Streetsblog Los Angeles

Going to the gym may not be enough to keep off the pounds if you drive to work. That’s the result of a study published recently in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Bike commuters gain less weight than car commuters, an Australian study found. Image: Bikes Belong

According to an Australian research team, active commuting is an effective defense against gaining weight. Among a sample of 822 Australian adults tracked over four years, people who walked or biked to work gained about two pounds less, on average, than daily car commuters.

Lead researcher Takemi Sugiyama, a behavioral epidemiologist at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, said it may be difficult for people who drive to work to find the extra time to devote to exercise.

“In order to achieve the level of physical activity needed to prevent weight gain, it may be more realistic to accumulate physical activity through active transport, rather than adding exercise to weekly leisure-time routines,” she told the Health Behavior News Service, part of the Center for Advancing Health.

The study found that engaging in “sufficient leisure-time physical activity” also helped people avoid weight gain, but that car commuters who exercised regularly in their free time still put on more pounds than active commuters.

Street conditions, of course, will have to improve to make active commuting a viable option for more people in the U.S. “For most Americans, it is challenging to find a safe route to work or shopping due to factors such as traffic concerns, lack of sidewalks, or protected bike paths,” said Penny Gordon-Larsen, a public health expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Health Behavior News Service.

Hat tip to Jay Walljasper at Bikes Belong for bringing this to our attention.

Janette Sadik-Khan addresses the UCLA Complete Streets Conference. Photo by Juan Matute.

Last Thursday UCLA hosted its third annual Complete Streets Conference in Downtown Los Angeles. I was excited to have had the opportunity to attend with such a packed line up for the all day event, with a few big names in the mix including the esteemed Janette Sadik-Khan.

During the opening presentation UCLA professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris walked the crowd through UCLA’s new document and tool kit for parklet planning entitled Reclaiming The Right of Way, incorporating some of the best practices for cities that have been doing them. She remarked that s0metimes “to think big you have to start small.” and pointed to the new Spring St. parklet in DTLA as a model for creating low cost an easily accessible opportunities for physical activity.

I had my first opportunity to listen to the LADOT’s new pedestrian coordinator Margot Ocañas in a panel discussion on implemented. There is a lot of work to be done in the ped arena for LA, an understatement, but Ocañas was a refreshing voice from the agency, and her appointment has clearly been a step in the right direction. You could hear the exasperation with dealing with LA’s bureaucracy in her voice at times, but she appeared determined to foster change. During the presentation, she showed off plans for quick modular conversion of underutilized auto space to parklets and ped plazas, among the more basic work of better crosswalk striping that began recently.

Westlake Streetcar Plaza in Seattle. (Source: SDOT)

On the same implementation panel with Ocañas were urban planner Darby Watson, an Associate at Arup, who presented on complete streets projects in Seattle and Fred Dock, Director of the Pasadena Department of Transportation. Watson discussed that in Seattle they had a successful streetcar project in their downtown that was followed by a reduction in vehicle volume on a section of street at an irregular area of intersections. Planners wanted to appropriate some of the overbuilt car space into forming a large public plaza area around the streetcar stop. They were primed to go cheap and fast for a pilot first pass, but the business community there wanted something more substantial, and contributed toward more permanent infrastructure on the first go (project details).

Watson also spoke to the issue of transit & bicycling being at odds with each other,  commenting that unfortunately “sometimes your most sustainable modes hate each other.” Although touching this issue only briefly she mentioned more careful consideration in street car design and transit islands for buses and streetcars with bike lanes behind, something more common in European bikeways, and reduces leap frogging and merging conflicts at loading points. I really wish that there were more planners in the active transport world and transit planning in the US talking more closely to each other instead of being off in separate worlds.

I had a little trouble keeping up with the adjectives & acronyms per minute of Fred Dock of the Pasadena DOT, but a few points stuck with me. He emphasized that we should focus on measuring travel times, not speeds and look at trips, not just intersections. The city of Pasadena is currently in the process of rethinking it’s LOS (level of service) standards, which are typically auto-centric, to incorporate other street users and uses. This is an area where I admittedly don’t have a lot of background on the specifics, but is of significant importance to how things are planned, designed, approved and built in California. Read more…

This week, I’m attending the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), now in it’s 20th year and currently in West Palm Beach Florida from May 9th to 12th. This is my first time attending but CNU has long been influential to my thinking. Many of my books devoted to urban topics are written by prominent leaders of CNU, and many of these authors are speaking or contributing to the conference.  These writers attempt to distill and articulate what really makes cities thrive, and how we went wrong in so much of America.

But CNU is also a movement and an organization that is embracing the need for fresh ideas. A sort of mini conference within the conference on Wednesday known as NextGen, has become an incubating dialogue for younger attendees to foster new ideas or approaches.

A packed house at the CNU Conference. Photo:Gary Kavanagh

It’s difficult to summarize exactly what CNU is and all it encompasses.  CNU is a gathering of very bright minds who give a damn about making our cities and towns more livable. Equally important is creating models to develop urban environments that are sustaining and viable, not just ecologically, but economically. Throwing in the most environmentally benign forms of transportation infrastructure itself isn’t good enough alone. The land use and return on investment served by that infrastructure must be in balance, not just in the short term, but over the long life of repair and eventual replacement of that infrastructure.

As of this writing I’ve been here for two days of CNU20, but I’ve consumed so many new things to think about it cannot adequately be reflected in today’s story.  Here are some things that stand out so far.

Pretty much everyone at CNU is approachable and not only willing but eager to chat, from that person who happens to be sitting next to you at a session, up to the renowned prolific authors or city builders. Whenever I made an effort, I could hop into a dialogue in the halls.  Jumping into any conversation you find interesting is actively encouraged. During “open source sessions,” with small break out groups, one of the few rules is to vote with your feet. If you aren’t either learning or contributing where you are at, walk somewhere else. Read more…

Mikey, Jonathan and George after being frisked on Ave. 50 and York Blvd. in Highland Park.

Mikey, Jonathan, and George were waiting for a friend just a few feet from the corner of Ave. 50 and York Blvd. in Highland Park when a police car pulled up. Two cops got out and told them to turn around, spread their legs, and put their hands behind their backs.

The police proceeded to give them a very thorough pat-down, including reaching their hands into the boys’ pants and turning their pockets inside out. They rifled through the boys’ wallets for ID and then ran their information. They poked around in the truck the boys had been standing next to, even though it wasn’t theirs.

The boys were clean — something the kids had told the police themselves, to no avail. Without an apology or even a “Have a nice day,” the police were gone. The whole incident had taken only a few minutes.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

The police had been looking for weapons, they said. It happens to them a lot. It happens to all their friends, too.

It was normal, they shrugged.

While it might be the “norm,” it shouldn’t be “normal” for minority and lower/lower-middle class youth to feel they could be treated to public TSA-style pat-downs any and every time they strike out into their neighborhood streets. Besides being unlawful, such incidents are demoralizing, dehumanizing, and disempowering. Because these incidents generally happen in view of everyone, they also have the unfortunate effect of communicating to the more recent arrivals that the minority youth are trouble, while effectively telling these youth that they are not welcome in the very neighborhoods they grew up in.

Jonathan, George and Mikey are searched by police while they wait for a friend.

Livable Streets Should Be Livable for All Read more…

Local uber-planner Ryan Snyder looks on as international planning rock star Gil Penalosa speaks at last Friday's "Complete Streets Conference" sponsored by UCLA's Complete Streets Initiative. Photo: Juan Matute. For more images, click here.

The idea of “complete streets”—that is, streets designed with all users, not just cars, in mind—isn’t a new one, but it hasn’t caught on everywhere yet. On Friday, planners, engineers, advocates, and students convened at the second annual UCLA Complete Streets for California conference at the Kyoto Grand Hotel downtown to renew their excitement in complete streets, see photos of cool projects around the country, and discuss how to make complete streets the norm in California. Advocates hope a widespread focus on complete streets in California could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging more walking and biking, but also promote healthier lifestyles, as explained by UCLA public health professor Richard Jackson.

The head cheerleader was keynote speaker, Gil Penalosa, executive director of healthy communities nonprofit 8-80 Cities and former government supporter of complete streets initiatives in Bogota, Colombia (where Ciclovia, a model for Los Angeles’ CicLAvia, happens every Sunday). He made a case for designing cities where people age 8 to age 80 would feel safe and able to move around—“Mobility is a human right.”

He reminded attendees that Californians aren’t unique in their attachment to automobiles, and that some of their attachment may be a myth—one-third of Los Angeles residents do not drive. He offered encouragement like, “If these cities [Copenhagen, Vancouver] can do it, any city in California can do it.” If there’s a will, there’s a way, given, of course, the right combination of funding and support from city staff, politicians, and citizens.

In Los Angeles there’s a unique combination of challenges, not the least of which is a minimum of four different agencies own the streets, reminded Tim Papandreou, deputy director at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. A former Angeleno, Papandreou brings both a local perspective and that of a distanced observer to his view of how L.A. develops.

The property owner owns the area outside his business, but the Departments of Public Works, City Planning, Metro, and others, also have a piece of the puzzle. Still, Papandreou believes a change in favor of more pedestrian and bicycle-oriented streets is possible in Los Angeles—“It’s going to happen,” he says. “The political environment will change. In San Francisco, you were crazy to run on a complete streets platform 10 years ago. Now, you’re crazy not to.” Read more…

Episode 4: Searching for Shangri La – (preview) from MPC on Vimeo.

(Jackson will be speaking as part of the UCLA’s Luskin Center for Innovation’s “Complete Streets Conference” this Friday.  Tickets are sold out, and despite an earlier report they won’t be accepting walk-ins .   If you check back here Monday for Streetsblog’s coverage. You can also read his thoughts on the importance of a federal transportation bill that caters to healthy communities in a 2011 op/ed published on Streetsblog.- DN)

Dr. Richard Jackson is the head of UCLA’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences.  While he’s been on television as part of the Designing Healthy Communities series on PBS and is known as an advocate for public health in American planning, he still remembers his roots.

Specifically, he remembers how he was able to ride a bus in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey anywhere he needed to go.  That experience helped shape how he views transportation and its impact on the health of our communities and the health of our children.

“Because of our car dependent sprawl, Angelenos can only do one, maybe two big things in a day,” Jackson remarks.  ”In other cities, you can do three or more.”

But a well built transportation network, the kind that gives people safe and attractive options to get from place to place, provides more than just a times savings.  It allows for a healthy lifestyle not possible in all communities.

Robert Ross, president of the California Endowment, tells audiences that he can determine how long someone will live based on their zip code.  Jackson agrees.  “In Oakland California, the average difference in life span of people living in the higher income zip codes and the people living in the lower income zip codes is about fifteen years. It doesn’t need to be that way.”

While transportation isn’t the only thing holding these areas back, access to health care, clean air and healthy food all play a major part, a car-centered transportation system is a major challenge.  Naturally, the areas that have freeways criss-crossing the community tend to be the same ones lacking in hospitals, supermarkets and farmers markets, and attractive open space.

“It’s such a huge disadvantage to be poor in America, because there is such a difficulty gaining access to physical activity, to parkland, to decent and healthy food,” Jackson remarks.

“We’ve built America in a way that is fundamentally unhealthy.”
Read more…

Carter created a 'word cloud' of his notes at the March kickoff.

Back in March, Carter Rubin covered the kickoff of an interesting project, funded by the LA County Public Health’s RENEW Grant Program and the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, to create a new street manual for road construction and redesign in Los Angeles County.

The Model Street Design Manual will be publicly unveiled on Thursday, October 6th at 6:30 P.M. in the Metro Board Room.  All are welcome to attend and will be treated to a brief overview of the manual, and a chance to speak with the team that worked on the manual.  Light refreshments will be served.

The new manual won’t have the power of law behind it, but because of the involvement of local government agencies and because the manual is funded through a County grant, it could provide a starting point for the County, municipalities within the County and pretty much anyone else who wants to use it to re-imagine their streets as public spaces and not just places for cars to run through.

The manual will be published digitally on the LA County website in two formats — as a Microsoft Word Document and an Adobe InDesign format — so that, in the words of Ryan Snyder, the lead planner for the project, “cities can use it, adopt it, steal it, and plagiarize it.”

(We’re kicking off a new series where transportation professionals write about some of the best practices in their city and how they could work in L.A.  Who better to start with than our favorite Occidental College Board Member? The NYC Plaza Program is a popular topic on our sister-site in New York.  – DN)

New York is the city that never seats.

With more than eight million residents and millions more commuters and visitors sharing just over 300 square miles, New Yorkers have long tried to squeeze everything they can out of every day and every inch of the city, but there’s just not enough places to sit and enjoy it all.

Plans for a plaza at Fulton Street and Marcy Avenue, in the first phase of the plaza program. Image: NYC DOT

While New York’s landmark buildings, parks and cultural institutions get a lot of attention, there’s less consideration given to the city’s most important real estate: the streets and sidewalks themselves, which make up 80 percent of the city’s public space.

With another one million people expected to move to New York over the next 20 years, every inch of this shared space will have to count. Our streets must be designed to be safer for everyone and, critically, they must be designed to invite people to walk outside and linger—to stop and take in everything the city has to offer.

Whenever we lay down traffic cones for a plaza project in New York, and long before the benches are installed, pedestrians immediately move in and take up the most New York of rituals: They sit down, even right on the street.
Los Angeles has 6,500 miles of streets—just as many miles as New York, and just as many opportunities to think about how its streets are being used. But just as most Angelinos aren’t lucky enough to live walking distance of Venice Beach, not everyone in New York is lucky enough to live near Central Park. Read more…

Complete streets provide safe spaces for all users, not just motorists. Photo: Streetswiki

Earlier this week, 12 senators, led by Tom Harkin (D-IA), introduced the Complete Streets Act of 2011 (S.1056), a companion to the House bill we reported on a few weeks back. The purpose of the bills is to push states and metropolitan planning organizations to fully consider incorporating pedestrian and bicycle safety measures when roads are built or reconstructed.

Like the House version, the Senate bill [PDF] would require states and MPOs to craft and adhere to complete streets policies. It goes further than the House bill, however, in that it also requires agencies to consider cyclists, pedestrians, and transit when building roads with federal funds. Both bills have been weakened from a previous incarnation, however — they no longer carry penalties for noncompliance.

Complete streets are streets with safe places for everyone, whether they’re in a car, on foot, on a bicycle, or riding transit. Some “street treatments” that are used to make streets more complete are sidewalks, bike lanes, special bus lanes, comfortable and accessible public transportation stops, frequent and safe crossing opportunities, median islands, accessible pedestrian signals, curb extensions, narrower travel lanes, and roundabouts, just to name a few.

Twenty-five states and more than 200 local jurisdictions have adopted Complete Streets policies. Every state except Maine, Nevada, Alaska and South Dakota has at least one city or town that has enacted a Complete Streets policy, according to a recent report [PDF]. According to the National Complete Streets Coalition:

The power of the Complete Streets movement is that it fundamentally redefines what a street is intended to do, what goals a transportation agency is going to meet, and how the community will spend its transportation money. It breaks down the traditional separation of “highways,” “transit,” and “biking/walking,” and instead focuses on the desired outcome of a transportation system that supports safe use of the roadway for everyone, by whatever means they are traveling.

Read more…

(As I type these words, UCLA is hosting the Complete Streets for Los Angeles Conference in Downtown Los Angeles.  As you can guess, I’m not at the conference.  To provide coverage, we asked some of the presenters to allow us to publish their presentations.  First up: regular Streetsblog contributor James Rojas.  We’ll have more next week. – DN)

As great numbers of immigrants settle into Los Angeles’ suburbs, they bring with them a different understanding and use of streets. The Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern cities, towns and villages, where they come from are physically and socially structured differently than the suburbs. In many places around the world streets are used for all types of activities, which include, walking, vending, working, socializing, and playing. These activities create a sense of place in these communities and define their public spaces.

LA’s streets have been designed and zoned to predominantly move cars all other activities are forbidden or marginalized.  This sets the struggle between LA’s majority minority populations for the use of streets and the city policies.

LA’s car oriented designed streets have become a creative canvas of guerilla interventions by LA’s ethnic communities as they retrofit them to ft their needs. Places like Koreatown, the Fashion District, Chinatown, Little Armenia, and the urbiquous Latino neighborhoods illustrate these creative interventions.

Through out Los Angeles one can witness the cultural behavior patterns of immigrants and ethnics groups transforming streets. This conflict can be as subtle and ephemeral as a few Armenian men gathering in the sidewalk in front of McDonalds on Western and Sunset to play a board game on tables or Russians sitting out in front of their West Hollywood on warm evening. The struggle can be as pronounced as the streets of Chinatown or Latino Neighborhoods where these communities are always in conflict with the physical design of the street and city policies. Read more…