Streetsblog Los Angeles

A standing room only audience descended on the Fashion Institute of Design on South Grand Street to listen to a presentation from the embattled Community Redevelopment Agency for a ground breaking and popular proposal to transform the South Figueroa Corridor.  When people discuss Los Angeles’ streets, they usually use terms such as “car-oriented” or “ugly.”  The new South Figueroa, aka My Figueroa, would be a truly beautiful street designed for people to walk, bike wait for transit or just enjoy life outside as well as a way to shuffle cars from one area to another.

The South Figueroa Corridor Project covers three miles of South Figueroa from 41st Street to Seventh Street as well as a half mile of 11st Street between Figueroa and Broadway, a half mile of Martin Luther King (MLK) Boulevard just south of Exposition Park, and a half mile of Bill Robertson Boulevard from into Exposition Park starting at MLK Boulevard.  While there are different proposals being studied for each part of the corridor, Oliver Schultze, from the world-renowned Gehl Architects in Copenhagen, promised that every part of the corridor would see some sort of improvement.

The project team offered three proposals for different sections of Figueroa, a “good,” “better,” and “best” options.  Whether a segment qualifies for good, better, or best depends on the amount of funding available and the current level of street life in the segment.  The good option consisted of an eight foot separated bike lane traveling the length of the corridor in each direction, an eighteen inch separator, car parking and bus bump outs, and a transit only lane for buses and streetcars.  In addition to creating a safe place for cyclists, removing them from car traffic and the sidewalk, it also created a 22 foot buffer between the sidewalk and the first regular vehicle travel lane.

As Joe Linton noted from the audience, “I love that protected bike lanes are the base proposal.”  Figueroa street would be the first street in Los Angeles to feature protected bike lanes.  In fact, no city in Los Angeles County has these special bike lanes, although Long Beach is adding some as we speak. Read more…

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs unveiled a visionary $33 million plan to remove cars from the central square of San Diego's historic Balboa Park.  They hope to raise the funds to complete the plan by the park's 100th birthday in 2015.  The plan would open up the heart of the park to a pedestrian friendly climate where children could play free of fear of passing vehicles in a clean and inviting atmosphere.  To bring this vision to reality, the city would have to remove sixty seven spaces of free parking.

As you would expect, the media is very concerned about those sixty seven parking spaces.

To make matters "worse," if Sanders and Jacobs are unable to raise the $33 million from private interests, they might have to charge for parking in the planned 900 space parking garage.  Can you imagine?  Charging people to use a public parking garage and re-investing in the area that will be effected by the thousands of cars using that garage on a daily basis.

Let the freak out begin.

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In San Francisco, the Pavement to Parks
program has launched an initiative that may someday alter the way many
dense U.S. cities decide to treat the streets of their commercial
strips.

Taking the PARK(ing) Day concept to a more permanent, logical level, the Parklets
Program has begun experimenting with trial spaces allowing businesses
to convert parking spaces into outdoor public spaces and cafes.  The
first was installed in March outside the Mojo Bicycle Café
on Divisdero Street where two parking spaces were reallocated to
people-space; now cafe tables & chairs, benches, bike parking, and
plants sit over a raised platform over the asphalt.  If all goes well
thru the evaluation period, the idea is to eventually turn the process
into a regular permitting process that business groups and communities
can apply for.  It looks good: owners of Mojo say business is up 30%
and they have had to hire more staff.

The Pavement to Parks program has already transformed a number of
community spaces in the Castro, Showplace Triangle and Guerrero Park.
We briefly look at those at well in this video.

Interested folks can see Park 101 project plans, ask questions, and
give input at a meeting preceding the monthly downtown Art Walk this
Thursday. It takes place between 4 and 6 P.M. at Caltrans
Headquarters, at 200 S. Main Street.

There are quite a few places where highway lids have been used to create park space. Successful examples include Memorial Park in La Canada and Freeway Park in Seattle. The lid idea is being explored for lots of locations in Southern California, including:

• Over the 101 Freeway from just west of Vermont Avenue to nearly Virgil Avenue - approved in the city’s Station Neighborhood Area Plan
• Over the 5 Freeway near the Lincoln/Cypress Metro Gold Line Station – shown in Metro’s and Livable Places’ Making the Connections study.
• Hollywood Central Park over the 101 Freeway from just west of Hollywood Blvd to Santa Monica Blvd
• Over the 10 Freeway from 14th to 17th Street in Santa Monica

Read more…

Yesterday the Los Angeles Times featured a story on what the Community Redevelopment Agency's (CRA) plan to bring a linear park to the corner of Olympic and Grand.  The Times does an excellent job explaining what the CRA is planning, but misses a key point.  A workshop, sponsored by the CRA and the Department of Recreation and Parks, will be held tonight to gather community feedback on what the linear park should look like.  but first, the Times explains the basics of the project:

In a city that spent the last century paving over the natural landscape, the idea that a small swath of asphalt might be going green is a bit of an anomaly.

But that's what the Community Redevelopment Agency is proposing for a stretch of Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles' South Park neighborhood. The idea is to narrow the street between 9th Street and Olympic by two lanes -- and use the extra land for open space.

So far, there seems to be a push from some community advocates to make the park a "dog park," but nothing has been decided yet.  Deborah Murphy, the consultant for the project, outlined over the phone an impressive outreach schedule for the project which features five community workshops and a bus tour.  The first of those workshops will be held tonight at 6:30 P.M. in the Public Works Building, 1149 S. Broadway, Room SB6, and will focus on a brainstorming session devoted to prioritizing the features that the community wants to see in the new park. 

If you live in the area and can't make tonight's meeting, you should consider joining a bus tour of similar parks designed to spark more ideas and conversation on the future of the Olympic and Grand Linear Park.  The bus tour will meet on west side of Grand Avenue between 9th & Olympic Blvd.  This tour is one of several being planned by the CRA for different projects throughout the city.  For a more complete picture of all of the outreach for the Olympic and Grand Linear Park, as well as the Nevin Elementary School Park, Slauson-Wall Park, and Ord and Yale Street Park; visit the Streetsblog Calendar Section.

(Full disclosure: Murphy is the founder and executive director of Los Angeles Walks.  I serve as the Planning Director on the group's Board of Directors.)

Yesterday, a twenty-five year battle between the Los Angeles City Council and the development group Monterey Hills Investors may have reached the end of the road. The Council agreed to pay a settlement of $9 million for the land known as Elephant Hill. Instead of housing a 24-home subdivision as MHI planned, this twenty acres of green hillside in El Sereno will be preserved as open space.

At issue was the quality of the environmental documents for the project, that were consistently opposed by residents, environmental groups and city leaders. When the project was first proposed in 1984, it was a 13-acre project. As time passed, the project continued to grow to its current 24-acre size. The complaints against the project alleged that the developer's plan to strip existing ridges down to bedrock followed by extensive fill would endanger both the El Sereno community and workers constructing the site. The ridges rest on seemingly unstable geography and an underground stream. The Natural Resources Defense Council reports that in 2006, workers installing fencing on Elephant Hill created a large sinkhole. In 2005, a worker was buried in a hillside slide in El Sereno.

For those opposed to the Elephant Hill Development the settlement is a clear victory for the city's efforts to preserve this land as open space. The settlement comes after the Council voted in August of 2008 to require the developers to undergo an extensive environmental review, despite advice from the City Attorney that they did not have the power to do that. In January of this year a judge agreed with the developers that the Council over-stepped its powers.   The developers counter-sued the city alleging that the lawsuit caused a delay which caused MHI to lose $8 million dollars while the city appealed the decision.

All of that may have come to an end yesterday.  While an attorney for MHI notes that the agreement wasn't finalized,  yesterday's decision by the Council was hailed as a victory by all opposing the development and fighting for their community and open space.

Read more...

"Subsidy" is a word used quite often in transportation policy-making circles, whether by road acolytes who claim (falsely)
that highways are not federally subsidized because of the gas tax or by
transit boosters who lament Washington’s unceasing focus on paying for
more local asphalt.

But the subsidy debate often overlooks the government tax
exemption for workers’ parking expenses. And federal parking subsidies
are skyrocketing, as Subsidyscope revealed yesterday in its data-packed
report on
U.S. transport spending: the value of tax-free parking will reach $3
billion this year, compared with $500 million in subsidies for transit
use.

The imbalance might be corrected if the government
treated parking and transit equally when it came to tax benefits.
Workers can write off a maximum of slightly more than $200 in monthly
parking benefits, while the maximum tax-free value of transit passes is
about $100 less per month.

Subsidyscope, a joint project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Sunlight Foundation , pored over federal records to produce a searchable database
of transportation spending dating back to the year 2000. Their
researchers’ conclusions found that highways received $30 billion in
federal support last year — more than three times as much as transit,
which got $9 billion.

How much of that $30 billion was a
subsidy? It’s tough to say, according to Subsidyscope, since state DOTs
are not required to report the details of how federal road aid is
distributed. Still, the overwhelming majority of federal transport
programs contain subsidies (see the chart after the jump for more
details).

A more classic example of federal subsidy is
programs that transfer the risk of new projects onto the federal
government. The Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation
Act (TIFIA), which offers
loans to states and localities at a low interest rate, is the transport
sector’s major source of credit subsidies from Washington — and the
majority of TIFIA loans go to highway projects.

Read more…

Alfredo Hernandez is one of those Angelenos who makes this city a better place to live but manages to fly under the radar of most people’s consciousness. Professionally, Hernandez works with the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, a non-profit that works with low and middle income communities to bring open space projects to the community.

If that weren’t enough, Hernandez is a founding Board Member of the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council and Chair of its Planning and Beautification Committee. Partially because of his influence, the East Hollywood Neighborhood Council has become one of the city’s most progressive when it comes to transportation.  They’re the first council to adopt the Cyclists Bill of Rights, the first to participate in Park(ing) Day and the first to create a video with a vision for their community. And of course, who can forget the amazing ArtCycle event?

Speaking of Park(ing) Day, have I mentioned that it will be on Friday, September 18 this year?  I have?  Great.

Hernandez is also a Board Member of the Friends of the Hollywood Cap Park and U.S. Veterans Artists Alliance where he produces a monthly improv comedy show called the
LAAVAA Slam in Culver City; but it was the high quality of last year's Park(ing) Day spot that led to this interview. You may remember East Hollywood’s elaborate series of spaces last year that included a grill, free food, street furniture and a swimming pool. Hernandez promises this year’s Park is going to dwarf last year’s. If you want to find out more, listen on…

I should note that we decided to do the interview outside next to Heliotrope just North of Melrose, in the heart of the unofficial bicycle district.  However, there was a lot of truck and car traffic, and a lot of people that couldn't figure out how to park in spaces where the head of the car would face the sidewalk and not the car in front of it.  We thought the street noise would add a second message to the interview, but do regret lacking the expertise to drown the woman talking on her cellphone during the first interview segment.

First we discuss Park(ing) Days past and present.  The East Hollywood Neighborhood Council have been such strong supporters of Park(ing) Day, that this year they may sponsor two parks, not just Hernandez's mega-park in Hel-Mel.  Hundreds of people visited last year's park, which is made possible with the help of the surrounding businesses.  Hernandez believes this year's will be the best one yet, and perhaps one of the best Park(ing) Day parks in the world.

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The East Hollywood Neighborhood Council is one of the most progressive ones in Los Angeles.  Find out what they're up to from one of their founding Board Members and how they're vision for they're community has changed the way people think about East Hollywood.

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When he's not volunteering, Hernandez works for the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust helping communities without park space carve out open space for themselves.  If you want to bring green and open space to your community, listen on to see if you're situation is a good match.

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Recent pilot programs in New York City and San Francisco demonstrate something that Livable Streets Advocates have known all along: by opening "car space" to the public, one can dramatically reduce car traffic and increase livability and sense of community.  While it's true that the concepts demonstrated by our friends to the north and the east are seemingly alien to the folks at City Hall these days; we've learned that once Livable Streets activism reaches the tipping point, things can happen quickly. Thus, we need to continue to celebrate and highlight some of the success stories in other cities.

The New York example is the more dramatic of the two case.  The above video, narrated by Streetsblog publisher Mark Gorton, is a tour of Broadway's car-free squares.  As Mark says, the counterintuitive truth is that taking away space for cars can improve traffic while making the city safer and more enjoyable for everyone on foot. There are sound theories that help explain why this happens -- concepts like traffic shrinkage and Braess's paradox which are getting more and more attention thanks to projects like this one.

When the plan to create these plazas at the expense of car-travel lanes was first announced, some of the local press in New York predicted doom for Broadway travelers.  One paper even went so far as to call the soon-to-be-created traffic disaster "Carmageddon."  Unsurprisingly, Carmageddon has been forestalled.

Read more...