Measure R

Five years ago, I was sitting at my desk in New York City reading about Los Angeles and wondering how I was going to adapt.  Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa seemed obsessed with speeding up car traffic to the detriment of neighborhoods.  It's hard to remember the Mayor's talk of Tiger Teams, specialized LAPD units designed to punish cars parked in rush hour travel lanes, cars "blocking the box" or anyone else that dared impede traffic at rush hour.  His attempt to "Manhattanize" Downtown Los Angeles was widely mocked in media outlets.  His signature transportation project was The Subway to the Sea, which was widely considered a pipe dream.

The Daily News, which still appears to be the conservative alternative to the Los Angeles Times in many respects, published an editorial earlier today calling on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to bicycle planning.  The message: it's not enough just to pass a bike plan, how about spending some of your own transportation dollars to make it a reality.

Is Los Angeles on the "verge of a transit breakthrough" as Move L.A. states in the promotions for Friday's all day conference featuring Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other political leaders, labor organizers and environmental groups? Or, is Los Angeles decades away from fulfilling the dream of a workable rail system promised by Measure R?

When the Mayor and his staff in city hall say that nothing is off the table when it comes to accelerating project development and construction for the transit projects funded by the Measure R sales tax, they aren't just talking.  While the Mayor promised that there was a "Plan B" if his efforts to change federal law to favor communities that tax themselves to build transit don't go anywhere in D.C.

At tomorrow's hearing of the City Council Transportation Committee, a last-second motion by Councilman Jose Huizar, who also sits on the Metro Board of Directors, and Councilman Bill Rosendahl seeks to create a mechanism for the City to accept Measure R dollars to better coordinate between the city staff and Metro.

Earlier this week, we posted the responses of Measure R Oversight Committee Advisory Panel member Gary Painter to some questions including several suggested by readers of this blog.  Today, it is Panel member Allison Yoh's turn.  Yoh is Associate Director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and also a past member of the Metro Board of Directors. The latter experience resulted in my asking Yoh one extra question I didn't ask Painter.

All things come to those who wait. In May I solicited input from readers of this blog for questions to ask Measure R Oversight Committee Advisory Panel transit system user members Gary Painter and Allison Yoh. The final set of questions I subsequently e-mailed Painter and Yoh included several that blog readers had suggested. Painter and Yoh sent their responses shortly thereafter. But in the meantime life happened and I had to put the task of doing the final writeup aside until now. My apologies to one and all for the delay.

My metaphor of choice to describe transportation funding and policy making is an onion, in which there are a succession of layers representing complexities and multifaceted cross-jurisdictional dimensions. And one cannot be complacent since there are always new aspects to explore and try to fathom.

As Streetsblog has been documenting, there has been a heavy cost to Measure R beyond a half cent increase to the county sales tax.