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Streetsblog LA
Parking Reformer Lowenthal Continues to Get Attacked in the Press. Let’s Help Him Out
As news continues to spread about Senate Bill 518, Senator Alan Lowenthal's legislation that passed the State Senate last week and would encourage municipalities to curb their addiction to free parking or lose out on state planning and transit grants; the reaction from the press has been almost uniformly bad. And it's not just the conservative outlets such as Fox News that are piling on. As we detailed yesterday, the Times is almost gleefully promoting the most inflammatory comments from their article. Yesterday, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Lowenthal's local paper, took an editorial stand against the legislation.
February 3, 2010
How Can Transit Backers Sway Conservatives? Oberstar Joins the Debate
In the years before partisan warfare became the norm in Washington,
transportation tended to unite both ends of the ideological spectrum.
Can rationality return to infrastructure policy debates that have
become subsumed by culture clashes between cyclists and drivers,
urbanists and suburbanites -- and, of course, Democrats and Republicans?
February 2, 2010
LaHood Talks Budget: “Very Bright” Future for Infrastructure Fund
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said today that he sees "very
bright" prospects for congressional approval of the Obama
administration's $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation and
Finance Fund, the new iteration of the long-discussed National Infrastructure Bank proposal.
February 1, 2010
The White House Transportation Budget: What’s In Line for the Axe?
In a fiscal year 2011 budget that proposes to increase spending on several core transportation
priorities, the White House also aims to eliminate a few
infrastructure programs that may prove popular with lawmakers.
February 1, 2010
Metro Board to Look at Finances and Begin Search for New Rail Car Contractor
Later this morning, the Metro Board of Directors will meet for the first time in the 2010 calendar year, and is faced with its biggest challenge since the passage of Measure R...a quarter of a billion operating deficit. While some issues on the undercard are interesting, such as the Board finally moving to find a contractor to construct rail cars ten months after their quixotic quest to hand the contract to AnsaldoBreda kicked off; the largest issues is going to be what to do about the budget. After years of shifting budgets and tapping contingency funds, Metro has to make some hard choices to make.
January 28, 2010
Bike Sharing Coming to USC and City Passes Rough Timeline for Anti-Harassment Ordinance. Speed Limit Increases Delayed.
The City Council met today and discussed two cycling related issues. The first was the ongoing discussion of whether or not the city should have a bike sharing program. Second, the Council debated how to create an ordinance that would better protect cyclists from harassment.
January 27, 2010
Fmr. Councilman Weiss: We Need the NFL to Increase Our Public Space
Former City Councilman Jack Weiss has not been what one would call progressive on most transportation issues. While he backed the Mayor on transit issues, he also was his largest backer for the massively unpopular Pico-Olympic Plan which would have sped up rush hour automobile traffic at the expense of parking for businesses, bicycle and pedestrian traffic. Weiss sounded a progressive tone on his candidate's survey for Streetsblog, but also backed an LADOT plan to remove traffic calming in Holmby-Westwood.
January 27, 2010
Vroom! Speed Limit Increases in Front of City Council
As mentioned in a post yesterday, the Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee will vote tomorrow at 2:00 P.M. in City Hall on whether or not to raise speed limits on three local streets Chandler Boulevard, Riverside Drive and Beverly Glen Boulevard. In the past day, three outraged pieces have attacked the limit increases and challenged the Council to defy state rules that require the increases for the LAPD to use radar to enforce the law.
January 26, 2010
Times: Metro Should Raise Fares
In today's Los Angeles Times, the local paper of record follows up on this weekend's look at Metro's operational funding crisis with an editorial urging the Metro Board to increase fares to help close the agency's roughly quarter of a billion annual deficit for 2011.
January 26, 2010