Rail L.A. Looking for Your Ideas to Fix L.A.’s Transportation Woes

The Prototypical American City, Los Angeles, is at a crossroads. It has grown from distant communities of missionaries and rancheros to a diverse yet separated community of suburbs, and now to an unhappily-joined community of industries and sprawl. The growth of Los Angeles as a de-centralized city has created a playground for the automobile - where no less than a six lane freeway will do, massive parking lots litter the built environment, and traffic strikes fear into anyone looking to traverse the city. It has rendered a city incapable of movement, a place where the freeway no longer allows freedom, but instead has resulted in a life informed by sigalert and strangled by traffic.

In response to the current state of the city, we are looking for a few sentences of imaginative and exotic ideas of what to do with a city beyond cars. How would you improve your environments? Perhaps with localized agriculture? A Linear Shopping Mall? Centralized Housing to encourage walking to work? 25 Selected ideas will be given to a team of artist, designers and architects, and result in a publication + exhibition of before/after collages envisioning a new pedestrian based Los Angeles. Go to www.railla.org/inmycity to share your idea or multiple ideas, and help us vision a new LA beyond cars.

To find out more about railLA and our scheduled events, go to www.railla.org.