Streetsblog Los Angeles

Rita Robinson, at her appointment to the Metro Board. Photo: Eric Richardson/Flickr

Rumors are floating around City Hall that Rita Robinson will be stepping down as General Manager of the LADOT to take a high-level position with L.A. County.  While nobody who discussed the rumor with me wanted their name attached to this story, I can say that the sources are high enough up in the city bureaucracy to be credible.

However, since LADOT wouldn’t or couldn’t confirm this staffing change, let’s save the reviews of Robinson’s performance until we get the official word.  In the meantime, it’s never to early to start talking about who could be a credible replacement/

The first person to answer the call was Joe Linton, the co-founder of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, who rather than suggesting an individual person suggested people “along the lines of,” Fred Dock, the head of Pasadena DOT and supporter of Complete Streets planning, Gil Peñalosa, of Bogotá, Colombia – champion of Ciclovía, and Timothy Papandreou, a former Metro staffer who now works at San Francisco MTA.  If LADOT is looking to hire from within, they should look to some of their younger engineers who understand multi-modal planning such as Pauline Chan or Jay Kim.

Linton also pointed out that Robinson sits on the Metro Board as a Mayoral Appointee and Villaraigosa is going to have to replace her.  Given his advocacy for many of Villaraigosa’s projects; Linton suggested that Denny Zane would be a suitable replacement.

The next call was to the LACBC who declined to get into specifics, but did encourage the mayor to look for someone that shares his values on green transportation, especially his new found commitment to bicycling.

After that was a call to L.A. Walks Founder and Chair of the City’s Pedestrian Advisory Committee who stated simply, “Janette Sadik-Khan or her clone.”  Murphy noted that the NYCDOT Commissioner and Livable Streets Rock Star has local ties as a graduate of Occidental College and that now “is time to bring her home.”

The last person to answer the call was the 2009 Livable Streets Person of the Year Stephen Box, who sent the following statement:

As Ms. Robinson departs and in light of the City of LA’s budget crisis, this is a reasonable time to evaluate the future of the LADOT and to look for any benefits to be found from consolidating the LADOT into City Planning, Public Works, the LAPD and the Department of Finance. The City of LA’s budget crisis demands that the people of LA look for every opportunity to reduce redundancies and increase efficiencies, all while improving the delivery of City Services and balancing the budget.

He added over the phone, “Long Beach doesn’t have a DOT, and they’re way ahead of where we are.”

This isn’t the first time Box has discussed dissolving LADOT to save the city money and make it rum more efficiently.  He’s written about it before at City Watch and has met with the Mayor’s Office and members of the Neighborhood Council Budget Committee.

We’ll have much more on this story after we get the official word from the Mayor’s Office, LADOT or Robinson herself.  In the meantime, leave your suggestions for her future in the comments section.

Way back on April 14, LADOT General Manager Rita Robinson spoke in front of the City Council Transportation Committee on how the department is going to deal with the city's budget crunch. Robinson delivered her usual passionate defense of the "LADOT Family" in the midst of the cuts and also brought a basket fool of amazing analogies. She compared planning in the budget crisis to working with a bad comb over, ("you think you're covered but you're totally exposed") and compared her experiences with furloughs and layoffs to a parent having to decide which of her children to feed. Oddly, her comments about the City Council having "Reality Deficit Disorder" seemed to be left at home.

I recommend listening to it if you have the time, it's about half way through this audio recording of the meeting.

But it wasn't her weird analogies that caught my ear, it was this statement:

I wish we were New York and could magically make things happen.

There's no magic involved with what's going on in New York. It's happening because the Mayor and DOT are dedicated to changing the way business is done when it comes to transportation. In fact, the leadership deficit in L.A. is exactly because our LADOT is busy wishing for things and defending their turf rather than pushing the envelope to free our streets, clean our neighborhoods and get things moving. If she wants to change transportation in Los Angeles and, do it without a magic wand or flying broomstick, she can.

Read more...

A slide heralding some of LADOT's accomplishments from Robinson's slide show.

LADOT General Manager Rita Robinson spoke to a standing room-only crowd at NYU's Rudin Center this morning, kicking off the New York City Street Summit. Robinson's speech, delivered just two weeks after NYCDOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan brought lessons from the Big Apple to her backyard, was both a spirited defense of LADOT's planning policies and a response to Sadik-Khan's vision of change.

"Every day, Los Angeles sees over 10 million car trips, and the number one goal of LADOT is to make this trips as smooth, fast, and stress free as possible," Robinson explained, before delivering a series of "lessons learned" to help NYCDOT better move cars through their city.

"Streets can only be so wide, that's why it's important not to waste space on things that don't provide room for moving and parking automobiles," Robinson told an enthusiastic group of former NYCDOT staff clustered in the front row. "Wasting space on bus-only lanes and bike lanes is sometimes politically necessary; but with term limits, you can just wait out the elected officials more times than not."

Robinson pointed to the LADOT Sharrows program, which she referred to as the "Sparrows Pilot Project," as an example. "We called it a pilot program. We brought in other agencies. We tied up the staff at the Bike Coalition. We promised the City Council President we were working on it. In truth, his kids will be termed out of office before we ever paint one of those damn things. Honestly, won't painting birds on the ground just confuse people anyway?"

A second secret initiative Robinson unveiled was LADOT's covert "DIY" program. "Sometimes people want things bad enough that they're not going to stop until they get what they want," she said. "So let them write their own bike plan, paint their own Sharrows and bike lanes, plan their own CicLAvia, devise and promote their own traffic calming plans, track their own bike crashes, do their own bike counts, create their own safety signage, film their own safety videos or whatever they want. They do it. We condemn it. Poof! No liability. And there's a lot of money saved to re-time signals to speed up traffic on other local streets."

Read more...

The Bicycle Advisory Committee, on the dais. Photo: Ciclavia

As budget cuts hit agencies across the city, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation continues to make cuts by retreating from its already lacking commitment to public outreach.  In a letter addressed to Bicycle Advisory Committee Chair Glenn Bailey LADOT General Manager Rita Robinson informs the Committee that the LADOT will no longer be able to provide staff to attend any meeting that takes place after business hours and won't provide any support staff at all.  The LADOT has already backed away from its commitment to have a working Memorandum of Understanding with Neighborhood Councils, and now they're bailing on providing support for its own advisory bodies.  You can read Robinson's letter here.

Bailey, in a letter to the rest of the Committee, notes that the city's commitment to the B.A.C. has been waning for years,

I would make the observation that for the first decade or so of the BAC's existence, it was staffed by someone from the Mayor's Office.  During that period it seemed that the BAC had more influence with City agencies, perhaps because all communication came from the Mayor's office.

However, not everyone is going to mourn the reduced role for the LADOT in the working of the city's official cycling body; LADOT staff has been blamed for the bureaucratic nature of the committee.  It will be interesting to see how, if at all, the Committee changes in the coming months and whether the LADOT will continue to back away from its commitments to interact with the public.

Earlier today in City Watch, Editor Ken Draper sings the praises of LADOT General Manager Rita Robinson for speaking to last weekend’s meeting of Neighborhood Council representatives and being bluntly honest about the state of the city’s finances while attacking the City Council.  Draper’s column is full of tough talk from Robinson, all of which can be seen on the video above.  She doesn’t mince words, claiming the City Council is in a state of "denial" and that they suffer from "Reality Deficit Disorder."

While Draper is full of praise for Robinson, I find her stance and posturing to be disturbing.  First, she was attending the meeting of Neighborhood Council’s to discuss the state of a proposed Memorandum of Understanding between LADOT and the Neighborhood Councils.  This document, as Stephen Box notes, "memorializes and codifies a relationship and the mechanism for
communicating and working together. It’s a living breathing document
with opportunities for revision and adjustment, just like any good
relationship."  Once you understand that, Robinson’s attack sounds more like excuse making for why the LADOT is unwilling to reach the same understanding with Neighborhoods that the NC’s have reached with the DWP and other agencies.

Second, the City Council is the elected body of officials that are charged with drafting the legislation that governs our city.  Rita Robinson is a career city official who has never been elected to anything and was appointed by said Council.  If LADOT staff takes its cues from its General Manager, it’s no surprise that they can’t give straight answers to simple questions at hearings and ignore directives from Committee Chairs.  We must be wasting our time talking to the City Council, it appears the real power in this city is in the hand’s of our unelected bureaucrats.

Robinson is basically saying that because of the budget cuts that have already happened and the ones coming down the road that she doesn’t want LADOT to enter into a contract with the Neighborhood Councils because she doesn’t want the LADOT to not be able to fulfill its arrangement.  Now let’s be clear, the Memorandum has to do with opening official channels for communication between the Council’s and the LADOT.  Nothing more.

So I pose the question to all of you.  You’ve read my take.  You can read Draper’s here.  You can watch the video above.  Is Robinson taking a courageous stance and warning people to be aware that cuts are coming or is she passing blame for sub-par community outreach with the Neighborhood Council’s by attacking the bogeyman of the Los Angeles City Council?

Photo: LA Chamber of Commerce/Flickr

Normally, I wouldn't add a Flickr page to our blogroll on the right; but given that the LADOT press office is operating on a shoestring budget a flickr page from the LADOT General Manager could be a useful tool to get information out to the public.

While Robinson hasn't been as much of a target for criticism as some of the people that work at LADOT; she is the top boss at the department that has as great an impact on L.A.'s streets as any in L.A.

So far, the tweets have been less than exciting; a critic might note that her tweets from yesterday sound awfully similar to Streetsblog's.  Hopefully the feed gets more interesting as time goes on, and if it does maybe we'll start seeing similar accounts for Gail Goldberg, Art Leahy and other transportation decision makers.