Wilshire that traverses the city of Beverly Hills.

That funny noise you may hear is me banging my head on my desk. As basically anyone who has taken the 720 or 920 down Wilshire can tell you (and probably at a fairly high decibel level), at least as between the Pacific and Vermont, the part through Beverly Hills is by far the worst, by far the slowest, and, along with the 405, the source of the delays along Wilshire. Whether or not it’s the fault of BH or Century City is open for debate but irrelevant. The worst traffic along Wilshire is in BH, and if you don’t have them along for this project, then you’re wasting money. Bus-only lanes won’t solve the 405 on-ramp problem, and the lanes don’t go through BH, which is the 20-series’s choke point.

Metro, take your $3.7m, put it in the piggy bank, politely return Washington’s funds and either (a) shelve the project and build the subway, or (b) wait until you have Mayor Delshad along for the bus ride.