Month: December 2011

Unlicensed Driver Hits, Kills, Pedestrian in Panorama City (NBC4, KTLA) Police Protective Union Calls for Mayor to Overturn Beck on Police Impounds (Daily News) Daily News: Police Commission Blew Call on Allowing Undocumented, Unlicensed to Keep Cars Mayor, Councilmen Back Plan for Hollywood Redevelopment  (Daily News) How Does One Attack Traffic?  GOOD Gives an Idea (The … Continued

fta civil rights compliance review for L.A Metro

With impressive urgency, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has spent his first months in office retooling and reconfiguring how the “City That Works” works. Emanuel’s energy is evident in changes from beat-cop deployment to the push for a longer school day, but perhaps the mayor’s most tangible efforts can be seen in his ambitious transportation agenda.

The poor Spring Street Green Buffered Bike Lane.  The first "outside the box" bike project in Los Angeles has come under fire from just about everyone for the peeling paint and tire tracks that dominate a portion of the lane.  Even Midnight Ridazz hosts a thread entitled, "Green Lanes Are a Joke," although opinions ont eh lane are mixed.  In order to bring some balance to the story, Streetsblog went out and found some actual riders of the lane to see what they had to say.

Chris Leinberger's op-ed about the decline of the outer suburbs a few weeks ago in the New York Times has been widely praised and scrutinized in the blogosphere. A few of us remarked that the decline of the outer suburbs and the rise of the central city doesn't seem to be a uniform trend across the United States. Cities like Louisville, Kentucky and Cleveland, Ohio flip the whole dynamic, to some extent.

Featured Headline: L.A. Weekly checks back in on the Westside Subway battle in Beverly Hills.  The second largest print publication in Los Angeles continues to carry water for Beverly Hills, basically taking all their arguments at face value and scorning any other arguments.  I'm not sure which part of the story is more odd, the class war-fare opening against Century City which seems to believe that many Beverly Hills opponents of the subway route are part of the middle class or the assertion that the Constellation Ave station location is "sleepy" and the Santa Monica Station is "bustling" despite having a golf course on half of the station border.

Yesterday, the Metro Board of Directors discussed the recently released FTA Report detailing Title VI Civil Rights violations at Metro.  The Source called the discussion "by far the liveliest part of the meeting," but it also showed ongoing confusion about what the report means and what is the best way to meet the complaints.

Yesterday, for the second time in as many weeks, the House T&I committee held a hearing on the benefit-versus-boondoggle high-speed rail debate. Last time, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was asked to defend the peppering of high-speed rail grants to projects outside the Northeast Corridor. Yesterday, the topic narrowed to focus just on California's high-speed rail project, whose recently-drafted business plan [PDF] has revised its total construction cost to $98.5 billion through 2033—up from $43 billion though 2020 just a few short years ago.

(Note: If you're not familiar with the history of the Westchester Station, check out this City Watch article by Westchester Neighborhood Council Member Denny Schneider)