South LA

As the second trickled away on the 2011 work year, the Federal Transit Administration issued its Record of Decision approving the environmental documents for the Crenshaw Light Rail Line.  The approval allows Metro to go forward with preliminary acquisitions and work needed to construct the line. It also makes the project able to receive federal funds, although most of the project is paid for with funds from the Measure R sales tax.

The Village at USC, a 5.23 million square foot mixed use development being programmed by the University of Southern California, is back in the news. Yesterday, Blog Downtown examined how the retail plans for the project could impact the Downtown. But the project could also have a major impact on the car parking in the area both in the garages that will be developed and on Jefferson Boulevard.

By now, many of you have seen the pictures that Gökhan Esirgen took of a car sitting on the Expo tracks at the station of Exposition Boulevard and Vermont Avenue that appeared on the Transit Coalition forum Tuesday evening.  A quick call to the Expo Construction Authority confirmed that the picture shows exactly what people thought it showed, a distracted driver actually took a left onto the Expo tracks.

(Mark Vallianatos is Policy Director of UEPI and an Adjunct Professor at Occidental College, where he currently teaches the Environmental Stewards class. Mark is co-author of The Next Los Angeles: the Struggle for a Livable City and a number of publications on food access, transportation, and goods movement.)

The Source had barely published its story highlighting the Metro Board's decision to approve the environmental certification of a Crenshaw Light Rail line that may or may not have a Leimert Park Station and definately runs at-grade through the Crenshaw communities' top retail corridor when I caught up to Damien Goodmon, the head of the Crenshaw Subway Coalition. His reaction was concise and clear, "The Metro board has had its say, now it is time for the community to have its say through the courts."

What do you do when the main barrier to encouraging more students to walk and bicycle to school isn't social pressures or broken infrastructure, but a different sort of public safety hazard?  What do you do when it's not motorists, but gangs that imperil children who want to walk or bike to school?

When Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas' motions to make the Crenshaw Light Rail project run entirely below-grade and to construct a station at Leimert Park both failed, the Board Member promised he would be back with a new motion to improve the project in a different way. At last week's Metro Board Meeting, Ridley-Thomas introduced a motion calling for community benefits during construction of the Expo Line.

Leimert Park from Mark Ridley-Thomas on Vimeo.

A motion by County Supervisor and Metro Board Member Mark Ridley-Thomas would grade-separate the planned Crenshaw Light Rail Line for twelve blocks from 48th Street to 59th Street along the Crenshaw Corridor and would require the construction of a station at Leimert Park.  Both grade-separating the Crenshaw Line and the Leimert Park Station are listed as "optional" in Metro's most recent corridor studies.  To pay for the grade-separation and new station, Ridley-Thomas asks Metro to identify funding sources "including but not limited to" Measure R funds for the Expo Line and for the Green Line to LAX, the Arbor-Vitae interchange project and sales of "surplus property" along the right-of-way that won't be used.  The Crenshaw Line will run below-grade for the rest of the route along Crenshaw Boulevard.