Interview

Late one Thursday night, or early on Friday morning depending your point of view, this April an H3 Hummer hit a cyclist, and what followed is a controversy that fuels emotions that rivals last year’s Mandeville Canyon “Road Rage Doctor” Crash.  The LAPD’s ham-fisted handling of the crash report has led to charges of bias and incompetence from various parts of the cycling community.

Earlier, I had a chance to sit down with Hilary Norton, the executive director of the non-profit organization Fixing Angelenos Stuck in Traffic.  F.A.S.T. was formed to take the recommendations of last year’s much-publicized RAND report on reducing congestion.  The interesting thing about the F.A.S.T.’s model for building a transportation constituency is that it is building it’s base one community at a time by having Norton present to Neighborhood Councils, community groups, Homeowner’s groups, civic and transit advocacy groups who are interested in learning more about “best practice” short-term transit solutions.

Today we’re interviewing Drew Reed the writer/editor of the popular blog “Obamathon Man.”  Reed traveled across the country with his brother to see the inauguration of Barack Obama and stopped at several places along the way to blog about their transportation and what he saw.  A Long Beach resident, Reed has developed some strong opinions about the state of transit and transportation in Los Angeles and the country in general.

Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Tim Halbur, the managing editor of Planetizen and author of the new, hot-selling, children's book Where Things Are, From Near To Far, which seeks to explain urban planning to children.  There's going to be a reading of the book this Sunday, January 25, at the Natural History Museum.  For more details on the event, click here.  For more information on the book, read our interview, below.  However, before you start reading, you might want to familarize yourself with the term "urban transect."

When I first stumbled on the Bus Bench it was during their “Dead Escalator Series” where Randall “Bus Tard” Fleming basically took pictures of all the escalators around Metro sites that didn’t work.  The Bus Bench became a regular read for me because it provided an alternative viewpoint of the Livable Streets movement because, to be frank, so much of the blogosphere that write about transportation issues tend to be white males.

When I first decided to conduct a series of interviews instead of guest posts to keep Los Angeles Streetsblog fresh while I'm away next week, I wanted to talk with some people that were and weren't regular readers and with at least one person who would be entirely new to me.

Robert Gottlieb is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Environmental Studies and Director of the Urban Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College.  The Institute seeks to marry education with action and thus Gottlieb and his students have become a major force for transportation reform in Los Angeles.