Back in March, Carter Rubin covered the kickoff of an interesting project, funded by the LA County Public Health’s RENEW Grant Program and the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, to create a new street manual for road construction and redesign in Los Angeles County.

The Model Street Design Manual will be publicly unveiled on Thursday, October 6th at 6:30 P.M. in the Metro Board Room.  All are welcome to attend and will be treated to a brief overview of the manual, and a chance to speak with the team that worked on the manual.  Light refreshments will be served.

The new manual won’t have the power of law behind it, but because of the involvement of local government agencies and because the manual is funded through a County grant, it could provide a starting point for the County, municipalities within the County and pretty much anyone else who wants to use it to re-imagine their streets as public spaces and not just places for cars to run through.

The manual will be published digitally on the LA County website in two formats — as a Microsoft Word Document and an Adobe InDesign format — so that, in the words of Ryan Snyder, the lead planner for the project, “cities can use it, adopt it, steal it, and plagiarize it.”