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At today's Metro Sustainability Committee, Metro CEO Art Leahy mentioned that he had visited Portland, Oregon. While there, he saw an "interesting treatment" for low volume streets making them better for bicycling. Leahy stated that cars hadn't been removed from the streets, but that they were diverted in some places. He said that these low volume streets carry hundreds of bicyclists every day.

Mayor Garcetti gave his first State of the City speech yesterday. The mayor touched on a number of transportation issues. He pledged to "bring rail to LAX" and to open the 405 Freeway's new billion-dollar carpool lane "next month," a bit earlier than its October 2014 projected completion date. The most detailed transportation news was a peek into some of the specifics of Garcetti's Great Streets initiative.

Yesterday's Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee meeting featured a number of livability issues that deserve more in-depth attention: Safe Routes to School, bicycle and pedestrian traffic counts, parking privatization, and more. SBLA will do a brief re-cap, and will track and report on these issues more in the future.

Cyclist John Philips was cycling in heavy traffic in the San Fernando Valley when he was hit from behind by an impatient driver. While the driver did try to run, heavy traffic allowed witnesses to photograph both him and his vehicle. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) WAS summoned and a report was quickly taken.

[UPDATE: Here is a link to a video of Professor Shoup's talk and here is a link to the Q&A portion of the evening.]

Fabled Abbot Kinney Boulevard, on Los Angeles' Westside, is the first street in the city to have two bike corrals installed. Councilmember Mike Bonin alerted Streetsblog to their installation this morning and I was able to bike over and catch one of the installations as it was being finished and another corral in action.

Join Streetsblog Los Angeles and  Councilmember Mike Bonin (confirmed) at the Brentwood home of Joel Epstein and Karen Sarachik at a celebration to honor the public service of PAUL BACKSTROM Transportation Deputy to Mike Bonin, and Formerly Bill Rosendahl and Jack Weiss March 15, 2014 6 pm to 9 pm Suggested donation $100, proceeds will … Continued

This morning, local elected officials and federal administrators joined together to announce that Metro's Regional Connector is now fully funded. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is granting $670 million in New Starts funding to the Regional Connector, and also extending a low-interest TIFIA (Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act) loan of $160 million.

In March of 2011, then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa signed into law the city's Bicycle Plan, a list of some 1,600 miles of bicycle lanes, routes, friendly streets and paths scheduled for the next 30 years. In some ways, implementation is going exceedingly well. The pace at which new bicycle lanes are being added exceeds even that of New York City. In other ways, the plan seems stalled as many of the projects that make up the "Backbone Bicycling Network" connecting neighborhoods, are being delayed or canceled as nervous City Councilmembers put up roadblocks to bicycle progress.