Tag Archives: LA is the future

Reinventing Los Angeles: Water and Transport

Los Angeles City Hall. Photo by Jimbolaya

Los Angeles City Hall. Photo by Jimbolaya

Earlier today I saw a Facebook post warning about traffic jams on our freeways as a result of a messy oil tanker truck fire.

I then went to sigalert.com to verify this information and I realized I hadn’t gone to this site since I gave up my car in June. There was no need for it; bicyclists are not usually subject to traffic jams, and certainly not traffic jams on freeways.

In the attached article, writer Jeff Turrentine remarks on his culture shock moving from Brooklyn to L.A., and on the overwhelming insertion of automobile life into almost every aspect of how we go about our days here in Los Angeles. I recently spent a month in New Orleans, and upon returning, I also was surprised at how easily I became aware of the tremendous assault on the environment (and Southern California is truly a beautiful environment) the “car” has. From noise, to pollution, to vast amounts of space necessary for roads and parking lots, etc., it’s almost as if we exist to serve this status quo of machinery.

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In addition to the Southern California water situation (in a nutshell, we don’t have any, it comes from elsewhere) and plans to make that more sustainable, he talks about the resurgence of projects in public transportation, biking and walking infrastructure and what has had to happen politically to get there. A lot of the programs, such as the extension of the Purple Line Subway to UCLA, have a completion date of 2035, when I, gulp, if I live that long, will be 80. But heck, I see people much older than that riding the subway. So I’m looking forward to it.

Michael Woo, my former L.A. City Councilperson and current dean of the College of Environmental Design at California State Polytechnic University-Pomona said this about the reluctance of Inland Empire City Fathers and Mothers to the idea of public transit/density issues: “Many of them believed that low-density living, automobile dependence, a culture based on private backyards instead of public open spaces simply reflected the L.A. version of the American Dream. They were reluctant to embrace transit or density as part of the solution. To them it all just seemed like going backward.”

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That says a lot about why things evolved the way they did. Still, as even car and backyard lovers don’t like sitting in gridlock much at all, everyone realizes some things must change, and we’ve finally found that there’s political will here to do it (and that will extends into Republican Orange County, as well as that Inland Empire). The end result will be a much more livable Southern California, perhaps more garden-like, as the earlier boosters liked to claim.

Now if they could just do something about that pesky seismic problem. . .

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Is it Time to Consider Leaving Los Angeles?

 

Los Angeles City Hall. Photo by Jimbolaya

Los Angeles is the future

Two recent competing articles, one (the link above, from the NY Post) from L.A.’s east coast competition (well, competition for cool, anyway) seeming to finally give the city its due, at least in some areas like dining and clubbing, transit, general livability, walkability.

The problem with articles like this one is that they’re most likely written by professional travelers/food writers looking for certain things and then finding what they were looking for, they write about it. In that process, though, they ignore the rest of what’s in front of them. They see the city that they expected to see, and write about it that way. Not from the perspective of a resident, but a tourist. One with a lot of cash, too. I’m happy they found the great places to eat in such varied spots as Downtown, Venice, Hollywood and Mid-City (and I’m happy for the restaurateurs and club owners, that they’re successful, really, that is an accomplishment).

But the overall impression you get from their story/review is of a city rich, laidback and carefree – of course, Los Angeles has that Entourage-y aspect. But that’s not the norm. The norm is that it’s a very difficult city in many respects: financially, socially, employment-wise, ecologically challenged, a diverse place but not without that tension.

There’s an incredible number of homeless people in the enormous city who don’t get to patronize these establishments. And, as it is the city of the car culture, there are many people who live in their cars. I’m not sure if that means they’re homeless or not – as a car is a roof over one’s head, I guess, technically. I come across a surprising number of people sleeping in their cars on my early morning walks. It never fails to startle me.

That’s what I flashed on – the homeless, in cars or on the streets – in the part of the story where they mentioned the daily celebrity sightings downtown –  I mean, OK, really? I’m not sure what celebs they’re seeing down there (though I know “Mad Men” is shot on downtown stages) but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. So if you see an actor or two you don’t see the thousands of desperately poor around you? I’m not sure what kind of person has that lack of filter.

Which leads me to the competing story:

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