T 4 America Interviews Denny Zane on Measure R and LA’s Future

The Transportation for America Campaign interviewed activist and former Santa Monica Mayor Denny Zane, who had as much to do with Measure R’s passage as anyone.  You may remember Zane as thr driving force behind the It’s Time to Move LA Conference last January which led directly to Assemblyman Feuer’s legislative efforts.  By bringing together environmentalists, labor leaders and busniess leaders; Zane built a coalition that overcame provencial interests in November’s election to get Measure R passed.

The interview covers a lot of different topics, below is a quick example of a question and answer from the interview, but for the rest head over to the T 4 America blog:

Do you see any broader implications from your victory, any
lessons that a larger movement for transportation reform could learn
from your campaign?

Well it was certainly was true that here in Los Angeles, the
business community, the labor community, the environmental community
all saw a common interest. Especially when the concern that might have
unsettled them would have been how much highways versus how much
transit, but in our case, nobody was really arguing for expanded
highway construction. Assuming you need maintenance and repair, and
interchange improvements, but significant freeway projects – all that
had been done in previous epochs.

So everybody was of accord that the future of transportation had to
be dominated by new transit, and this case, fixed guideway transit. It
was just a question of how much.