Streetsblog Los Angeles

What can I say? I’m a sucker for hometown pride. I was born about 60 miles downriver from the Motor City in Toledo, Ohio, a town sometimes known affectionately as “Little Detroit.” I remember when it was considered treasonous to drive a foreign car.

That’s the brilliance of these ads. They appeal to our inner urge to root for the underdog, our nostalgia for simpler days. Those flashes of a grand-looking Woodward Avenue. The water tower that proudly shouts “Birmingham, Michigan.”

It’s also very telling, the commodification of Detroit. It says something about Americans’ new-found fascination with cities — the same fascination that has inspired many young entrepreneurs who are working to reinvent Detroit.

But Chrysler is selective about the Detroit it celebrates. Absent is the ruin that now accounts for a large share of the city. Invisible is the crushing poverty, constantly present in the urban landscape. The driver in the most recent installment, traveling out from the center of Detroit to its suburbs, is in control of his fate (thanks to his snappy ride) in a way few in the region really are.

Despite the defiant sentimentality of its ads, Chrysler, as well, is selective about its commitment to the city of Detroit.

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Villaraigosa at the L.A. Auto Show in 2010. It's ok, we know you're only smiling because you're daydreaming about the CicLAvia you had ridden in the month before. Photo:Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images North America via zimbio

Picture this.  One day one of the most important political figures in the city stands in front of a major Downtown attraction and announces that train service to this attraction will be increased dramatically in the coming weeks.  The next day, a major political figure, flanked by an up-and-coming political star and the City Council President, stands with the head of the local automotive dealer lobbying group and announces a political proposal to end business taxes for car dealerships.

In most parts of the world, that would be a sign of a hot political campaign with two candidates offering competing visions for a city’s transportation  future.  In Los Angeles, it’s just two days in the life of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.  While car dealerships are praising the Mayor’s proposal, supporters of green transportation options are puzzled by today’s announcement.

“This city can’t take too many more of Mayor Villaraigosa’s ‘business friendly’ policies,” writes Alex Thompson, President of Bikeside. “The guy extends Metro hours one minute, and decides he wants more car dealerships the next.”

Earlier today, Villaraigosa, Council President Eric Garcetti and Councilman Mitch Englander stood toe-to-toe with the car dealership lobby and announced a plan to end local business taxes for car dealerships operating in the City of Los Angeles.  The plan makes sense from a short-term economic point of view.  Auto dealers produce substantially more sales tax than business tax. In 2010, auto dealers accounted for only $3.6 million in business tax revenue but $29 million in sales tax revenue.

But the three pols see a potential sales tax boom if they can convince the car dealerships that have fled the city for Glendale, Pasadena, and Beverly Hills to come back.  Since 1986, the City of Los Angeles has lost 95 auto dealers. If those 95 dealers were still operating within the City limits, Los Angeles would have an additional $57 million per year in sales tax revenue.  In addition to the new tax proposal, Villaraigosa also announced that Beverly Hills Porsche is moving from Beverly Hills to Los Angeles.  The Mayor’s Office of Economic and Business Policy helped to persuade Beverly Hills Porsche to come to Los Angeles by pulling department directors together and speeding the permitting process.

“For too long, LA’s business tax has driven auto dealers outside the City limits,” said Villaraigosa.  ”It’s time to reform the way we tax auto dealers so that we can bring more jobs and more sales tax to our City.” Read more…

First, let’s state for the record that Ken Bensinger and the Los Angeles Times did a public service by shining a harsh light on the largely unregulated “Buy Here Pay Here” used car dealership industry.  Too many dealers in this industry and preying on poor people desperate for a car by intentionally driving up their debt so that in the end the “dealership” ends up with the shoppers money and gets a chance to sell the car all over again.

Because taking advantage of people of lesser means is patriotic.

In the third part of the three part series, Bensinger and the Times recommend finding ways to make car ownership more affordable for people of lesser means.  Not wanting to dismiss this solution without a better one of my own, I asked a group of people who regularly appear on Streetsblog as authors or as sources in our stories for their thoughts and solutions.

The narrative is what you would expect, that subsidizing car ownership (or further subsidizing car ownership) is not the answer that’s going to make vampire industries that prey on the poor’s transportation needs go away.  We had a burst of good answers, many of which are outlined below.  Full articles by Occidental College Professor Mark Vallianatos and Eastside Bike Club Founder Carlos Morales will be published tomorrow and Thursday.  Some of the other answers are summarized below, and full text of these answers can be found here.

Joe Linton, Streetsblog Board Chair and CicLAvia consultant: Many public subsidies to reduce the cost of owning a car are already in place: from free parking to subsidized gas to huge public investments in expensive car-centered infrastructure (and those are more direct subsidies – there are externalities like environmental and health care costs that are caused by and not paid for by the driving public.) No Los Angeles driver today ever pays the real cost of their driving. They’re already getting a bargain.

I think that if we’re looking to subsidize transportation in ways that are good for low-income people, it’s better for the public to invest in a balanced system that gives people choices.Subsidizing transit, walking, and bicycling will yield mobility that’s affordable for all and accessible to all. If low-income people have many viable choices, then they are less at the mercy of loan-shark car dealerships. Read more…

The Los Angeles Times wraps its three part series on the “Buy Here Pay Here” used car dealers — those that often times con low income people into high interest loans for low quality cars — with a plea for policy to make cars cheaper.

My favorite "Buy Here Pay Here" promotional picture.

For more than a century, efforts to help the disadvantaged have focused on education, healthcare, nutrition and housing. Almost nothing has been done to help the working poor afford cars, despite research that indicates it would help alleviate poverty.

About 1 in 4 needy U.S. families do not have a car, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation. That’s a serious handicap for the millions of Americans who don’t have access to robust mass transit.

Oh, so close to getting to a sustainable solution, so close. Read more…

It's official. Southland residents are sick of sprawl and massive highway projects. Source: Key Findings from Recent Southern California Survey on Transportation and Land Use Planning

Even as Los Angeles embraces an expanded transit and bicycle program, the rest of Southern California is still pictured as a sprawling wasteland of highways and subdivisions.  However, that’s not what the people that live in the Southland want according to a new survey released by Move L.A., the American Lung Association and the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Instead, Southlanders want the kind of dense mixed use development and short commutes over McMansions and sprawlways.

The survey, completed by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates, shows that voters in the six county region served by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) overwhelmingly support expanding and investing in transit over investing in highways.  Even when voters backed highway spending, there was more support for a “Fix It First” approach than funneling more money into mammoth road expansion projects.

“If Southern California voters were in charge of our transportation plans, the region would look very different,”Amanda Eaken, NRDC’s deputy director of sustainable communities, added. that “Voters understand what so many studies have told us: widening roads will not solve traffic congestion. Instead, designing communities that increase our mobility and freedom — helping us to get out of our cars — is what will ultimately solve the problem.”

The survey was released just days before SCAG is scheduled to vote on the region’s Long Range Transportation Plan this Thursday.  The SCAG Region encompasses six counties: Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and Imperial, 18 million people and 38,000 square miles.  Organizations such as the three who commissioned this report and the Safe Routes to Schools National Partnership have lobbied SCAG officials and testified at public hearings helping to create a far more progressive transportation plan than SCAG has passed in the past. Read more…

If there’s a better example of the completely debilitating impact our car culture has on America’s poorer communities, I can’t think of a better one than the “Buy Here Pay Here” used car dealership industry highlighted by the Los Angeles Times in a special series running this week.  The first piece in the series, “A Vicious Cycle in the Used Car Industry” ran in this morning’s paper with follow-ups coming tomorrow and Wednesday.

Desperate to avoid multi-hour (or just downright impossible) transit commutes, less affluent workers get taken in by a “Buy Here Pay Here used-car” salesman who offers a loan at a ridiculously high rate of interest to purchase a beater car.  If the person can’t make all the payments, the dealer forecloses and looks for another victim after reaping thousands from the previous customer.  If the person can, they end up paying tens of thousands of dollars for a car worth tens of hundreds.  The dealership escapes oversight by being both the seller and lender and falling into an industry that is mostly unregulated.

While “Viscous Cycle” is full of pretty horrifiying statistics, reporter Ken Besinger also spends time on some of the individual stories that put a face on the tragedy.  The first story is about a single mother in Hawthorne who declared bankruptcy, so the dealership couldn’t come to her house and take the car, so they tricked her into coming back to their lot where they parked the car in with other vehicles with her children trapped inside.  The story also features a less traumatic, but still horrifying, story of a dealership that apparently has math problems, having people who don’t speak English sign English-language contracts that mis-represent what they are actually paying.

And of course, the entire process aims at taking people of lesser means’ lower income away from them.  The Times notes: Read more…

GM pulled its offensive ad that tried to depict biking as uncool in response to complaints from bicycling advocates, but they’re still running this ad, showing what a drag it can be a pedestrian because cars will ruin your day. (Best just to get your own car and ruin someone else’s day.)

A GM spokesman said that they listened to the complaints they received about the bike ad and “there are changes underway.”

“The content of the ad was developed with college students and was meant to be a bit cheeky and humorous and not meant to offend anybody,” said Tom Henderson. “We respect bikers and many of us here are cyclists.”

But the hell with you, pedestrians! Sucks to be you, out on the street getting exercise and sunlight and not sitting in a two-ton steel bubble!

We renew our call for the GM marketing department to get with the program already.

(Tanya Snyder takes a somewhat more serious tone at Streetsblog Capitol Hill.  Alao, the Times reports that G.M. is pulling the advertisement out of its rotation.- DN)

Does reality suck?  Apparently to General Motors.

Yesterday, the company’s year old advertising campaign to college students received a fresh round of scorn yesterday as Bike Portland published their most recent print advertisement, found in the Daily Bruin and heaped on loads of scorn.

But here’s the thing, just like State Farm’s Humiliated Cyclist ad campaign, the meaning of the advertisement is open to interpretation.  I see the ads as cleverly disguised apologies for the damage wrought by America’s Car Culture obsession aided by General Motors’ advertising and lobbying activities.

Image via the Daily Bruin via Bike Portland

A UCLA undergraduate who lives with her parents because of family debt partially caused by decades of car payments, stumbles wearily out of the house. Her Dad insists that he drive her to her first class in the morning, even though they live in Westwood. So the two walk to the car parked on the sidewalk in front of her house and they head off to class. She keeps the window rolled up to avoid the air pollution created during the morning rush hour on Westwood Boulevard. Just as she thinks, “Reality Sucks, I never should have given up the bike I road in high school for this crap,” (stopped pedaling to start driving…) a cyclist pulls up. She gives him her best come hither smile, but the poor cyclist is tired of being sexually harassed because he’s constantly exercising so he pretends not to see her. Besides, he’s running a little early today because he needs to finish the Model Street Manual encouraging healthier streets published by the Luskin Center for Innovation before he can read the most recent update on UCLA’s Be a Green Commuter Blog. Read more…

This banner appeared over the I-10 briefly on Saturday morning. L.A. without cars? It was kind of nice. Photo: Jonathan Weiss

There are two theories to transportation engineering and traffic.  One theory is that traffic is like a raging river.  If you block it in one place, it will flow someplace else.  If you add more space for it to flow, it will flow more smoothly.  This theory has dominated traffic and transportation plans for years.

This theory got kicked in the shins over the last weekend.

The other theory is that people make choices based on what they believe makes the most sense at the time.  Under that theory, if you spend a disproportionate amount of resources building and expanding highways, people will drive, even for short trips that could easily be completed on bike or foot.

If you believe the first theory, this weekend’s temporary closure of the I-405, “the most driven highway in the country,” should have been a disaster.  There should have been drivers everywhere stuck on surface streets and gridlock should have clogged up all the freeways as people used their high-tech Waze application to “Beat Carmageddon” by exercising their God-given right to drive wherever they want to.  If you believe the second, then everything should have been fine.

The sad thing is, most transportation planners, especially ones working in Greater Los Angeles, still seem to believe the first theory.  After all, while the city and surrounding area benefitted tremendously from the closure of the 405, the reason the project was closed was so that they could expand the freeway, creating another pipe to flush our car traffic through.

Sig alert.com at 3:47 P.M. on Saturday

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Photo: Associated Press

We got your predictions in the thread below, but as the weekend progresses feel free to let us know how/if Carmageddon is impacting your weekend. My first report is that we’re relieved that the news is recharging at the moment so that we have a couple of hours without helicopters flying overhead.

Also, I got a phone call from our friend Sgt. David Krumer with the LAPD asking if I would pass on the word that the LAPD kindly requests that people not try to ride their bikes on the closed portion of the I-405. They know how to read Facebook and Midnight Ridazz guys…Enjoy the weekend, we’ll be back tomorrow with coverage of the “Flight v bikes” race tomorrow.