[Damien]

It would be nice if the La Brea/Wilshire station (Miracle Mile) really did have a heavy art deco influence.

[cookiejarvis]

Thanks Damien, that's a bit more what I'm envisioning.

[POLA]

http://mta.net/images/rail_info-1.gif

[KarLarRec1]

Shouldn't the bubble for Wilshire/Vermont be demoted to a smaller bubble (like Westlake/McArthur Park, Pershing Square, and Civic Center) and be un-bolded now that it is just another station where the Purple Line and the Red Line share stations?

[Wright Concept]

^No, because folks can technically transfer from the North Hollywood Line to the Wilshire/Western Line.

[KarLarRec1]

Hmm good point. I still don't like it though. :)

[Wright Concept]

You'll like it once the Purple Line is extended past the Wiltern Theater.

[Easy]

They also show a transfer to the bus route at Pico Station when the buses in reality only come within a block or two of the station. There aren't even any signs at the station or bus stops that mention the transfer. I think that there may be an announcement on the bus, but I can't recall for sure. I'm sure that there isn't an announcement for the bus line on blue line trains.

The map also makes it looks like the bus line ends at 7th/metro when, in fact the buses travel all the way to Union Station. I guess the reason is that when the buses are off the freeway they are no longer express (no $1 surcharge). Still it doesn't make sense to just ignore a significant portion of their route. It might be helpful for people using the system to know that they could catch the same bus from Union Station without having to take the red and blue lines back to Pico.

[Wright Concept]

They also show a transfer to the bus route at Pico Station when the buses in reality only come within a block or two of the station. There aren't even any signs at the station or bus stops that mention the transfer. I think that there may be an announcement on the bus, but I can't recall for sure. I'm sure that there isn't an announcement for the bus line on blue line trains.

The map also makes it looks like the bus line ends at 7th/metro when, in fact the buses travel all the way to Union Station. I guess the reason is that when the buses are off the freeway they are no longer express (no $1 surcharge). Still it doesn't make sense to just ignore a significant portion of their route. It might be helpful for people using the system to know that they could catch the same bus from Union Station without having to take the red and blue lines back to Pico.

While you're at it might as well extend the Silver Line past it's Union Station stop and show it going to at least 7th St. But here's an insider secret. They are planning on cutting the Harbor Transitway buses to Financial District, and shortening El Monte Busway buses to at least Civic Center potentially running through with the Harbor Express buses.

[RAlossi]

That's really interesting.. I think Metro should invest some money into the Bronze Line like they did with the Orange Line and get more signage, better connections, and some more advertising. Same with the Silver Line. Interesting.

[Wright Concept]

They just upgraded their signage and stations on the Silver Line. The Bronze line is almost a lost cause.

[SunMonTueWedThuFriSa]

are they gonna put up new signs for the "bronze" line or is it going to remain 445, 446 or wahtever it is. i had a difficulty finding the harbor transitway when i wanted to ride it for the first time. mind you, it was a spur of the moment thing and the street maps and signage weren't too helpful.

[solongfullerton]

the easist place to catch the bus from the 7th Metro station is at Flower/7th right across the street from the portal that goes to the blue line platform. The 450x is the most direct route on the transit way, with no stops between 7th Metro and the Green Line station.

[Wright Concept]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-smartcard28dec28,1,1608782,full.story?coll=la-headlines-california

MTA tests what it hopes will be easy ticket to ride
Prepaid 'smart cards' would provide access to buses and trains from 11 regional agencies.
By Jean Guccione
Times Staff Writer

December 28, 2006

Imagine getting on a bus without having to fumble for exact change or wait behind somebody trying to stuff crumpled dollar bills into the fare box. Consider transferring from the subway onto a bus operated by the city of Long Beach or another municipal transit agency using the same prepaid pass.

For Wally Shidler, the fantasy has begun: He simply taps his new transit "smart card" every time he boards the Blue Line or gets on a Metro bus.

With a flick of his wrist, transit officials can track his every move: His 8:11 a.m. departure on board a bus near his Walnut Park home, his transfer 17 minutes later onto the Blue Line, his 8:47 a.m. arrival at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles.

"Why have all the hassle? If I want to go someplace, I just hop on the bus and go," said Shidler, 68, a lifelong transit rider.

He is one of about 50 volunteers testing the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's new universal fare system. The accompanying Transit Access Pass cards should be widely available within the next two years.

At that time, transit users will be able to load prepaid products, such as student passes, onto their TAP cards over the phone, on the Internet or in person. They also will be able to add separate credit to the cards that can be used, like gift cards, for transfers and rides on other transit agency buses.

Passengers can designate amounts to be automatically deducted each month from a bank account or regularly charged to a credit card, or they can authorize transactions whenever they want to reload their cards.

Transit officials are gradually introducing the cards, each embedded with a computer chip, into widespread circulation. UCLA got the first batch in the fall.

"We want to be absolutely certain that we have completely tested the veracity and reliability of that equipment," said Jane Matsumoto, the MTA's project manager. The agency, also known as Metro, collected $280 million in fares last year.

Signs of the new system are already evident. Computerized fare boxes have been installed on all 2,500 Metro buses. Stand-alone card validators in subway and light-rail stations advise riders to "TAP here." And new ticket vending machines allow passengers to buy one-way tickets and day passes.

When completed, the regional transit pass — similar to those used in Washington, D.C., Chicago and the Bay Area — will help create the seamless system envisioned by transit officials a decade ago. So far, the MTA has budgeted more than $165 million for equipment and this summer signed a $32-million contract to provide customer service.

Computerized card readers should reduce delays because each ticket will no longer have to be inspected. All bus drivers will have to do is listen for a beep from the fare box to know a pass is valid.

"In milliseconds, it recognizes you, beeps and you move on," said Jeffrey Klompus, a project consultant.

Each TAP transaction also helps document rider trends, particularly transfers within the system. Transit officials say they will study the data to reroute buses to better serve passengers.

Morning travel patterns of Gold Line passengers, for example, might be examined to determine how riders get from Union Station to their jobs. Are they transferring onto particular buses? Are those buses going where riders need to go?

Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, an MTA board member, has pushed for the new technology for 13 years.

She believes installation of the TAP system will help transit officials recover millions of dollars in ticket revenue now lost to fraud and, in some cases, reduce customer fares.

"There is a lot of flexibility in terms of fare structure," she said.

Older riders, for example, can be offered a bigger discount if they travel during off-peak hours. The cost of transfers between transit agencies also can be reduced, she said.

As for fraud, under the new system, lost or stolen cards can be instantly invalidated. Fewer paper tickets will make illegal duplication and sales less lucrative. And workers who hand off employer-paid bus passes to others during nonbusiness hours or in unauthorized locations can be easily caught.

A few weeks ago, 1,000 UCLA students, professors and staff members became the first paying customers to get TAP cards. (The MTA's 10,000 employees, who already ride for free, have been testing the system for months.)

UCLA bought the passes — valid for one school quarter — in bulk. For security, each is emblazoned with a photo from the user's school identification card.

Students "thought the pass was really high-tech and cool," said Jane Gould, a UCLA transportation planner. Next quarter, riders will be encouraged to keep the same plastic cards and reload them through the university's transportation office.

Over the next several months, about 30 businesses that offer transit passes to employees will get TAP cards. Three municipal operators, in Culver City, Santa Clarita and Torrance, also will begin testing the card-readers on board their buses.

In all, 11 regional bus agencies will buy the equipment and honor the cards. Cash and paper tickets for casual transit riders will still be accepted.

New fare boxes will be installed in buses in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Norwalk, Montebello, Gardena, the Antelope Valley and the Foothill area within the next two years.

Meanwhile, Shidler continues to track his every TAP card transaction in a little notebook he keeps in his shirt pocket. Twice a month, transit officials generate a computerized report documenting his every move on the transit system.

He compares the two, searching for discrepancies. "They are pretty much getting the bugs out of it," he said. "One time they had me somewhere I wasn't."

That was a few months ago.

"It's getting better," Shidler said, noting that he doesn't care that the transit agency knows so much about his daily outings.

But if other passengers prefer a less personal relationship with their transit agency, they can pay cash for the card and decline to tell agency officials who they are.

"If you don't register the card, you are just a number," Shidler said, predicting the system might generate too much information — even for transit officials eager to learn from it.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
jean.guccione@latimes.com

[Westsidelife]

Here's a video from Youtube of Villaraigosa taking the Red Line from Hollywood/Highland to Downtown LA. Good to see that he himself is setting an example for everyone else, especially after that stupid article from the Daily News about him being a hypocrite.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjs0VvQtwso

[Wright Concept]

^ Actually it was the LA Times.

[Wright Concept]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez7jan07,1,503763,full.column

STEVE LOPEZ / POINTS WEST
Going nowhere on the Westside
Steve Lopez
Points West

January 7, 2007

There's been no meeting, no memo, no poll. But everyone who lives on the Westside of Los Angeles or does business there has independently arrived at the same conclusion:

Traffic has gotten so predictably, maddeningly, curse-the-gods miserable that only a fool would attempt to head east after 3 p.m. on a weekday.

Some war-weary traffic veterans say even that's too late.

"Three o'clock is not a sweet spot anymore," insists Kevin Sheehy, an attorney who lives in Santa Monica and has found that all the alternate routes he used to take as he zigzagged east are now bottled up. "It's closer to 2 o'clock."

L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has told his secretary to schedule nothing for him west of the 405 unless he can wrap things up by 2:30 p.m. He'll schedule later events, but only if they end after 8 p.m., when traffic has lifted. And, of course, he avoids heading from east to west in the morning if he can help it because that can be just as bad, with thousands of people commuting to jobs in Santa Monica and thereabouts.

"There is no part of Los Angeles County where it takes such a long time to go such a short distance," says Yaroslavsky, who's on the road more than most people. "I've several times been stuck in a traffic jam that is just total, absolute gridlock, where it doesn't move. You're in the same place for 10 minutes at a time."

The trip that sent Yaroslavsky over the edge was in October. After attending an event on Cloverfield Boulevard near Michigan Avenue in Santa Monica, he headed east at 6:30 p.m., expecting to be on time for a 7:30 Beverly Hills appointment. But by 7:20, he was just getting to the 405.

"I never even made it to the Beverly Hills event, so I went home to Fairfax. It took one hour and 41 minutes from Cloverfield to Beverly and La Brea."

It was only about 11 miles, Yaroslavsky said. He could have jogged the distance in less time.

Now Yaroslavsky has asked a traffic engineer to investigate the possibility of turning Olympic and Pico boulevards into one-way thoroughfares.

In the meantime, Westside traffic has become the city's all-purpose excuse.

Late for work? Westside traffic.

Marriage on the rocks? Westside traffic.

Lost 10 years of your life? Westside traffic.

Yaroslavsky said it's a big topic at downtown cultural institutions, where they're wondering if traffic combat fatigue is keeping Westsiders from filling up seats at music, dance and theater events.

Yaroslavsky recalled that in the late 1990s, Los Angeles philanthropist Richard Colburn declined a request for a donation to Disney Hall, arguing that a concert hall ought to be on the Westside. That's where the subscriber base would be, he reasoned, and why would beach dwellers want to fight the traffic to get downtown, of all places?

"We do now and again see some empty seats, but there isn't anything in terms of research that could tell you why," said Catherine Babcock of the Music Center, whose companies include the Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles Master Chorale, L.A. Opera and Los Angeles Philharmonic.

She said attendance held steady at about 1.2 million each of the last two seasons and figures aren't available yet for the current season. When seats are empty, she said, the reason could be illness, scheduling conflicts and many other things besides traffic.

No doubt. But Sheehy, the attorney with the never-after-2 p.m. rule on eastern commutes, told me he and his wife subscribed to the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood several years ago, in part because the trips to downtown arts and entertainment events had become such a nightmare.

And patrons at Wednesday night's chamber music performance at Disney Hall — which had 160 no-shows (people who bought tickets but didn't attend) — told me Westside bottlenecks are making it harder to justify the trek. David Nimmer, who lives in Beverly Hills, said he recently picked up his mother in Westwood at 6 p.m. and they missed a 7:30 curtain for the L.A. Opera.

"It's definitely something I think about all the time," said his friend Robert Smith, who lives at Pico and Robertson boulevards and is reconsidering his commitment as a volunteer at a kosher food bank near downtown. "You have to be there at 6 o'clock, and you just can't go east after 4 in the afternoon."

Carol Schatz of the Central City Assn., which has helped lead the downtown renaissance, would like to see public officials get to work on the traffic problem. Especially since the Grand Avenue and L.A. Live projects will rely on lots more people making their way downtown.

Schatz left her home in Benedict Canyon at 5 p.m. on a Wednesday for a Rolling Stones concert at Dodger Stadium. She and her husband, Fred, took Beverly to Silver Lake Boulevard to Sunset and got to their seats at 7 p.m.

"If I have a show to do at KCET at 6 p.m.," Brentwood resident and former Mayor Richard Riordan said of the public TV station in Los Feliz, "to get there from my house is probably an hour and a half. It should be a 30-minute drive."

As maddening as such tales are, none of this happened by accident. It was created by decades of horrendous planning, including a lack of mixed-income housing near job centers and transportation. As the number of Westside jobs exploded, the traditional traffic flow shifted, Yaroslavsky said. A lot of the new people working on the Westside couldn't afford to live there, and so you had more cars heading from east to west in the morning rather than from west to east.

There's also been a mind-boggling lack of interagency cooperation, under-investment in public transit, overpopulation and an unshakable preference for sitting alone in our cars and fuming at all the other drivers inconsiderate enough to be on the same road.

It didn't help that Westside congressman Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) put the kibosh on Red Line tunneling two decades ago, even as more people were commuting to jobs by the beach. Or that in 1998, Yaroslavsky pushed a ban on the use of sales tax money for more subway digging. But in Yaroslavsky's defense, the public was fed up with corruption, accidents and other disasters that came at a cost of roughly $300 million a mile.

Now Waxman has changed his mind, although he hasn't yet produced the money to get the Red Line back under construction. A light-rail line along Exposition Boulevard is also part of the long-term plan.

I called Jaime de la Vega, Los Angeles deputy mayor for transportation, to see what he says about it all and to ask if he's gotten rid of his Hummer yet. He didn't call back. I know it's a free country, but we have to hope the transit boss in a city with legendary smog and traffic is no longer tooling around town in a goofball buggy the size of a tank.

L.A. City Councilman Bill Rosendahl tells me he's optimistic that with a Brentwood resident as governor, a bond measure that will funnel cash into Southern California transit and a mayor who was in Washington last week to start pumping the new Democratic power brokers in Congress, the big-ticket projects have a fighting chance.

But like Yaroslavsky, he says we can't wait.

"I know that everybody on the Westside, from rich to poor and everything in between, is so fed up they're willing to think outside the box," said Rosendahl, who announced a plan last month to synchronize lights, add 32 left-turn signals, get the Green Line extension project moving and spend $200,000 on bicycle and pedestrian lanes.

But let's not forget that north-south arteries are no picnic either, Rosendahl said. He'd like to try a contra-flow system on Lincoln Boulevard, adding a third lane in the northerly direction from 6:30 to 9 a.m. and switching the lane to the southerly direction from 4 to 7 p.m.

Yaroslavsky returned from a trip to Brazil several years ago with a drawing of a busway system that inspired the hugely successful Orange Line in the San Fernando Valley.

Last month, he went to Buenos Aires and came back talking about the contra-flow lanes in front of his hotel. Now he's pushing an even more radical approach.

"I'm now talking about taking Olympic Boulevard from downtown to the beach and making it one-way in one direction and taking Pico one-way in the other direction," he said.

That'll tick off some people, he said, especially those who live on north-south streets that end up being used as crossover routes.

But he said he was going to discuss it with officials in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Los Angeles and call on a traffic engineer to report on the feasibility of doing it full time, just on weekdays or only during peak commute hours.

"It's a relatively inexpensive way to move traffic over the short term while we work on the bigger things," said Yaroslavsky. "I think the public would embrace and welcome radical ideas.

"Something has to be done when a mother tells me it takes her 40 minutes to take her son from Brentwood to Palisades Park for an afternoon soccer game and 40 minutes coming back. That's ridiculous."

*

[solongfullerton]

I say give it a shot, I can't imagine one way streets making anything worse. I double checked the distances too, the farthest that Pico and Olympic run from eachother is .6 miles between Hauser and La Brea. That's less than a 10 minute walk for bus riders.

[Wright Concept]

I say give it a shot, I can't imagine one way streets making anything worse. I double checked the distances too, the farthest that Pico and Olympic run from eachother is .6 miles between Hauser and La Brea. That's less than a 10 minute walk for bus riders.

Or a longer ride on the bus, considering the longer left/right turns that will be placed on the North-South Streets.

The one potential bright spot if any is that Zev, should add Bus Only Lanes in the Contraflow for the existing bus routes. So that those trips are faster.

[solongfullerton]

I'm not quite sure how relevant n/s busses play into this, since most mta busses remain on the same streets for a majority of their routes ie. the sepulveda bus. This is quite different for the Big Blue Busses that change streets multiple times on their routes. However, the only big blue busses that use either Pico or Olympic, are the 5 and the 7. Other busses do cross Olympic and Pico or use them for such a short distance that any impact would be negligable in my opinion.

[Wright Concept]

I'm not quite sure how relevant n/s busses play into this, since most mta busses remain on the same streets for a majority of their routes ie. the sepulveda bus. This is quite different for the Big Blue Busses that change streets multiple times on their routes. However, the only big blue busses that use either Pico or Olympic, are the 5 and the 7. Other busses do cross Olympic and Pico or use them for such a short distance that any impact would be negligable in my opinion.


They have everything to do with it. Especially in the Mid-City area where the North-South streets are the only artery out in order to get to the 10 freeway. You place a large load of let's say left turns onto a street to access these one way roads you create a bigger bottleneck for North-South traffic.

[solongfullerton]

With my experiences on one way streets, I've found that the cities were able to cope with any potential problems. Obviously downtown manages to handle block after block of one way streets. Also in Manhattan there are more one way streets than I can count. In NYC they also have signage that lead cars to the fastest way out of the city. I thought this was an ingenious idea. Also in Manhattan, I can't say for sure, but it seemed like every stop light in the whole city is synced. I can't even imagine what syncing all the lights, addding "fastest way out" signs, and creating some one way streets outside of downtown in LA would do for our traffic. The thing about it too, is that the amount of money to implement these things, is marginal compared to any form of mass transit. I'm not saying that we don't need better transit here, but obviously freeways aren't being built anymore and roads can't really be widened, so we might as well make these roads as efficient as possible. Busses will always share the road with cars, and public transit will never serve the entire population, so instead of expanding capacity, the city should increase efficiency.

[Damien]

Yaroslavsky returned from a trip to Brazil several years ago with a drawing of a busway system that inspired the hugely successful Orange Line in the San Fernando Valley.

Last month, he went to Buenos Aires and came back talking about the contra-flow lanes in front of his hotel. Now he's pushing an even more radical approach.

What do we have to do to get the guy to visit Madrid?

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

lets chip in and buy him a ticket! seriously, do you think he would get the message? we could attach a littl note with a pic of the metro and directions to a station.

[Wright Concept]

^ No, He'll come back with a picture of the buses.

[DJM19]

Seriously, I dont care if this guy goes on a world tour of the great rail-cities, just bring back a rail idea for once!

And yeah, Madrid is a good idea (thats the one with the cheaper tunnels?)

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ Yes, according to Damien's research.

[Wright Concept]

With my experiences on one way streets, I've found that the cities were able to cope with any potential problems. Obviously downtown manages to handle block after block of one way streets. Also in Manhattan there are more one way streets than I can count. In NYC they also have signage that lead cars to the fastest way out of the city. I thought this was an ingenious idea. Also in Manhattan, I can't say for sure, but it seemed like every stop light in the whole city is synced. I can't even imagine what syncing all the lights, addding "fastest way out" signs, and creating some one way streets outside of downtown in LA would do for our traffic. The thing about it too, is that the amount of money to implement these things, is marginal compared to any form of mass transit. I'm not saying that we don't need better transit here, but obviously freeways aren't being built anymore and roads can't really be widened, so we might as well make these roads as efficient as possible. Busses will always share the road with cars, and public transit will never serve the entire population, so instead of expanding capacity, the city should increase efficiency.

It's a scale issue more than anything else. You're taking a traffic problem that will be good in one direction in one part of the day but compounded at rush. There's also a law that for every action there's an opposite reaction. That opposite are those North-South streets, who will be sitting and waiting why these large convoy of traffic are moving in one direction add longer signal intervals you're doing more harm than good.

With those other cities and their one-way streets there's a balance between Primary One Way/Two Way streets and secondary ones, there's a hierarchy. The reason why Fifth/Sixth, Eighth/Ninth, Eleventh/Twelth streets work are they are close @ 1 block apart, Second there are two primary two-way corridors in which they serve to feed which are Wilshire and Seventh, Olympic and Pico Blvds. Here in this proposal there is no such hierarchy, just potential chaos. If you were to configure one way streets in Los Angeles, you start with the smaller streets and then work you're way up.

[LongBeachUrbanist]

Within the city boundaries, Pico and Venice make the more obvious pair. But once you reach Culver City, Venice diverges south, making it useless as Pico's twin.

Pico is the problem, the meandering street. Unfortunately, the tangled mess of streets in the Mid-City area is a direct result of our old transit network, i.e., the streetcar system.

Too bad we can't straighten that street out. Imagine if city planners had the freedom to do what Baron Haussman was allowed to do in Paris. (Forget the ethical considerations, this is fantasy). Imagine what kind of street-grid modifications would be possible!

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ WHat did Baron do in Paris?

[J Church]

Invented the bulldozer.

[solongfullerton]

I'm not sure if anyone else caught this, but Hal Fisman's nightly commentary on this evening's 10pm news was regarding Steve Lopez's Sunday article on Westside traffic. He mentioned all the points that Lopez made, then on top added that part of the reason for the perpetually awful traffic all over the city (not just the Westside) was due the uncontrolled amount of high density development being built in the all ready over congested neighborhoods in the city.

Take it as you will, but I don't understand how someone like Hal, who could probably afford to live in any neighborhood the city, has any room to talk.

[Wright Concept]

I'm not sure if anyone else caught this, but Hal Fisman's nightly commentary on this evening's 10pm news was regarding Steve Lopez's Sunday article on Westside traffic. He mentioned all the points that Lopez made, then on top added that part of the reason for the perpetually awful traffic all over the city (not just the Westside) was due the uncontrolled amount of high density development being built in the all ready over congested neighborhoods in the city.

Take it as you will, but I don't understand how someone like Hal, who could probably afford to live in any neighborhood the city, has any room to talk.

Hal could be advocating the single most important thing that the city is laking and that is coordinated growth, zoning, land-use and transit planning. It's what I call the charm of "destined" Density and the cost of sprawl.

[DJM19]

No, I think hes just a NIMBY who doesnt want to see all this higher density stuff

[Damien]

^ No, He'll come back with a picture of the buses.

:haha: :haha: :haha: :haha: :haha: :haha:

[LongBeachUrbanist]

^ WHat did Baron do in Paris?

He created the boulevards. Late 1800's, got license from Napoleon III to plow straight routes through neighborhoods to create the magnificent boulevards that now connect the city.

This devastated the neighborhoods, dislocated tens of thousands of people. Much like the freeway-building binge here in the states during the 50's.

But there's one huge difference. Because of how they were designed, the boulevards actually united the city by creating civic space and a rational street hierarchy. (Unlike freeways, which actually divide a city.) The short-term pain was actually a worthwhile investment in the long run.

My only point was, it would be nice to imagine the creation of new boulevards where they are badly needed. But only if they are well-designed.

[cookiejarvis]

I'm not sure if anyone else caught this, but Hal Fisman's nightly commentary on this evening's 10pm news was regarding Steve Lopez's Sunday article on Westside traffic. He mentioned all the points that Lopez made, then on top added that part of the reason for the perpetually awful traffic all over the city (not just the Westside) was due the uncontrolled amount of high density development being built in the all ready over congested neighborhoods in the city.

Take it as you will, but I don't understand how someone like Hal, who could probably afford to live in any neighborhood the city, has any room to talk.

Hal Fisman doesn't get the big picture. He's a dinosaur from a dying breed of Angelenos who still remember the city as a quaint cowtown. I've heard his traffic rants before and he's definitely pro-freeway in his solutions (most notably completing Caltrans 1 square mile freeway grids throughout L.A. County including extending the 2 freeway through Beverly Hills). He also apes Bradbury's call for building monorails in the middle of freeway medians. IOW, he's not to be taken seriously on the matter.

[Wright Concept]

Hal Fisman doesn't get the big picture. He's a dinosaur from a dying breed of Angelenos who still remember the city as a quaint cowtown. I've heard his traffic rants before and he's definitely pro-freeway in his solutions (most notably completing Caltrans 1 square mile freeway grids throughout L.A. County including extending the 2 freeway through Beverly Hills). He also apes Bradbury's call for building monorails in the middle of freeway medians. IOW, he's not to be taken seriously on the matter.

Ok,My mistake, I don't watch the Channel 5 news or heard his "Commentary" other than the fact that KTLA is part of The Tribune Co. which owns the LA Times. So you guys do the math.

[cookiejarvis]

Anyone remember when Pico and Venice Blvds. were designated one way streets after the Northridge earthquake collapse of the 10 freeway? I seem to recall it was fairly successful band-aid solution at the time.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ I don't want it to be successful enough where it takes away the urgency of extending the Purple Line down to the ocean. I don't know if I'm the only one here that feels this way, but I believe that the Purple Line is the make or break of LA's future. I think that Downtown LA becoming extremely successful (on par with Chicago's downtown) will actually exacerbate traffic since people will have to go back and forth. Downtown LA and the Westside will become two distinct power centers that is severed by distance without effective transit access (to a certain extent that is the case today). Instead of creating ONE power center with two nodes, we have disconnection.

LA's full potential can never be realized without including the Westside into the equation, and our QUINTESSENTIAL beach communities.

I say NO to Olympic and Pico becoming one way...at least until the Purple Line is for certain.

[Wright Concept]

Anyone remember when Pico and Venice Blvds. were designated one way streets after the Northridge earthquake collapse of the 10 freeway? I seem to recall it was fairly successful band-aid solution at the time.


I thought it was Washington and Adams Blvds that were one way because the collapsed section was at Fairfax and they temporarily had No street parking allowed on Venice Blvd during that incident. There were no one-way portions of Pico Blvd, cause I'd have to take the #12 Big Blue Bus from Rimpau to Palms to come from school my Magnet school.

[colemonkee]

^I don't know if I'm the only one here that feels this way, but I believe that the Purple Line is the make or break of LA's future. I think that Downtown LA becoming extremely successful (on par with Chicago's downtown) will actually exacerbate traffic since people will have to go back and forth. Downtown LA and the Westside will become two distinct power centers that is severed by distance without effective transit access (to a certain extent that is the case today). Instead of creating ONE power center with two nodes, we have disconnection.
You've got a point here about creating two power nodes, but the connection with the Westside won't work entirely without a north/south connection to the Westside "center" in mass transit form. Too many people commute from the Valley to the Westside for the Purple line to give the Westside true "auto-non-dependence". But the Purple line is a great first step.

[Wright Concept]

You've got a point here about creating two power nodes, but the connection with the Westside won't work entirely without a north/south connection to the Westside "center" in mass transit form. Too many people commute from the Valley to the Westside for the Purple line to give the Westside true "auto-non-dependence". But the Purple line is a great first step.

Precisely! Too many folks from the Valley from both the Cauhenga and Sepulveda Passes or up from the South Bay make the trek down to the Westside. If this Subway is to create other smaller centers in conjunction with linking the existing centers than the North-South corridor feeders or trunks like the 405 in Westwood, La Brea or Fairfax in Mid-Wilshire, Building the Downtown Connector for 7th/Flower are essential to make any transit network work.

http://i13.tinypic.com/6ofjpuh.gif

This revision is more for LA City political pull. I've been thinking that the City of LA should do this on it's own away from LA County it's bull, bureaucracy and balderdash and just fund and built the tunnels for these lines. All MTA would need to do is purchase the additional trains and fund the operations of the system which for these high-capacity higher ridership corridors would be very easy since they can actually save money in some cases where instead of having the 761 waste 35-45 minutes on the 405 it ends at Sherman Oaks meaning they can save up to 10 extra 60' buses and operators.

On Vermont Avenue and Wilshire Blvd they can move all of those rapid buses to other streets/routes like 3rd Street or 8th Street, where buses are full and standing room only and are operating on tight 2 minute headways.

[LongBeachUrbanist]

I definitely support a Westside-Valley line along Sepulveda or a similar route. This would connect with the Purple Line at a new "Union Station West" or "Westside Station" around Westwood/Brentwood.

[RAlossi]

Metrolink has their new map up on their test redesigned site.

http://209.79.237.44:82/includes/pdf/MetrolinkMap.pdf

It's in PDF now for the forumer that was talking about that earlier!

[ferneynism2]

Expo Line is coming to town....
http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e124/fnee1901/Itscomingverysoon.jpg

[WesTheAngelino]

^ Where might that be?

[ferneynism2]

^ Where might that be?


^Arlington and Exposition.....

[LosAngelesBeauty]

He created the boulevards. Late 1800's, got license from Napoleon III to plow straight routes through neighborhoods to create the magnificent boulevards that now connect the city.

This devastated the neighborhoods, dislocated tens of thousands of people. Much like the freeway-building binge here in the states during the 50's.

But there's one huge difference. Because of how they were designed, the boulevards actually united the city by creating civic space and a rational street hierarchy. (Unlike freeways, which actually divide a city.) The short-term pain was actually a worthwhile investment in the long run.

My only point was, it would be nice to imagine the creation of new boulevards where they are badly needed. But only if they are well-designed.

So if it's LATE 1800's, then many of the main buildings Paris is known for are no older than Old Town Pasadena or the Bradbury Building? :frog:

[DJM19]

A lot of the nice buildings in Paris that we think of as being very historical are relatively new. They look amazing of course, and they replaced a lot the poorer areas (which I imagine probably had poorer looking buildings) with these regal ones for the rich.

There were many half-timber houses and such. Starting mid-1800s you saw many variations on this put into place:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Paris-immeuble-avenue-opera.jpg/710px-Paris-immeuble-avenue-opera.jpg

[LosAngelesBeauty]

Yeah, Paris is beautiful. I wonder if Buenos Aires, sometimes known as "Paris of South America" has older buildings?

Vienna is also beautiful.

[Codex Borgia]

ORIGINAL STORY HERE (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez14jan14,1,173770,full.column?coll=la-headlines-california)

Traffic disaster towers over L.A.

January 14 2007


"I no longer go to Dodger games, or the L.A. Philharmonic…. I only go out to dinner at restaurants within two miles of my house."

That was Michael Gale, who lives in Pacific Palisades.

ADVERTISEMENT

"I'd rather stick hot pokers in my eyes than drive downtown from Santa Monica on a weeknight. Saturday nights are almost as bad. Therefore, I go to Disney Hall only on Sunday."

That was Kim Nicholas of Santa Monica.

"We learned fast how hard it is to go east in the evening. The first few times we tried it, we assumed there was a big rig overturned somewhere …. We were then, and remain still, incredulous that an entire major American city has allowed itself to become paralyzed every evening."

That was Maryland transplant and Santa Monica resident Laurie Brenner, who has given up on downtown L.A. cultural attractions and scratched Skirball events because of northbound evening traffic on the 405.

This is but a tiny sampling from the traffic jam of angst that clogged my mailbag after last Sunday's column. Although my focus was Westside insanity, readers from Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino counties joined the cry-fest, insisting a historically annoying problem has reached the level of catastrophe.

But many readers saved their best work and sharpest barbs for those they hold responsible for an irresponsible explosion of residential and commercial projects erected without adequate consideration of the horrors they generate.

"Our problems can be traced directly to the development community, lobbyists, attorneys and the elected officials," said Sandy Brown, a Westside activist.

"If you think the Westside traffic is bad now, just wait until all the condo and office projects currently in various stages of development in Beverly Hills and Century City get completed!" wrote Jaycie Ingersoll of Beverly Hills. "I cannot understand how these projects get approved without more realistic consideration of traffic impact, but they do. I always have the feeling that if the right palms get greased, the projects get approved."

No project drew more fire than two 47-story condo towers proposed for traffic-choked Century City. A coalition of hopping-mad homeowner associations has sued the city over the skyscrapers, and residents are doing battle with City Councilman Jack Weiss, who represents the area, for control of $5 million the developer has offered for traffic planning, parks and other city services.

Homeowners feel like the deck is stacked against them. They point out that the project developer's Chicago affiliate ponied up $100,000 for the school takeover campaign by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who just happens to support the condo tower project.

The developer, JMB Realty Co., is represented by Latham & Watkins, an international law firm with lots of juice at City Hall that has written thousands of dollars in campaign checks to Weiss.

Is it any wonder, homeowners ask, that city planners approved an environmental impact report paid for by the developer that claims the skyscraper condo project will actually decrease rather than increase traffic?

"It's not underestimation, it's willful avoidance of looking at the data," says Mike Eveloff, president of the homeowners coalition. The group hired its own traffic engineer, who concluded that it was pure hokum to suggest that 483 new condominiums would make for less traffic than now exists at a bank and an over-the-hill nightclub.

"It doesn't pass the smell test," said Eveloff.

He was being too kind. It stinks to high heaven.

I put in a call to Villaraigosa's office, asking for an explanation of massive campaign contributions that came at roughly the same time his office was making public its support of the JMB project as a great example of smart growth. Villaraigosa spokesman Matt Szabo promised me late Friday that he would look into the matter and get back to me, and I assured him readers would look forward to the response.

Weiss told me he supports the 47-story condo towers because they're just what's needed in an area that now has an overabundance of offices. He describes a reimagined Century City in which people walk from home to work, shop and go to dinner and a movie without ever getting into a car.

Sounds wonderful, but is he kidding?

The people who work in the expanding Century City service economy aren't going to be able to afford one of those condos in the clouds, so they're going to commute to the area each day and add to the congestion. The people who actually live there are not going to lock themselves into the compound as far as I know, so they'll help jam the streets as well. And if the commercial expansion of the new Century City is a success, what will it draw?

Exactly. More traffic.

The city needs more high-density housing, but the only sensible projects are mixed-income developments near transit corridors. The Century City sky towers are neither.

"I really think you have to be fair here, that there is a property owner who has owned the property for, I think, decades, and there are certain legal rights," Weiss said.

Yeah, and if you're a councilman, you have certain obligations — namely to make sure a developer helps solve any problems he creates.

"What my vision is, is a subway stop in Century City, and then to connect that subway stop with the Exposition line stop just south of Century City," said Weiss. Only problem with that is, last time I checked there was no subway on the drawing boards.

Here's a different vision worth considering: BUILD THE BLASTED TRANSIT OPTIONS BEFORE YOU APPROVE THE DEVELOPMENT!

Trust me, people have had it. They're steamed about lost hours and productivity, frayed nerves, narrowing orbits and missed time with family.

I asked for ideas and got them by the dozens, big and small, new and old. Monorails. Traffic cones to add contra-flow lanes on Olympic. London-style congestion fee-charging. Dedicated bus lanes on the 405. Declare a transit emergency and hit up the new Democratic-majority Congress for aid.

Join the fray. Post your traffic gripes and ideas for solutions at

---

http://www.latimes.com/bottleneck (http://www.latimes.com/bottleneck) .

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at http://www.latimes.com/lopez (http://www.latimes.com/lopez)

[LongBeachUrbanist]

http://www.latimes.com/bottleneck (http://www.latimes.com/bottleneck)

Unfortunately, there are only two comments on that comment board. I posted a comment (in favor of the subway), but it just disappeared.

[Codex Borgia]

Unfortunately, there are only two comments on that comment board. I posted a comment (in favor of the subway), but it just disappeared.

WTF?? You serious? You think you were censored? what had you said??
:yuck:

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

ya my comment didnt show up either.

Its really simple. lets invest in our mass transit. we cant continue to build rail one segment at a time. We need to build the purple line to Santa Monica, Expo to Santa Monica, the 405 line from North Hollywood to LAX, the Green Line to LAX down Lincoln, the Downtown Connector, the Vermont Line the Crenshaw Line and several more at the same time. We get a couple billion from the transit bond, we should get a federal match, float a tax for LA County and walla, in 8 - 10 years we can build 10 - 15 new lines and provide alternatives for people stuck. New lanes dont solve congestion they add to it, and once people figure that out and cry out for Mass transit, well get it. Everyone should contact their reps, and especially idiots that are stuck in the past such as MIKE ANTONOVICH and demand more mass transit funding. Lets get this done already.

[Wright Concept]

Comments are showing up now on the LA Times blog.

[cookiejarvis]

Judging from the comments on the L.A. Times website, it seems like Steve Lopez has opened up the floodgates for a westside bitchfest about traffic. Not sure what to think of that.

[solongfullerton]

With all the discussion of traffic lately, I had some new ideas for transit in LA. My idea here is that there is a lot of line overlapping, much like in NYC. The first thing I would do is to create a "loop" in the red line. from either the universal or noho station, the train would would run west and run until sepulveda/405. the train would then run south through the pass to Wilshire blvd. simultaneoulsy, the red line would be extended west from wilshire/western to meet up with the valley tracks. once the loop is complete, spoke lines could meet up with this loop/hub and share tracks with the loop until they need to divert to their end location. For example, one train would run from SM to Union Station and potentially beyond. Another line would run from the Central (potentially north) Valley and would run south the airport. another line would run from the east valley and follow the loop through hollywood and go down vermont to south la. The last spoke would be a line that ran in the southern valley from the far west (woodland hills) to the far east (ie burbank or glendale). Other lines will be needed as well, and can eventually run through the loop, ie s SMB line. However, I think the best part of this Red Line loop would be that once its complete, a major portion of the "spoke" lines will be completed. Here is a little picture I put together on this. Let me know what you think.
http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c314/solongfullerton/RedLineLoop.jpg

[LongBeachUrbanist]

Yeah, it eventually showed up. Here it is:

"Traffic everywhere is bad. If I had a good transit option, I would take it, but I don't.

Number 1 priority is to build the subway between Downtown and at least Westwood (if not all the way to Santa Monica). That would take hundreds of thousands of people off the roads. It would give people from all over L.A. the ability to get to UCLA, Century City, LACMA, Beverly Hills, Mid City, Koreatown, Downtown, etc. in a predictable amount of time."

Tried to make a simple, direct argument that would appeal to the masses.

[JRinSoCal]

I just posted my comment also in support of Public Transportation. I hope something good comes out of this public discussion on the transit situation our region is dealing with. We need these rail lines and we need them NOW not in 20 years!

[LosAngelesSportsFan]

here is my second post. some people are so ignorant and stupid.

Here are a few observations ive made after reading these comments.

1) the Expo line is already under constuction, as is the Gold Line East. Interesting that some people dont know that.

2) Transit doesnt help reduce traffic, it provides alternatives. Los Angeles will always grow and traffic will never get better. When you have options then its not as bad.

3) We can thank Zev Yaroslovsky, the BRu and especially Mike Antonivich and other dumba@#es for a lot of our problems. they have continously been againts rail that isnt in their districts because they say it doesnt help their constituents. Bastards.

4) Monorails are not compatible to our current system, handle no where near the capacity that we need, and are prone to breakdowns and many problems. check out Las Vegas and Seattle for examples.

5) rail down freeway medians is not the way to build a system. We need our rail to reach destinations. thats how it works.

6) Development in Downtown LA, Long Beach, Hollywood, Wilshire should be encouraged. High density, pedestrain oriented and close to Transit. Is it any wonder that the areas in LA with transit are the ones that are booming?

7) the Wilshire subway is not the only one that is going to get built. we need the Downtown Connector, the Vermont Line, the 405 Parallel Line (in my opinion, the 3rd most important line, with the two biggest traffic generators, LAX and UCLA, as well as connections to the purple line, the red line, the orange Line, the Expo Line the green Line, LAX Express, need i say more?)

We need to pass a 20 billion dollar city bond ( government match to make it 40 billion) and do it now, and build all these lines at the same time. Imagine all the jobs that would be created, the massive restructuring of LA, the stress relief and the money saved by not sitting in traffic. lets get this done before we are dead.

Posted by: D at Jan 15, 2007 4:36:44 PM

[bjornson]

I have just read all the posts. A lot of those who posted comments seemed rather ignorant and really don't know about why the Purple Line doesn't go all the way down Wilshire.

Monorails it is! :haha:


LASF, good post. Unfortunately, no one is going to pay attention as shown in the comments.

[cookiejarvis]

I reread the L.A. Times comments to see the newer comments last night. Aside from the idiotic monorail/prt rants, it was a pleasant surprise to see some consensus that we need to build adequate transit infrastructure and instill some personal responsibility in our commuting/work habits.

[WesTheAngelino]

2) Transit doesnt help reduce traffic, it provides alternatives. Los Angeles will always grow and traffic will never get better. When you have options then its not as bad.


THANK YOU. People, traffic reduction is not the way to sell rail to Los Angeles, because when it fails in doing so (and it will), there will of course be a let down.

[DJM19]

Ive never seen rail as a traffic reducer (a slight road bump in it becoming totally unbearable, perhaps). It is an alternative, one people deserve, and hopefully one taken advantage of with more people moving near transit nodes. Just having a large amount of people take it every so often would be great, most dont use it at all, ever.

[Wright Concept]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez17jan17,1,7962027.column?coll=la-headlines-california

STEVE LOPEZ / POINTS WEST
Seeing the light at the end of the bottleneck
Steve Lopez
Points West

January 17, 2007

Any day now, we should be closing in on answers to the many questions posed in this space and on the Bottleneck Blog by traffic-weary readers.

What will L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky propose to ease Westside traffic misery, and if it's really good stuff, will readers finally forgive Yaroslavsky for years of subway opposition?

Why did a real estate company in Chicago spend $100,000 on L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's school takeover bid?

Why is the chief of transit in Los Angeles — outed months ago by my colleague Steve Hymon — still commuting to work by Hummer instead of by bus or train?

Yaroslavsky, who is thinking about proposing that major thoroughfares be turned into one-way streets, got this whole thing started a couple weeks ago with a question: Why does he have to travel abroad to find innovative solutions to gridlock?

Yaroslavsky's office tells me that he will soon be drawing up a short-list of do-able fixes.

And as for the Chicago real estate company's $100,000 check to Villaraigosa's school takeover campaign, it's kind of fun to speculate as we await the official explanation. Sure, a cynic might say it had something to do with the fact that the company's affiliate has a mega-condo project in the works in Century City, with Villaraigosa's support.

But Villaraigosa press secretary Matt Szabo assured me there's nothing fishy about it.

"There's absolutely no connection whatsoever," between the donation and the mayor's support of the twin 47-story behemoth, which neighbors say will make deplorable traffic all the more unbearable.

I had trouble getting an explanation out of the Chicago office of JMB Realty last night, so here are my top three guesses on the $100,000 donation:

1. Chicago is sending us all its dropouts and this was a down payment.

2. People in Chicago, home of The Times' parent company, think they should own everything in Los Angeles.

3. Villaraigosa is the player to be named later when the Cubs signed slugger Alfonso Soriano.

Given the generosity of the Chicago real estate company, I'm wondering if it could send another hundred thousand bucks so Villaraigosa can hire a transit boss who drives something a little more sensible than a Hummer. Like maybe a coal-powered locomotive.

Szabo assured me Tuesday night that I'll finally have my get-together with Jaime de la Vega today. Don't be surprised, Szabo said, to hear that de la Vega is hard at work locating funding for the subway to the sea and otherwise implementing Villaraigosa's vision of the city of the future.

Szabo said the mayor is going to synchronize every light in the city, regionalize air traffic, modernize LAX, complete the 405 carpool lane and the Expo line, and figure out a way to address Gov. Schwarzenegger's proposed diversion of gas taxes away from public transit.

You've got to love the mayor's boundless ambition, but I'll believe all that when I see it.

And as for de la Vega, I still say he should be gone by Easter if he doesn't start driving something smaller than the Rose Bowl.

Besides, we don't need a cowering traffic factotum, we need a traffic czar. Is Bob Hertzberg doing anything? I wasn't entirely sold on Hertzberg's Commuters' Bill of Rights when he ran for mayor, but let's get him out of retirement to do some honest work.

Until then, you'll find all the best traffic solutions at http://www.latimes.com/bottleneck .

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at http://www.latimes.com/lopez

[LAsam]

It would be interesting if someone organized a mass protest in front of City Hall for improved public transportation. From all the comments I've seen on the LA Times site and other places, I think the attendance would be pretty high. This would draw the national media's cameras and put the spotlights on the polititicians. Maybe this could motivate them to start moving faster on improving things...

[edluva]

^I'd be so for a mass-transit demonstration.

[JRinSoCal]

^^^I'm down with that too. When do we do this? Let's organize!

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ You all know I'd be down! :)

In fact, we should have it done at UCLA/Westwood Village too. Someone can hold a large placard printed: "Future Subway Stop!" or "Like Sitting in Traffic or Subway?"

[Wright Concept]

Westwood would be cool, If I don't get stuck in traffic getting there. :haha:

Better yet they should protest at that buck toothed jackass Henry Waxman's office so that he makes damn sure there's money to build the subways. :whip: :whip: :whip:

Even better, I need to find Jaime De La Vega's hummer and slash his tires and put sugar in his gas tank so he'll ride the transit here. That will make him find a way to fund and build the subway. :jester:

[stuckintraffic]

I'd be interested to find out if anyone knows if there has ever been talk of connecting Dodger Stadium with L.A.'s metro system.

If I had to guess, I'd say the issue revolves around McCourt's plans for the future of Dodger Stadium and it's behemoth of a parking lot/potential space for real estate development.

[POLA]

I like this protest idea, and I know that turn out would be good too... So, wheres the best place to stage it?

[solongfullerton]

If theres going to be a protest, you should probably wait until the time changes, so it will be light outside if you plan on gathering during the evening commute.

Also, westwood would probably be a good location, especially on wilshire. the federal building has been a hot spot for protests for a while now. you could probably also let steve lopez know about this and he would probably mention it in the Times. food for thought.

[WesTheAngelino]

How about the MTA headquarters?? That way peeps from every direction can practice what they preach and all take transit to the protest.

[LAsam]

If this demonstration were to really occur, there would have to be enough advertising and communication so that there was a huge turnout... anything less and it wouldn't serve its purpose.

[LongBeachUrbanist]

I'm copying my own post from the Wilshire Project thread, just because I think it's relevant to the discussion of having a demonstration.

I don't buy the argument that the way to get the Purple Line built is by activating people. This is more than apathy among citizens. Lots of cities building subways have apathetic citizens.

The difference is, leaders in other cities (i.e., leaders in local/state/national government) are not so afraid of taking a gamble as ours are. I'm convinced that our city councilpersons are absolutely terrified of making a false move that might piss off the anti-tax crowd.

In other words, I think rather than focusing on activating pro-subway people, I think the key is to neutralize the anti-tax, government-watchdog NIMBY community.

I think the most compelling case to this crowd for building the subway now is to convince them that (1) building the subway is inevitable, and (2) building it later will cost way more. Once these premises are accepted, the conclusion (build the subway now) follows immediately. It is an appeal directly to the enemy's pocketbook.

I think once that case is made, and is pounded into people's heads, the dam will break loose and the subway will be built. But that's if and only if that case is made.

By the way, I think the first premise, that we will eventually need to build the subway, is becoming widely accepted. I think what needs to be emphasized now is the skyrocketing price. I think people need to be scared into a realization of the costs down-the-road if we don't act now.

[Wright Concept]

I'm copying my own post from the Wilshire Project thread, just because I think it's relevant to the discussion of having a demonstration.

I don't buy the argument that the way to get the Purple Line built is by activating people. This is more than apathy among citizens. Lots of cities building subways have apathetic citizens.

The difference is, leaders in other cities (i.e., leaders in local/state/national government) are not so afraid of taking a gamble as ours are. I'm convinced that our city councilpersons are absolutely terrified of making a false move that might piss off the anti-tax crowd.

Mostly because they've squandered and mis-used tax dollars before, it creates that attitude. Had they been better serving their constituents then then it turns the gamble into a calculated risk which makes a big difference.

In other words, I think rather than focusing on activating pro-subway people, I think the key is to neutralize the anti-tax, government-watchdog NIMBY community.

I think the most compelling case to this crowd for building the subway now is to convince them that (1) building the subway is inevitable, and (2) building it later will cost way more. Once these premises are accepted, the conclusion (build the subway now) follows immediately. It is an appeal directly to the enemy's pocketbook.

I think once that case is made, and is pounded into people's heads, the dam will break loose and the subway will be built. But that's if and only if that case is made.

By the way, I think the first premise, that we will eventually need to build the subway, is becoming widely accepted. I think what needs to be emphasized now is the skyrocketing price. I think people need to be scared into a realization of the costs down-the-road if we don't act now.

The best way to neutralize it is to enforce a deadline on completion within two political terms and ensure that it gets built. Their mindset is on the bottomline. Discussing inevitability will just make them say, "Well if the density is coming now without it, what difference will it make". Keep with the business understanding that time is money and the quicker it's planned, built and operating the cheaper it is. The technology is there to speed it up and ensure safe construction, the standards are already available, so no need to reinvent the wheel.

[Stilosilva]

The one-way (east) dedicated bus lane for the Santa Monica Transit Parkway Project in Century City is FINALLY up and running. Here is a photo:

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/8038/buslineea5.jpg

Ridiculous?!? On www.lacity.org/bpw/santamonica/, they stated that, "A dedicated bus lane in Century City will enhance bus transit operations." Funny how the bus lane only spans from Ave. of the Stars to Century Park East, basically one large city block. I've only seen a few buses pass by and by the looks of it there doesn't seem to be much of an enhancement.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

lolol

[WesTheAngelino]

Who in the fuck paid for that??? I certainly hope it wasn't transit fares or tax dollars.

[DJM19]

Thats a very large median...And is it a one-way bus lane?

[Damien]

Keep with the business understanding that time is money and the quicker it's planned, built and operating the cheaper it is. The technology is there to speed it up and ensure safe construction, the standards are already available, so no need to reinvent the wheel.

This is the point I make to people who suggest my map is too ambitious, and one of the criticisms I have to all these damn studies.

The lines have already been proposed and most the routes have already been studied to death, many within the last 10-15 years. We need to be spending the time and money on our rail extensions greasing up the committee chairs so we can bring home the bacon to start f---ing building them, not reaffirming what we already know.

If this demonstration were to really occur, there would have to be enough advertising and communication so that there was a huge turnout... anything less and it wouldn't serve its purpose.

Speaking as a person who has loads of experience in the area, building a crowd ain't that easy - especially in L.A. Press releases and press conferences can be just as effective and far less difficult in getting free press.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

Freeway or the rail way


Orange and Los Angeles counties take different paths in search of ways to reduce traffic congestion.

By ERIC CARPENTER AND JIM RADCLIFFE
The Orange County Register
MEASURE M:Voters will be asked to decide Nov. 7 on a 30-year continuation of Orange County's half-cent transportation sales tax, beginning when the current tax expires on March 31, 2011. If approved, the measure would generate an estimated $11.9 billion for projects intended to improve roads and alleviate traffic congestion.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The county line • Here, Dana Lemos is treading traffic.

The Orange resident had sailed along the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway through Anaheim at 65 mph, shaking her head at the motorists she calls Ricky Racers who whizzed by her.

But the 43-year-old customer-service representative for a Pico Rivera trucking firm had known what was ahead for all of them.

At the county line, several miles after the I-5 has shrunk from five lanes a side to three, the weekday bottleneck greets her as always.

"The median dividers up here look like hurricane salvage," Lemos says, killing time by trying to decipher the graffiti painted on the freeway dividers as her late-model Honda draws to a halt.

"Three lanes just doesn't make sense," she says. "Maybe in the 1940s and 50s but not now. L.A. has just not kept up."

Here, at the county line, is the best vantage point to see the differing approaches Orange and Los Angeles counties take to battling congestion.

"You can tell when you're in Orange County because of the good condition of the streets and roads," says Art Leahy, the top administrator for the Orange County Transportation Authority and once the chief operating officer for Los Angeles County's Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "Come in to Orange County on the 5 and there's no mistaking the difference."

Perhaps, but there has been a trade-off.

One county spends much of its transportation-tax revenue on asphalt, while the other focuses on rail.

Widening the 5
On an average day, 178,000 vehicles cross the county line on the 5, going north or south, according to the California Department of Transportation.

On the Orange County side, construction crews are in their first of four years of a $314 million project to widen what was once Southern California's transportation backbone, the I-5. The improvements will go south to the Riverside (91) Freeway.

So in 2010, the freeway built in the late 1950s with six lanes, three in each direction, will have at least 10 all the way down to Dana Point.

Caltrans wants to fatten up the I-5 in Los Angeles County, too.

There is a $1.5-billion plan to add lanes, going north from the county line. The proposal, though, is $400 million light. A state bond, if approved next month, would likely include enough funds to cover the gap.

Even then, the 5 would only widen north to the San Gabriel River (I-605) Freeway, merely moving the bottleneck 10 miles up the road. At best, construction would be done by 2016.

The crucial push north toward downtown Los Angeles, widening the 5 from the 605 to the Long Beach (710) Freeway, could be completed by 2022 – if more than $1.5 billion is found, somewhere.

Caltrans, the curator of the state's freeway web, depends on local governments to round up much of the money for massive freeway projects.

"Now we are more focused on light rail and dedicated bus lines for a few reasons," says Assemblyman Richard Katz, an MTA board member. "We need to do more mass transit to improve our air and get some cars off the road."

Both counties have relied on state and federal funding for freeway projects. But while Measure M, passed by voters in 1990, has helped widen every Orange County freeway except one, Los Angeles County's two voter-approved transportation taxes have zeroed in on mass transit.

And in those same 16 years, Orange County's attempt to construct a light-rail system bellied up, while Los Angeles County has built 73 miles of subway and light-rail track, with another 15 miles under construction.

Los Angeles County
Three previous attempts for a transportation tax had failed. And, just two years before, in 1978, state voters had passed the anti-tax Proposition 13.

But Kenneth Hahn – the popular county supervisor who wanted his county to again have a Red Car-like trolley – wrote Proposition A and pushed for it.

The half-cent sales tax, which promised to push down bus fares and go toward a mass-transit railway, was approved by 54 percent of the voters in 1980.

A decade later, just months after Los Angeles County's first railway leg opened, Proposition C eked out a win. That half-cent sales tax was also geared to add muscles to mass transit.

The two taxes brought in $1.3 billion last fiscal year alone.

The tax dollars can't go to add regular freeway lanes – only car-pool lanes. And they can't go to roads – unless a bus rolls on them.

Orange County
Measure M will raise $4.2 billion before it expires in 2011. With the help of other governmental funds, it will have led to the widening of every freeway here except the San Diego (I-405). The proposed extension of the measure would continue the widening strategy.

Measure M was to deliver light rail to Orange County, too, but that plan depended on heavy funding from the federal government, which declined.

Instead, more than $400 million was shifted to Metrolink, the locomotive commuter line that runs through various counties, including Los Angeles.

"It's a matter of different leadership – county leaders listening to the desires of their electorate about how their money is spent," says Curt Pringle, Anaheim's mayor and an OCTA board member.

"In Orange County, the public has expressed that improving our road systems is the priority," he says. "So that is our focus."

[DJM19]

Its true, the difference in the LA 5 and the OC 5 is night and day. But Im glad we are spending it on rail.

[numble]

STEVE LOPEZ / POINTS WEST
Transit boss' SUV is too big to ignore (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez21jan21,0,3698927,print.column?coll=la-home-headlines)
Steve Lopez
Points West

January 21, 2007

Questions about the Hummer would be off-limits. That's what the mayor's press secretary told me as we headed to a City Hall meeting with transportation chief Jaime de la Vega, whose vehicle of choice seems odd for a man in his position.

No way, I told Matt Szabo. How can I not ask about it?

What de la Vega drives is a private matter, argued Szabo.

No it isn't, I told him. It's now a public matter, and I don't know how Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa can have any faith in a transit chief who drives a 2-ton monster in a city with notorious traffic and smog.

It's like having a surgeon general who smokes unfiltered Camels while snacking on Cheetos.

I felt a little sorry for Szabo, a decent enough chap who had arranged the meeting after I complained that de la Vega didn't answer my call.

But not sorry enough to pull punches. What's with the Hummer? I asked as soon as we were seated in de la Vega's office.

De la Vega gave me a cold stare, his lips sealed. Then he looked at Szabo, who said we were there to talk transportation.

I asked about de la Vega's background and he dropped the mummy act, telling me he'd gotten a master's in urban planning from UCLA. He was also Mayor Dick Riordan's traffic chief and a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board.

So you'd think he'd know better.

I just can't get past it, I told de la Vega. A Hummer?

And then I noticed a quote on his wall from Rosa Parks.

"Every person must live their lives as a model for others."

I read the quote to de la Vega, who clammed up again.

"Should we all drive Hummers?" I asked.

Silence.

Szabo, meanwhile, looked like he might have some kind of a breakdown. He argued that de la Vega's vehicle is not the largest in the Hummer line.

"It's smaller than a Yukon," he said.

Wonderful. So is the Queen Mary.

The polar caps are melting, we are at war in the oil fields and Mr. Transit is driving a hog that says who cares?

But for Szabo's sake, I changed the subject, asking de la Vega if he'd checked out all the great ideas on my Bottleneck Blog (latimes.com/bottleneck), where people are posting solutions to our traffic mess.

He said he hadn't looked at it, which is his loss.

De la Vega said he's looking at everything from charging people to drive in congested areas to creating one-way thoroughfares to synchronizing every light in the city.

But the larger plan is to "maintain a first-class bus system" and get the Exposition light-rail line going, extend the Gold Line to the San Gabriel Valley and the Eastside, take the Green Line to the airport and the Red Line to the sea.

Sounds lovely, except that the city doesn't have $27 billion sitting around, and even if it did, the mayor hasn't sold me on whether rail would be the best use of that money in a city where people go in a million different directions to get here and there. Even at that, it would take years to get any of those lines in place, and we've got a crisis now.

De la Vega said the city is looking at twisting the governor's arm and turning up the heat on Washington as well as considering a sales tax or a bond.

"There is no magic wand," he said.

Yeah, no kidding. There's not even a formal transit plan for the city to begin debating.

It would help, I told de la Vega and Szabo, if the mayor and other public officials stopped taking huge campaign checks from developers and rubber-stamping their projects until we get some of the transit in place.

Villaraigosa, if you ask me, is now testing the limits of big ambition. How much more might he have accomplished by now if he hadn't devoted so much time to a school takeover bid that so far has been a disaster? We didn't elect him to run the school district, and he already has a full plate with homelessness, housing and public safety.

Before he takes on the schools, too, he should use his popularity and gift of gab to step up on traffic, which affects millions of people every day and is redefining our lives, wasting time, money and productivity. An uninspired City Council is asleep at the wheel on this issue, by the way, offering the mayor little or no help.

But it's Villaraigosa who should use his million-dollar smile to charm people out of their vehicles at least one day a week, encouraging them to use transit, bicycles, carpools and flexible work schedules. And given the depth of its problems, Los Angeles and the surrounding region ought to have the smartest and most enviro-friendly innovations in the world rather than having to read about what works in London or Bangkok, Argentina or Brazil.

I don't want to hear that it can't be done, and I can't think of a better way for City Hall to show it's serious than to have Villaraigosa take de la Vega's Hummer and ship it to the troops in Iraq, where it might come in handy.

Or he could trade it to the governor for a bigger chunk of state transit funding. I told him if they can't work a deal, I'll be happy to drive his tank back to the dealer and trade it in on a nice Honda or something.

De la Vega didn't respond, but I could tell he was beginning to see the wisdom of unloading this thing.

All right, I told him. We'll trade vehicles for a week. He can gradually warm to the idea of a car that's smaller than Half Dome, and I'll be high enough off the ground to get a better look at just how awful the traffic has become.

*

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com.

[RAlossi]

I'm starting to not like Steve Lopez more and more... Can't he do an interview, ask some serious questions and be done with it?

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ I agree! I used to think his witty banter was amusing and somewhat insightful. Today, I see he's just a witty writer with little long term vision.

This comment is as retarded as him bashing l.a. live a few months ago:

"Sounds lovely, except that the city doesn't have $27 billion sitting around, and even if it did, the mayor hasn't sold me on whether rail would be the best use of that money in a city where people go in a million different directions to get here and there. Even at that, it would take years to get any of those lines in place, and we've got a crisis now."

And what would work Mr. Steve Lopez? Trading in a Hummer for a Honda? Is that the key? The entire article concludes with that kind of message. A car for a car.

What he doesn't realize is that our multinodal system is not unique and cities like Taipei or Tokyo have many different centers and have managed to build transit to get people from "here to there." :rolleyes:

[solongfullerton]

However, I think the fact that he is starting at the top and pointing fingers there is definitely a good thing. The public awareness he is creating regarding De La Vega's Hummer should help create some kind of accountability to our elected officials and their appointed goons, which obviously wasn't there before.

[WesTheAngelino]

^ I agree! I used to think his witty banter was amusing and somewhat insightful. Today, I see he's just a witty writer with little long term vision.

This comment is as retarded as him bashing l.a. live a few months ago:

"Sounds lovely, except that the city doesn't have $27 billion sitting around, and even if it did, the mayor hasn't sold me on whether rail would be the best use of that money in a city where people go in a million different directions to get here and there. Even at that, it would take years to get any of those lines in place, and we've got a crisis now."

And what would work Mr. Steve Lopez? Trading in a Hummer for a Honda? Is that the key? The entire article concludes with that kind of message. A car for a car.

What he doesn't realize is that our multinodal system is not unique and cities like Taipei or Tokyo have many different centers and have managed to build transit to get people from "here to there." :rolleyes:



That is rediculous. "We've got a crisis now"......well no shit sherlock. But what exactly would fix it NOW?? Flying cars??? When your canoe starts to sink you don't just paddle faster, you take the time to make the necessary repairs.

[Codex Borgia]

That is rediculous. "We've got a crisis now"......well no shit sherlock. But what exactly would fix it NOW?? Flying cars??? When your canoe starts to sink you don't just paddle faster, you take the time to make the necessary repairs.

PERFECT!!
:) SEND THAT TO STEVE LOPEZ

:jester::whip::tup:

[Wright Concept]

That is rediculous. "We've got a crisis now"......well no shit sherlock. But what exactly would fix it NOW?? Flying cars??? When your canoe starts to sink you don't just paddle faster, you take the time to make the necessary repairs.

This cumstain is just like the other guys who did it's "reports" on King-Drew. Just finding an angle to win a Pulitzer. Around this time last year he was writing on Skid Row.

[Wright Concept]

http://www.dailynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=5054824&siteId=200

Relief en route to the 405
Bond money detoured away from Valley's I-5 section
BY HARRISON SHEPPARD, Sacramento Bureau
LA Daily News


SACRAMENTO - State transportation officials allocating billion of dollars in bond revenues to ease California's legendary gridlock have snubbed a key project on Interstate 5, where thousands of motorists travel daily through the East San Fernando Valley.

Local MTA officials had sought $1.8 billion for freeway improvements in Los Angeles County, but Caltrans has recommended allocating just $1.5 billion.

While the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would get the $730 million requested to build a badly needed car-pool lane on the northbound San Diego Freeway, no money was recommended to help build a similar lane on the Golden State Freeway between the 134 and 170 freeways, which stretch through Sun Valley, Burbank and Glendale.

Additionally, a project to widen Route138, a two-lane highway that provides a popular alternative for Las Vegas-bound motorists, would get just a fraction of the requested funding.

"The perception is that you never get your fair share, there's never enough money," said Brendan Huffman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association. "I'm sure there are going to be a lot of shortfalls in the allocations because the need is so great."

The California Transportation Commission is scheduled in late February to allocate money from the $4.5billion Corridor Mobility Improvement Account - the first round of funding from the $19.9billion transportation bond.

Huffman said even though the I-5 car-pool lane didn't make the initial cut, he is glad the San Diego Freeway is still on the list.

"The 405 has regional importance. It also has national importance. So much of the nation's goods movement occurs on that corridor," Huffman said.

"There's not enough money for everything. It's unfortunate we didn't get the money for the I-5, but on the bright side, we can get some for the 405."

Overall, the MTA, which is responsible for the county's transit infrastructure, submitted six projects for funding. The bonds would have paid about $1.8billion toward the $3.6billion cost of the projects.

In forwarding its recommendations to the state commission, the California Department of Transportation pared the MTA request by about $300million.

That eliminated $73million sought to help build the $606million I-5 car-pool lane.

Caltrans also scaled back a request to widen Route138, also called Pearblossom Highway, which sees heavy truck traffic and a relatively high accident rate. The MTA had sought $111million toward the $138million project, but Caltrans recommended just $15.8million.

MTA officials said that even without Caltrans' recommendation, they can lobby the Transportation Commission in the hope of getting funding for the local projects.

While MTA officials plan to seek alternate funding sources and to apply for future bond disbursements, they said the local projects could be delayed without the initial infusion of cash.

"The (lack of) Caltrans' blessing does not rule us out yet, but it does make it a little harder to make our case for these projects that were on the short list," said David Yale, the MTA's director of regional programming.

Caltrans officials said that in allocating funding for this portion of the bond funds, they will follow a formula that gives Southern California 60percent of the $4.5billion revenue pot, with Northern California getting the balance.

Because of its size and the scope of its problems, Los Angeles County can expect to receive about one-third of the total.

"There's not a lot of room here to play pork-barrel politics," Caltrans spokesman David Anderson said. "It's established formula, and for the most part it's the regular process, to provide the public with the accountability they deserve."

State Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Van Nuys, said he expects the state Transportation Commission to make its decisions based on need rather than politics.

"It's clear that lessons have been learned. One is that the people want to see the bonds that were approved translated into specific projects sooner rather than later," he said.

Still, local elected officials hope to be able to convince the Transportation Commission of the critical need for local projects.

Sen. George Runner, R-Lancaster, for example, said he frequently travels Route138 and understands the need to widen the highway. He noted, however, that millions of dollars have already been secured to make some improvements to the two-lane thoroughfare.

"This is just basically the first crack at the bond money that the voters passed in November," he said. "We'll come back and try both the additional bond dollar pots that are available, and the ongoing funding that we have with (the gasoline-tax measure) Proposition42 and other funding sources."

Once the Corridor Mobility Improvement money is disbursed, several new rounds of funding will quickly follow, officials said, including:

Bonds would pay half

Following a formula

$2 billion for the State Transportation Improvement Program. About $500million will go to projects of statewide interest, with the rest distributed to counties, based on population and the number of registered vehicles. Los Angeles County, the nation's largest, is expected to get a substantial share for its project list.

$750 million for the State Highway Operation and Protection Program. About $500million will go to improve and maintain freeways, with the rest paying for traffic light synchronization programs. Los Angeles is expected to get a sizable portion because of its major synchronization efforts.

$2 billion for local streets. The money will be distributed by the state controller based on formulas using population, lane miles and registered vehicles. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed spending $600million in the fiscal 2007-08 budget, so the money cannot be spent until July1 or later.

$3.6 billion for public transit and rail projects. The money would be distributed by the state controller, based on various formulas. Schwarzenegger had proposed spending $600million in 2007-08.

Other parts of the transportation bond go toward rail projects, goods movement, port security, bridge retrofits, air quality and school buses.

harrison.sheppard

@dailynews.com

(916) 446-6723

[DJM19]

There should be more federal money for these roads heavily trafficed by goods. These things are distributed nation-wide and so are of importance to the whole nation.

And because LA transit aims to keep traffic on these freeways at bay somewhat, its also important that the nation invest heavily in LA transit. ;)

[stuckintraffic]

I never got what the rationale was in creating more freeway lanes. It seems like creating more lanes (carpool or otherwise) like they're doing currently on the 405 between LAX and the Sepulveda pass is like putting a band-aid on an artery wound.
With the city's density increasing, it seems like added lanes may alleviate pressure slightly at first, but in another 10 years we're going to be back where we started: bumper-to-bumper gridlock hell 10 or more hours out of the day.

[WesTheAngelino]

^ You learn that in any basic urban planning class about transportation. More lanes might alleviate some traffic at first, but very soon things return to critical mass.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

I never got what the rationale was in creating more freeway lanes. It seems like creating more lanes (carpool or otherwise) like they're doing currently on the 405 between LAX and the Sepulveda pass is like putting a band-aid on an artery wound.
With the city's density increasing, it seems like added lanes may alleviate pressure slightly at first, but in another 10 yearswe're going to be back where we started: bumper-to-bumper gridlock hell 10 or more hours out of the day.


10 years???? I think it's gonna be probably less than that! :(

[LongBeachUrbanist]

Steve Lopez has this 'everyman' complex, where he thinks we're all angry about de la Vega's Hummer.

That guy can ride a lawnmower or a unicorn to work for all I care, as long as he helps his boss AV get the subway built.

[cookiejarvis]

Steve Lopez has this 'everyman' complex, where he thinks we're all angry about de la Vega's Hummer.

That guy can ride a lawnmower or a unicorn to work for all I care, as long as he helps his boss AV get the subway built.

:banaride: oh, look! Here comes Jaime de la Vega riding a llama! Good job Steve!

Yeah, Steve Lopez is on a bit of an ego trip right now. He's a perfectly good writer, but he needs an editor to serve him up some humility and perspective. Getting de la Vega to drive something other than a Hummer isn't going to solve our countywide traffic problems.

[Wright Concept]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-fares26jan26,0,6589570.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials

EDITORIALS
Raise the bus fares
The MTA is deep in the red, making a fare hike -- not seen in more than a decade -- a reasonable decision.

January 26, 2007

TAKING THE BUS or train in Los Angeles might soon get a little more expensive. Believe it or not, that's a good thing.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority hasn't raised single-ride fares since 1995; adjusting for inflation, local transit riders are paying 20% less than they did a dozen years ago. The result is a system that has long had to cannibalize itself to placate two groups: federal monitors who refused to allow service reductions and a small but politically potent group of rider advocates who won't accept fare hikes. To maintain service on a budget deep in the red, the MTA has raided its maintenance budget, pared its administration and depleted its reserves.

No big-city transit system in the country is self-supporting. On average, systems get about 40% of their operating budgets from fares. But the MTA covers only about 24%; the rest comes from sales taxes and state and local sources. Other cities also charge more to ride the bus — a daily pass costs $9 in Boston, $8 in Atlanta and $5 in Chicago. It's just $3 in L.A.

For the last decade, the MTA has been handcuffed by a federal consent decree to reduce overcrowding, giving a judge huge power over budget decisions. Any discussion of raising fares, meanwhile, has been met with howls of protest from the Bus Riders Union, whose 1994 lawsuit about overcrowding and a proposed increase first led to the consent decree. But the decree ended in October.

That doesn't mean the newly empowered MTA board is eager to raise fares. The Bus Riders Union has shown that it can scare politicians from doing anything that might trigger an accusation of "transit racism." No politician wants to be accused of making life harder for the low-income people, largely nonwhite, who rely on public transit.

But the board doesn't have much choice. The MTA faces a $105-million shortfall in next fiscal year's budget, which begins July 1. Though the agency is hoping the state will bail it out by returning $100 million in gas-tax money that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to seize, that's a long shot. A board committee is scheduled to discuss the financial situation in a few weeks, though the budget probably won't be approved until at least May.

With roughly 450 million transit rides a year, a modest increase in daily fares and monthly passes could go a long way. Still, to balance the budget, some service also will have to be cut.

L.A. faces challenges unique among U.S. cities in encouraging new people to ride public transit and accommodating a huge population of transit-dependent residents. The MTA is right to try to keep fares low. But the agency's budget woes have been worsening for years because tough decisions have been deferred. It's time to raise fares.


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