Pico/Olympic

The more I think about the LADOT's new plan for the Olympic-West Pico-East project the more I think they may have gotten things backward.  Starting last night, the LADOT began a series of public meetings to provide the public input on "scoping" for the environmental studies, i.e. gave the public a chance to weigh in on what alternatives they would like to see to alleviate automobile congestion on Pico and Olympic Boulevards.

When I first read that the Los Angeles Department of Public Transportation was holding public meetings this week on a revised Pico-Olympic Plan, I got nostalgic.  Covering the battle between the community and the city over the plan to remove rush-hour parking, restripe the roads and retime the signals was the signature story back at StreetHeat, the precursor blog to  LA Streetsblog.  As a matter of fact, most of the links below are to Street Heat stories that were brought over, which hopefully explains some of the issues with layout and image quality.

A View from Olympic Boulevard at Dusk

When Nicholas Whitaker and I went on a car ride with Deborah Murphy, she expressed exasperation that transportation engineers are still so concerned with "improving" roads as the key to more efficient transportation. Sometimes, because the readers of this blog and many of the planners and engineers to whom I speak are more progressive, it's easy to forget how far we have to go to change the culture of transportation engineers.

Maybe it's not such a "done-deal" after all.

In yesterday's Times, Steve Hymon discusses the changing attitude at LADOT about how best to move people throughout the city. The headline, "L.A. officials do a 180 in traffic planning" suggests that we were about to read some radical stuff. Maybe he was going to discuss Gordon Price's argument that LA needs to be more like Vancouver and plan on how to design the roads to best move people, not cars . Maybe he was going to discuss charging people to use our highways through a toll or HOT Lane system and redirect that money towards transit. Instead, this is what we was meant by a "180 in traffic planning":

When an angry mob of westside business owners descends on city hall it can mean just one thing...it's time for another hearing of the Mayor's Pico/Olympic Plan.