Carter Rubin

Santa Monica has 700 extra parking, as in available parking spaces no longer needed. The cost is the opportunity cost of squandering such a valuable resource.

It’s time for Metro to pump the brakes on its misguided, climate-harming road plan for the 710 N. Corridor cities.

Editor's Note: Streetsblog Los Angeles founding board member Carter Rubin recently finished his Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree at UCLA. In the following article, he recaps the findings from his capstone “client project” for the Urban Design Studio at the L.A. Department of City Planning. His research adviser was the inimitable parking guru, UCLA Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup. You can read the report in its entirety here.

For those just joining the discussion, a group of activists in West Los Angeles has been working with the office of Los Angeles Dist. 11 Councilman Bill Rosendahl since April to re-open Bundy Triangle Park. This rare swath of green space in dense West LA sits at the intersection of Bundy Drive, Santa Monica Boulevard and Ohio Avenue.

Editor's Note: On Wednesday, the Daily News published an editorial that acknowledged that riding a bicycle in Los Angeles is dangerous and that cyclists are harassed on the road, but that Los Angeles' recently passed anti-harassment ordinance was a "missed opportunity to create more harmony on our roads."  Carter Rubin responded in their comments section, and expands on those views below.

This spring, livable streets activists on the Westside began working with L.A. City Councilman Bill Rosendahl's office to reopen Bundy Triangle Park. A May 9 Streetsblog article titled, "Open Space Behind Bars," looked at the history of the park: when it opened, why it closed, and what can be done to transform it into a vibrant public space.

On Saturday afternoon, the City of Santa Monica hosted its 20th annual Santa Monica Festival. The wholehearted embrace of biking at this year's event was, it seemed, both an embodiment of the city's early successes in encouraging biking and a hopeful harbinger for an even more bike friendly future.

On Tuesday night, a group of urban planners, transportation engineers, and public health advocates convened at Metro headquarters to preview the fruits of an intensive two-day labor. Led by design consultant Ryan Snyder, this team of local and national experts had been working in Los Angeles to create a new and visionary streets manual for the streets of Los Angeles County.

Back in January 2009, Los Angeles Magazine writer Matthew Segal took an assignment as an embedded reporter (so to speak) with bike activists and group riders. The resulting article, titled "Bike Culture: Spokes People," was a thoughtful five-page assessment of the state of the bike community in Los Angeles from the perspective of a curious onlooker. Segal discussed the genesis of the bicycling advocacy movement in the 1990s, its slow, organic evolution and its branching into more radical and more mainstream elements.