People

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.

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.

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.

Livable Streets advocates could have a full day in City Hall this Wednesday.

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times took a look at the coming budget crisis at Metro.  The article just scratches the surface of the issue, correctly noting that there are a lot of reasons for the quarter of a billion dollar operating deficit including the state's budget grabs, lower than projected sales tax revenue and an 8% decline in ridership from Metro's record setting year in 2008.

As Governor Schwarzenegger presses forward with his newest scheme to rob funds dedicated to transit, he's receiving a frosty response from legislators and opinion makers that could spell doom for this plan to balance the budget. 

When it comes to re-centering the Washington bureaucracy to better accommodate cities' needs, the first year of the Obama administration has brought its share of progress (a three-agency partnership set to spend $150 million on sustainable development) and hiccups (a White House urban affairs office with lots of talk but little action).

The U.S. Conference of Mayors released a report this week with some dire conclusions for the nation's cities: Even the payroll growth that many prognosticators anticipate this year won't make a dent in double-digit urban unemployment. Half of the 363 biggest metro areas won't return to their pre-recession jobs levels until 2013 or beyond.

Back in the days of "cash for clunkers," which saw the Obama administration send nearly $3 billion in taxpayer-funded rebates to boost the sagging auto industry, our Ryan Avent and several other economics wonks pointed out an inconvenient fact: Many participants in the program would have bought cars anyway, and the rebates only pulled their purchases forward in time.