transit

There will be many accolades bestowed upon Los Angeles at this year’s American Planning Association conference. And no doubt many of them will be reserved for L.A.’s forward-thinking transportation policies; well deserved, since public transit generally lurks in the collective blind spot of Los Angelenos. But there is one strategy transit strategy that will likely get overlooked at the conference, and it is perhaps Los Angeles’ greatest feat. In L.A., where image is everything and the car is king, Metro is doing what might be considered Mission Impossible: make transit hip.

How did the crash happen? Over-inflating the economic balloon with debt that was vulnerable to rises in oil price. What do we do about it? Use non-oil-based projects and approaches to generate economic growth or else we are going to make things worse. In detail....

San Francisco ranks at the top in walkable urbanism on countless surveys. In the Brookings' survey I released in December of 2007 (Footloose and Fancy Free; A Field Survey of Walkable Urban Places in the Top 30 US Metropolitan Areas, www.brookings.edu/walkableurbanism), it ranked #3. In the recently released version 2.0 of Walk Score (www.walkscore.com), the city of San Francisco (as opposed to the metropolitan area I ranked) ranked #1. Yet take a ride on the CalTrans commuter train from downtown Sa

Over the next few months or the next year or two at most, a new concept will be embraced by real estate developers, civic leaders, and environmentalists; eco-density. I hijacked the term from the mayor of Vancouver, who coined it to explain why he was a proponent of much higher density development around rail transit stations. In spite of devising a very clever term, his concept and term were viewed quite negatively. This is due to the oft used expression that "there are two things people hate; density and sprawl."