Streetsblog Los Angeles

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for its excellent obituary memorializing former Metro CEO Julian Burke.
His tenure was during the period when I actually attended Metro Board meetings. These days I figure between Steve Hymon of The Source, Laura Nelson of the Los Angeles Times and our own Damien Newton you don’t have to attend to know the scuttlebutt about what happened. Albeit I do read selected staff reports for agenda items to educate myself.

Photo: Los Angeles Transportation Headlines

The Times doesn’t exaggerate when it describes the turmoil that Burke found when he was recruited to head Metro. Multiple “recovery plans” for the dysfunctional budget had gotten thumbs down from the feds. Land had been condemned for the east-side extension of the Red Line but the agency had no money to build it. Then Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan had labored mightily to recruit a new head for the troubled agency only to be frustrated at several turn downs including the amazing case of the thin skinned New York transit official.

The L.A. Times coverage by Richard Simon of this surreal situation includes hilarious quotes by L.A. County Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky and Michael Antonovich — I guess they needed to laugh to forestall crying in frustration at the seemingly endless search for a new Metro CEO after the previous CEO, Joe Drew, quit in disgust in response to back stabbing sniping remarks by Board members appearing in the press. And note Simon confirms Burke was supposed to be a temporary fill-in; he ended up serving 4 years.

A high point of the Burke era is when he was able to find 20 new buses to expand the fleet as I have written about previously. But what I didn’t mention in my previous coverage is Burke announced this at a Metro Board meeting, describing the extraordinary circumstances under which staff had found new equipment without the long wait that ordering from transit bus manufacturers usually entails. The Board received this news without comment, not even a simple thank you. So I used my public comment later in the meeting to express appreciation on behalf of the bus riders for what Mr. Burke had done. I think he smiled in response. Frankly it just felt like the right thing to do. Read more…

The future of South Figueroa at 11th Street? Doesn't seem far fetched now. Click on the image for a high-res copy.

The MyFigueroa team will be presenting all their images and renderings at the Andrew Norman Hall Orthopaedic Hospital at 5:30 pm on April 9th. Get the event details at the MyFigueroa website. Of course, we’ll be Live Streaming at Streetsblog TV. Bookmark our event page now.

It seems like just yesterday a team of Los Angeles’ most progressive planners and international planning rock stars from Gehl Architects unveiled some planning images showing how the rather bleak South Figueroa Corridor could be transformed into a complete street. While the public was “mostly positive,” it seemed a stretch that such a project would ever take place in Los Angeles.

In truth, it wasn’t yesterday. It was over two years ago. But despite some major hurdles, such as the minor issue of the dissolution of the Community Redevelopment Agency responsible for the project, the $20 million project should be completed on-time before the end of 2014.

The newly released images don’t look quite as dramatic as the ones shown a in 2011, but still promise bus only lanes, new transit waiting areas, fixed sidewalks, zebra crosswalks and the minor issue of separated bike lanes, proudly marked as “cycletracks” in MyFigueroa’s promotional materials.

“While our design still includes cycletracks on Fig, as we have always shown, we have more to share about the design of the entire corridor, and the multimodal components serving pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders,” writes Melani Smith, the president and principal of Melendrez Design Partners, the firm who has teh lead on the project. “We think there’s something in our design for all kinds of people using the streets.  Ultimately, we’re planning a corridor that is a safer, more comfortable place for people to be.”

The project isn’t just about improving Figueroa Street between 7th Street (in Downtown Los Angeles) and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard  (in South Los Angeles) by offering a full buffet of safe and comfortable transportation options. It also includes new streetscapes on 11th Street between Figueroa Street and Broadway and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard from Figueroa Street and Vermont Avenue.

“I am thrilled that the pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders in Downtown and South Los Angeles are benefactors of the 2006 State of California bond measure that provides funding for the implementation of new infrastructure,” writes Deborah Murphy of Deborah Murphy Urban Design + Planning, another project partner. “The MyFigueroa! project supports the development of new housing, particularly affordable housing, in dense transit-oriented urban neighborhoods.” Read more…

Photo of Van Nuys Flyaway Terminal via Wikipedia

Here are tidbits and some updates on transportation happenings in our region.

The Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners (who oversee Los Angeles World Airports, the Los Angeles city agency that operates LAX, Ontario and Van Nuys airports) at its February 19th meeting approved implementing a one-dollar increase (to $8) to the one-way fare between the FlyAway Van Nuys bus terminal and LAX. The new fare becomes effective July 1, 2013. The agency justified the increase due to increased costs to offer the service. BOAC also decided the new service between the Expo light rail La Brea station and LAX that I have written about previously and is due to start this spring will have a one-way passenger fare of $7 BUT to jumpstart the new service it will have an introductory fare of $6 for at least the first six months of operation.

Has Antonovich's gambit to remove Ara Najarian from the Metro Board turned this into a public test of his political clout in the era of term limits?

Thanks to Jim Newton of the Times we now know the City Selection Committee meeting where the fate of Ara Najarian’s seat on the Metro Board will be be decided will be on March 7th . And with Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich’s role in this drama now out in the open the stakes really have skyrocketed as many openly wonder if the bid to keep Najarian off the Board falters is it a sign that Antonovich (who is termed out in 2016 after 36 years as a Supervisor) is becoming a lame duck and no longer the king of the northern county. And will aspirants to his seat start maneuvering which would further signal the end of his influence over events in his domain is drawing near (much as several national figures have already signaled their plans to run for the seats of Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky as they also will soon be termed out).

OCTA is inaugurating an ongoing series of Customer Roundtables and is soliciting applications from riders. They plan on holding three roundtables a year approximately 3 weeks after scheduled service changes (February, June and October). The agency will review the applications and select participants for each roundtable. And for those not selected initially they promise to keep applicant information on file for future meetings. Read more…

Icon courtesy of Railvolution (http://www.railvolution.org/conference-program/schedule-of-events/all-days)

Thanks to the timely arrival of Damien’s adorable package of sugar and spice and all that is nice, I was asked to take his place on a panel at the Railvolution conference.

The panel, titled “The Blogosphere: Transforming the Information Landscape,” was headed up by moderator Jeff Wood of Reconnecting America. Over the course of an hour and a half, Jeff led myself, Steve Hymon of The Source, and Matthew Johnson of Greater Greater Washington through a discussion of everything ranging from the impact blogs and social media can have on policy decisions to how to deal with commenting trolls.

Not unexpectedly, the room was filled with transit-enthusiasts, most of whom not only are voracious consumers of blogs and transit news but also have a very active online presence. Very active. Some were live-tweeting our discussion. One even tweeted the panel a question, despite the fact that there were only 30 people in the room and jumping in with a question was a fairly easy proposition. Read more…

The Mayor Villaraigosa's image looms over hundreds of transit professionals and advocates at the start of Railvolution. Photo: Damien Newton

Just over a month ago, planners, advocates and political leaders from around the country descended on Long Beach for the annual “Pro Walk/Pro Bike Conference” to plan the next steps in the Livable Streets movement. This week, Los Angeles takes its turn on center stage as host of Railvolution, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was there to roll out the red carpet.

The tagline for this year’s Railvolution is “Building Livable Communities with Transit.” By holding the conference at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, across the street from the Hollywood/Highland Red Line subway stop, Los Angeles is able to showcase both the good and the bad of its Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) planning. On one hand, the stop allows for people to access many of Hollywood’s attractions and for tourists to access the rest of the city. On the other hand, the lack of advance planning before the subway was built led to expensive TOD developments that don’t always blend smoothly with the community.

Following short introductory pieces by Metro’s CEO Art Leahy and Board Chair Mike Antonovich, the mayor took the stage.

“Welcome to Railvolution,” he began, before launching into a laundry list of transit expansion projects and a call to support Measure J, the Los Angeles County sales tax extension on the fall ballot that would allow Metro to, in the mayor’s words, “build three decades of mass transit projects in one [decade].”

While Villaraigosa sounded upbeat about the ballot measure’s passage, and polls show it would pass narrowly, if a vote were held today, he also noted that there is significant opposition to overcome. Read more…

The Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo Rail Corridor Agency (LOSSAN) is a joint powers consisting of various rail operating agencies and stakeholders who (as stated in their outreach material) seek to increase ridership, revenue, capacity, reliability, and safety on the coastal rail corridor from San Diego to Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo served by Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner along with the Coaster and Metrolink.

In the past year or so they have been engaged in what they call “quick” improvements. The most recent manifestation of this is the just posted LOSSAN Corridor Joint Timetable with maps and schedule information for the aforementioned coastal corridor trains.

Danny Veeh of the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) described the Timetable’s development at the
July 16 LOSSAN Board meeting (see pp.9-10) thusly: Read more…

Image from Metro Board reports via The Source.

The issue of whether or not Measure R+, our temporary name for a proposed ballot initiative to extend the 2008 transportation sales tax, will be on the fall ballot will be much clearer in a couple of days.  The Metro Board of Directors will vote on whether or not to place the initative on the fall ballot this Thursday.  The initiative still needs the approval of the State Senate and the Governor’s office, but if the measure passes muster on Thursday, it will most likely go before the voters.

Whether the voters will pass it is another story.  As in 2008, extending the sales tax would require a two-thirds vote of those voting.  The 2008 ballot measure passed with 67.2%.

In other words, it barely passed.

While the coalition that worked to pass Measure R in 2008 is coming back together under the stewardship of Move L.A., the opposition to the transit tax extension already appears stronger than last time.  The campaign for Measure R+ could have a tougher road to travel.  The plan calls for no new projects, just a “speeded up” project schedule.  In other words, if it matters to you whether the airport connector is completed in 2023 instead of 2028, then you’ll likely support the project.  If you wanted a Leimert Park Station for the Crenshaw Line, there’s nothing in this proposal for you.

Leading the opposition is Supervisor, and soon-to-be Metro Board Chair, Mike Antonovich.  The Supervisor famously compared the plan to “gang rape” of his constituents despite his Supervisor District receiving the lion’s share of the highway funding portion of the sales tax.  Antonovich voted against placing the initiative on the ballot in Committee.

Noting that rail transit generally requires a higher subsidy than bus transit, thus causing an overall increase in transit fares, the Bus Riders Union led the charge against Measure R four years ago. The civil rights group seems poised to repeat that role this time around.

“The original Measure R has offered nothing good to transit-dependent Black and Latino bus riders, who have seen close to one million hours of bus service cut and a 20% fare increase since it took effect in 2009,” explains Barbara Lott Holland, Chair of Bus Riders Union.  ”Extending Measure R indefinitely will only accelerate the destruction of the bus system and the civil rights crisis that LA Metro now finds itself in, and will plummet the agency into a debt that the poor will be asked for pay through more fare increases and even deeper cuts to their service for decades into the future.”

The Los Angeles Times puts voice to a fiscal argument that extending a sales tax indefinitely out into the future doesn’t make a lot of fiscal sense long-term.  What if the transit needs of the county change in the next fifty years, and voters are paying a tax for a completed transit system with no revenue going towards future expansion?  Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa argues that these future voters will have the benefit of a completed transit system, but that argument could be a harder sell than the argument for any transit expansion made four years ago.

Another group that opposed the 2008 tax was a loose coalition of legislators and municipal governments in the San Gabriel Valley.  These lawmakers gave perhaps the least articulate opposition demanding funds for a local project that was funded by Measure R at the same time they opposed the overall Measure.  Getting more funds for the Alameda Corridor continues to be their top priority, and there is little opportunity to close the $260 million funding gap in Measure R+. Read more…

Photo of Hilgard Terminal, courtesy of Google Maps

(Update: I received a question on why we published the name and address of the angry homeowner, questioning whether or not he qualifies as fare game to be signaled out by name.  I chatted with a friend of mine who doesn’t have a stake or opinion in the issue of how UCLA decides when to keep its transit stops open.  He advised me that it wasn’t illegal, but that we should have contacted him for a quote if we were going to feature him so prominently.  It was my call to leave his name in so any blame/fallout should fall on me, not Juan.   I just removed his name, address and references to his employment from the story and comments.- DN)

Just a few months ago, UCLA received accolades for reducing vehicle trips to campus.  The campus has a robust transportation demand management program and exceeds the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s reporting requirements to track travel trends in its annual State of the Commute report.

As the University released its latest report that highlighted that only 53% percent of UCLA’s employees commute in a single-occupancy automobile, it was also finalizing a decision to eliminate Big Blue Bus service to Hilgard Terminal (behind Murphy Hall) after 8 pm on weekdays. This decision will affect the 23.5% of campus visitors and commuters who travel to and from campus by public transit .

The University will implement this change on Monday, June 18.  Because the University places barriers at the terminal’s entrance, after 8:00 pm, Big Blue Bus service must re-route to the Ackerman Terminal, which is one-half mile away on foot.  A common rule of thumb used by transit practitioners (and supported by research) is that transit passengers are willing to walk about one quarter of a mile to a bus stop.  Because this, the detour may have a significant impact on trip generation to the UCLA campus by causing existing commuters and visitors to adjust travel patterns.

Though this decision is being implemented next week, it is largely the result of persistent complaints of a single resident over the past decade.  A short history puts the latest change into perspective: Read more…

A Transit Score map of Seattle, the nation's 7th-most transit-friendly major city according to new rankings. The city is buoyed by its dense urban core, where many transit lines converge. Image: Walk Score

Today, Walk Score — developer of the popular method for evaluating neighborhood walkability (and filling out NCAA tournament brackets) — announced its first ranking of cities by Transit Score, a measure of the “usefulness” of a city’s transit system. On a 100-point scale, New York and San Francisco took the top two spots with scores of 81 and 80 respectively, while Boston (74), Washington D.C. (69), and Philadelphia (68) round out the top five (see the full rankings).

Walk Score CEO Josh Herst believes this is an important time to begin evaluating cities in terms of transit, and all the Americans who rode transit 10.4 billion times in 2011 would likely agree with him. “Heading to the gas pump this season is about as much fun as getting a root canal,” Herst said in the official release [PDF]. “With gas prices expected to hit new highs, more people are riding transit, walking and biking to save money. And being able to leave your car at home more often is great for your wallet, your waistline and the environment.”

The company generates Transit Scores using data provided by transit agencies, and takes into account the number of nearby transit routes (weighted differently by mode), how often those routes run, and how far away the stations are from any given point. A city’s score is based on a population-weighted average of all individual point scores. For an excellent discussion of the Transit Score methodology, check out this exchange between transit expert Jarrett Walker and Walk Score’s Matt Lerner from early 2011.

Overall, it’s fair to say that few American cities score well on the system. Of the 25 largest cities that make their transit data available to the public, only ten topped a Transit Score of 50, which is the lowest score qualifying as “good transit,” described as “many transit options nearby.” Most (14) fall into the “some transit” bracket, and the 25th-highest Transit Score among the cities evaluated — Raleigh, NC — is a 23, the upper end of “minimal transit.”

Read more…

In recent weeks, regional transportation agencies in Southern California have made some slow moves towards embracing a more sustainable transportation network throughout the Southland.  Local “Metropolitan Planning Organization” the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) is poised to pass a long term plan that would dramatically increase bicycle and pedestrian funding while its sister agency in San Diego passed the first regional funding plan complying with the state’s ground breaking greenhouse gas emissions law SB 375 which mandates improvements in air quality with reductions in vehicles miles traveled.

Last week, SCAG’s Joint Meeting of the Regional Council and Planning Committees met to vote on a proposed long-term plan for the SCAG region which covers Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and Imperial counties, passed a measure that nearly tripled the regional investment in bicycle and pedestrian projects.

Walking and driving account for 21% of trips, but 1.3% of funding. To see a county-by-county breakdown or a larger version of this graphic, visit the Safe Routes to School California Blog.

Over thirty people testified in favor of the proposal including representatives of the Safe Routes to Schools California, Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, National Resources Defense Council, and San Bernadino Council of Public Health.   At the Safe Routes to Schools blog site, Jessica Meaney lists some of the more powerful testimonies.

So bicycle and pedestrian planning is on the mark in Greater Los Angeles County.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is the near-tripling of funding is less impressive when put in a larger framework.  SCAG updates its long-term plan every four years.  In 2008, it allocated less than half of one percent to bicycle and pedestrian funding.  This year’s draft plan increases that percentage all the way to 1.3% of the future funds or about $6 billion of a $450 billion spending plan.

The Safe Routes to Schools California explains why even the higher number is alarmingly low:

And given that 21 percent of all trips are conducted via walking or biking (2009 National Household Travel Survey) and 25 percent of all roadway injuries and fatalities in this region affect bicyclist and pedestrians (2008 SWITRS data), we continue to urge SCAG’s Regional Council to invest a significant percentage of resources toward walkable and bikeable communities and neighborhoods.

But even alarmingly low is better than the status quo.  At NRDC’s Switchboard, Amanda Eaken casts a positive light on this modest victory but still calls for a more equitable funding scheme:

We couldn’t agree more.  But is funding a paltry 1.3% enough to do that?  We don’t think so.  Equity, safety and the environment demand more than that.

Fortunately, there’s time to improve the plan. The next milestone is the December 1, 2011 vote of the full Regional Council to release the preferred alternative to the public for review.

Read more…