We’ll Find a Place in the Sun…

Over and over again, I hear from transportation planners and leaders at LADOT, Metro, and beyond that Livable Streets projects can’t move forward because we would take away space from cars.  If you follow that view, you’re basically saying that the people that use their cars are the ones doing the right things, living their lives the right way, and the rest of us are just special interests with special needs.

If there was ever a weekend that shows the fallacy of that kind of thinking, we just experienced it.  Below are four different pictures I took this weekend, and you tell me which one seems out-of-touch with the others and who are making the healthy decisions.  The four pictures are from Santa Monica Critical Mass, my Transit People team approaching our first transit stop at Wilshire and Fairfax, the Curry Festival celebrating Thai New Year and a shot of traffic on the 101 from the Wilton Boulevard Bridge.

And yes, the title for this post is from the song in Thrive from the Kaiser Permanente commercial that’s been running since last summer.  I had the song stuck in my head all weekend, so it seemed appropriate.