Wilshire BRT

On Friday night, I received an agitated email from Ray Klein, a Board Member for the Brentwood Neighborhood Council who requested a retraction for my claim that he has continually misquoted LADOT Senior Traffic Engineer Kang Hu while making the case that Brentwood should be excluded from the Wilshire Bus Only Lane (BOL) project.

In an editorial in today's paper, the Los Angeles Times comes out swinging while calling on Council Man Bill Rosendahl and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to show some leadership in the ongoing debate over the Wilshire Bus Only Lanes Controversy.

(Note: I've been trading emails with Ray Klein, who I parody in the second part of this story. He claims my claims that he's misquoting Hu are false and he has a transcript. My claim is based on Hu's argument at the end of the Transportation Committee hearing that he was being taken out of context. We'll get to the bottom of this next week. - DN)

(Update 4:04 P.M.: I just got the following message from Council Man Rosendahl's Office.  We're cheered to know he's doing well, and wish him a speedy return.

In an odd quirk of L.A. City Council rules, a Committee can "meet" with just the chair present and move legislation along to the full Council for a vote.  Thus, with the majority of the City Council downstairs debating how to frame the outsourcing of political will to raise parking rates in a way that didn't make them look like a rubber stamp, Transportation Committee Chair Rosendahl served as a one man committee.  Rosendahl's office explained to me that if the Full Council Meeting was still happening, that the Chairman would not ask all the witnesses who trekked Downtown to come back later and would hold the hearing himself.

You knew it was bound to happen.

Following nearly an hour and fifteen minutes of public testimony, most of which overwhelmingly favored passage of the staff recommendation to complete the Wilshire Bus Only Lanes on all parts of Wilshire Boulevad controlled by the City of Los Angeles, the Metro Board of Directors unanimously backed transit expert Zev Yaroslavsky over their staff and LADOT staff and decided to remove the Comstock/Selby area of Wilshire in Westwood from the project.

It's official, many Westside neighborhood leaders really don't want bus-only lanes.

Late yesterday afternoon, the news broke that the federal dollars needed to construct the Wilshire Bus-Only Lanes project would not be put in danger if the one mile just west of Beverly Hills were excluded.