Streetsblog Los Angeles

Gloria Ohland’s overview of the recently held 9th Annual Southern California Transportation Summit certainly provides a neat snapshot of the livability aspects of the event.  But a lot else was going on, which is no surprise for such a large event, and I have some observations of my own from attending.

The great irony is while Ohland speaks of “the real goal of transportation in the 21st century is accessibility” that the venue for the conference (the Disneyland Hotel) was one of the more transit inaccessible locations I have ever encountered.  Neither OCTA public transit nor the local Anaheim resort shuttles provide service anywhere near the location.  So I ended up missing the first hour of the conference while walking from the bus stop on Harbor on the far side of the park property.  This entailed walking along the buffer between Disneyland and California Adventure where Disney has created a linear outdoor shopping zone known as Downtown Disney, consisting of chain stores and eateries (decidedly upscale).

When I finally made it to the Hotel Conference Center as I anticipated I had missed all the gasbag introductions by dignitaries.  Also I had missed comments by Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation but I was assured later by fellow attendees it had been nothing but overblown talk of new freeways and tunneling, no surprise from someone representing that “bastion of libertarianism.” Read more…

Big Ticket

The annual Mobility 21 conference for the SoCal transportation industry, consultants and agency officials usually comes and goes without much fanfair but this year there was a palpable sense of excitement – and record attendance – at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. LA County really has a lot going on with Measure R, 30-10, the $547 million Tiger grant to speed up construction of the Crenshaw line, recent decisions about the alignment of the subway and regional connector, and the $43 billion high speed rail line billed as “the biggest public works project in the state’s history” – its first phase ending at a big intermodal terminal in Anaheim.

But there was lots of hand-wringing among speakers about the fact that that the federal government seems unable to reauthorize the multi-year federal transportation bill, now in its fifth extension – because there’s no money to pay for it and no appetite to discuss solutions like a VMT fee or increased gas tax. Meantime, this country is falling behind its competitors who are creating jobs and investing in an oil-independent future – like China, which is spending its economic stimulus money on 42 hyper-speed rail lines connecting every major city.

It was curious there wasn’t more celebration of SoCal’s “self-help counties” that step up to tax themselves and provide local funding that can be used to leverage federal dollars. Measure R and 30-10 is the stellar example, and is providing Los Angeles with a robust transit expansion program that’s not dependent on federal hand-outs but only needs low-interest loans, interest write-downs and “qualified transportation investment bonds” or QTIBs. And what got lost in the discussion about all these big-ticket transportation projects were the small-ticket items like bike and ped infrastructure and car-sharing that make the billion dollar projects work so much better.

Little Ticket

Yes the Bike Station’s Andrea White-Kjoss, Dennis Allen from LA streetcar, and Jessica Meaney, California policy director of Safe Routes to School, were given spots on panels otherwise crowded with advocates for HOT lanes, hydrogen fuel cells, and “green” pavement. Meaney pointed out, for example, that walking maintains a 12 percent regional mode share even though we invest just 0.5 percent of transportation funding to make walking safer and more pleasant. Allen pointed out that even if we build transit-oriented development around every single rail station we’ll never provide the volume of walkable development and transit proximity that streetcars make possible – because while light rail stations are typically a mile apart streetcars stop on almost every street corner. Read more…

(Editor’s note: One of the drawbacks of the timing of things is I have been unable to add anything to the coverage of the Mobility 21 conference that occurred earlier this week.  Leaders from the freight industry, ports, car-lobby and government leaders held a summit on Monday to get together and talk about what they think needs to be done to fix our transportation system.  Fortunately, there was a lot of coverage in the media, Steve Hymon served as the conference’s official blogger/twitterer and So.CA.TA.’s  Dana Gabbard wrote a lengthy review, which you can find below.)

Sept. 21st I attended the 8th annual Mobility 21 Transportation Summit.
I’ve been to every summit since the event was conceived by then Metro
CEO Roger Snoble and the late Rusty Hammer who at the time headed the
L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce.

In my reading during the 90s I
would often run across mentions of similar summits held in other parts
of the country, and often wondered why we didn’t have a similar event
here. Of course it took bigshots like Snoble and Hammer, partnering
with the Auto Club, SCAG etc., to get the ball rolling.

And
after initially being a L.A. County centered event in 2007
Mobility expanded to encompass the adjacent counties of Ventura,
Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties.

Read more…