Ah, no he can’t. The Mayor might be able to advocate same but he has no final direct control of how funds are spent. He only controls 4 votes on the metro Board, plus long range plans are drawn via complex processes involving SCAG, the feds, Air Resources Board etc. And the realpolitick is that to build consensus requires dealing with various dueling priorities, etc.

But then that is at a level of nuance that evades Mr. Damien Goodmon, despite his claims of superior political expertise.

The photo is from the LA Weekly, but the credit should go to Ted Soqui. I guess those people at Metro just automatically take credit for everything.

@Damien G.:

Article by Dan Koeppel about Dept. of D.I.Y. bike lanes, published in Bicycling magazine:
http://www.bicycling.com/article/0,6610,s1-3-583-19643-1,00.html

It does have the nation’s most productive light rail line (40,000 boardings on a 7.5 mile line) and just getting that project was a major task. Tom DeLay once tried to withhold all federal funding in an effort to get Harris County’s MTA to stop building the line. Even Henry Waxman didn’t egregiously abuse his powers in stopping the subway in the 1980s.

Denver’s Light Rail was NOT built “all at once” as you state.

It was originally opened from Broadway and I-25 (Gates Rubber) to 30th and Downing in Five Points through downtown via the Stout/California couplet. This opening in 1994.

Then it was extended alongside US85 to Littleton, opening in 2000

Finally the T-Rex portion was built to Denver Tech Center/Lincoln along I-25 and to the Nine Mile Park & Ride along I-225 in 2006.

Built faster than LA Metro? Sort of. Built all at once? No.

‘Taken For A Ride’ is one of the great propagators of the “GM destroyed LA’s transit” urban legend, because many well-meaning people will believe anything the see on PBS. As a long-time student of LA history, I’ve spent s lot of time researching the Red Cars and their history from primary sources, and I have to say that Bianco’s review strikes me as accurate in its particulars and reasonable in its conlusions.

And I was saying it more as street theater: chalking up 20-25 miles of bike lanes over a week or something like that, and recording LADOT painting over them.

Plans are still afoot, but it’s always small-scale stuff that is more symbolic than anything else.

umberto: you guys ever think about just going out there one week/weekend and painting/chalking $100M worth of lines on the ground?

Really? I used this image once before and someone at Metro took credit for it. I’ll have to go back in my notes, this was like 20 months ago, and find out who. I wonder if they were just jerking my chain

That’s like saying LA is not dense enough for rail. There are plenty of places where bikes will work.

Thank God Measure R passed. Otherwise we wouldn’t even be entertaining this possibility.

The article is filled with decades of missteps and failures despite well-funded and visionary plans, so I am tempted to take the viability of Villaraigosa’s timeline with a grain of salt.

IMHO, what we could use is a west-coast version of Janette Sadik-Khan, someone who will push a high-profile and quickly-constructed bicycle network as an affordable part of L.A.’s transportation system. This will be the person that history will label a visionary.

I think Antonio doesn’t care about bikes because we such small potatoes. For $100 million he could make LA the most bike-able city on the west coast in one year. $100 million wouldn’t pay for a bathroom at a train station. There aren’t enough big contracts to throw around, and milk for campaign contributions when it comes to cycling.

I have long complained (not that anyone was listening) that the primary with L.A.’s transit system was that it’s not a system, but a series of trains that maybe, one day, will connect into a working network if we’re lucky enough to live long enough to see it completed.

The brilliance of Denver’s light rail system is that it was built out all at once, so they had a viable transit system from day one. While funding is an obvious hurdle, speeding up these projects would give the city the functional, working system it needs to actually get people out of their cars.

Now if the mayor would put the same sort of commitment behind building a functional bikeway system, we might actually be getting somewhere.

http://la.streetsblog.org/2009/10/30/todays-headlines-417/#comment-45471

As I noted at LA Observed in a guest blogger entry

While it is well poised for federal funding (a full funding grant agreement in the parlance of transitspeak) the reauthorization of federal transportation funding has been bogged down due to that old bugaboo, too many needs and not enough money to satisfy them (plus the trust funds that draw on gas taxes are falling short of even funding the status quo).

http://www.laobserved.com/visiting/2009/10/take_transit_seriously_la_obse.php

Everyone knows the federal gas tax is long overdue to be raised but seemingly nobody wants to broach the subject, as is clear from the excellent coverage on this blog by Elana Schor tracking the status of reautjhorization. Health care and energy are the big topics right now and transportation has been mostly put aside as “we’ll get back to it” status.

I have long felt there exists the outline of a possible grand alliance of mutual cooperation between LA and other big cities (like the bay area, NY, Denver) that could be worked out since they also have big projects that need funded and having everyone work together to increase the size of the pie is a better strategy than fighting over scraps. I wish I knew if that is what the lobbyists the city of L.A. and Metro have in Washington are working toward (maybe with the near secretive New Starts Working Group).