People

It's no secret that Livable Streets advocates are big fans of the theories of Donald Shoup.  The Shoupista that introduced him on Saturday referred to him as "Shoup Dogg," and Streetsblog prefers to sing "Shoup there it is."  These kind of salutations for an Economics professor who dresses the part of the academic activist from his tweed jacket to a t-shirt that reads "All may park, ALL MUST PAY" may seem silly; but his message for Angelenos is not.  Our parking policy doesn't just make bad economic sense, it's also playing a major role in holding our city back.  The UCLA professor is considered one of the foremost expert at parking policy, and when it comes to his host city; he doesn't like what he sees.

The move to speed up Los Angeles' streets continues unabated.  Less than a week after hundreds of people gathered at the L.A. StreetSummit to discuss how to tame traffic and make Los Angeles' streets more livable, the City Council Transportation Committee is expected to hear, debate, and pass three speed limit increases in the San Fernando Valley at 2:00 p.M. this Wednesday in City Hall.  In a way, its kind of a sobering crash back to reality.  After a week of being reminded of what could be, activists are back to where we are...fighting speed limit increases that represent the exact opposite kind of thinking to what we talked about all weekend.

For anyone that missed last night's talk and won't make it tomorrow or just can't get enough of LA Streetsblog's rock star coverage, I've downloaded the audio from last night's speech.  With apologies to Professor Gottlieb and the rest of the speakers from Occidental College, I'm just posting the parts where Sadik-Kahn is speaking.

Last night, the L.A. StreetSummit kicked off with a rousing keynote address and slide show by the groundbreaking New York City DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn.  Three levels of Occidental College students, bike advocates from around the county, and others interested in Livable Streets packed the auditorium to hear Sadik-Kahn show the changes that have come to New York City's streets under her and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's leadership in the past three years.

Fixing a disputed provision in the jobs bill that President Obama signed into law yesterday -- as Senate Democratic leaders promised House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) following complaints by several members of his panel -- would involve the redistribution of $932 million in funding for two major federal road and rail programs.

When House leaders agreed last week to ban earmarks to for-profit entities, tax and transportation projects got a notable exemption. But that doesn't mean Congress has no appetite to curb transport earmarks, as Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) showed in a letter sent this week to U.S. DOT chief Ray LaHood.

Fed up with speeding traffic zooming through their local street, residents of the well-to-do Mt. Olympus Homeowner's Association have approached the city with a plan to pay for the speed humps and speed feedback signs that would make a difference in protecting their street from speeding drivers of all stripes.  A motion to allow them to do just that was heard at last week's City Council Transportation Committee Hearing, with a resolution expected at next weeks.

Days after pitching the Senate environment committee for federal help with expediting his ambitious "30/10" package of new transit projects, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was back on the Hill yesterday meeting with lawmakers as part of a broad campaign for more investment in California infrastructure.