Comments on: Streetscast: Emily Gabel Luddy

By: EGL

EGL — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:44:05 +0000

Hat Tip to Damien from the Studio. We sent the DTLA bike lane proposals to Jordann/Alta for incorporation into the Bike Plan. Nice thing was through the DT Street Standards, we already completed the environmental analysis. So this stuff was studied. I’ll be double checking our recommendations.

One hopeful outcome of the DT Project was to bring LADOT and Engineering in as partners not adversaries. We had tremendous consultants and a tremendous inter-agency team — including the CRA (the project started with the CRA, the Studio picked up the ball and advanced it down the court).

One final thing — yes it is incremental, but remember — it was all adopted by the City Council on April 24, 2009.

By: ubrayj02

ubrayj02 — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:48:00 +0000

After re-listening to this interview, I think it is really exciting to hear that City Planning is pulling everyone together into the room to “move people not cars”. Genius!

I’m a big fan of technical standards to achieve that, and not a fan of fiat style prose that planners tend to use, but they both achieve the same end of a more localized commercial retail focus to L.A.’s planning. So cool.

Plus, bike lanes in DTLA? Rad.

By: Joe Linton

Joe Linton — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:06:15 +0000

Great interview, Damien! I already had a very good impression of Emily Gabel Luddy and Simon Pastucha and these clips raise them even a couple notches higher.

Though all the clips are good, cyclists should especially listen to Clip #1 – I didn’t realize that the new downtown street standards have already approved downtown Bike Lanes for 7th, 2nd/Glendale, Figueroa and Flower! Sweeeet!

I hope these downtown standards get wrapped into the new bike plan update. Currently their draft maps don’t show these as bike lanes… they even say that 7th is infeasible. Let’s hope Emily Gabel Luddy can touch bases with her colleague Jordann Turner… you’re both in the same department… so let’s get on the same page!

By: ubrayj02

ubrayj02 — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:52:16 +0000

It is illuminating to see how our planners take themselves out of the game a bit by not relying on technical standards, and instead rely on their prose to direct transportation planning.

I think they (1) underestimate the power granted them by the charter and (2) need to look to cheap survey methods used in other countries and that have been developed domestically to combat data-driven lawsuits and engineering arguments around LOS, “mobility”, ADT, VMT, etc.

Still, it is cool to see that something productive was created from the Urban Design Studio.

It’s sad that they weren’t working on re-jiggering our highway and street classifications, but that is a huge step (I guess) and LA’s progressive planners are all about incremental change, which is the only way to do this type of thing it seems.