Move LA ED Denny Zane helped develop Santa Monica College's "Any Line, Any Time" program in 2008 and a survey done last year shows that 45% of students now arrive on campus by bus! Here are the reasons you should vote HERE in LA2050's crowd-funding faceoff for our proposal to work on a countywide universal student transit pass program:
•  Big increases in student transit ridership;
•  Big reductions in traffic around colleges and universities;
•  Students can save $2,000/year on cost of getting to school;
•  Reduced GHG emissions and air pollution;
•  Reduced demand for parking at/around schools so land can be used for educational purposes;
•  Students can also take transit to work and all destinations;
•  Students are incentivized to make decisions about where to live and work based on the proximity of transit;
•  Students might become transit riders for life;
•  Increased transit ridership makes LA even more likely to win federal transit funding;
•  LA County builds a transit-responsive culture!

LA County is dramatically expanding its transit system BUT WHAT IF we also began a universal student transit pass program to help 700,000 community college and California State University students shift from cars to transit? Doubling student transit use would be like adding another Blue Line without any construction costs! PLEASE VOTE HERE to help Move LA win $100,000 to make students transit passes a reality across LA County.

Move LA has long been interested in the idea of a countywide universal student pass program so students can ride "Any Line, Any Time" on LA Metro trains and all buses. Move LA Executive Director Denny Zane helped develop a similar and very successful program like this for students, faculty and staff at Santa Monica College with the Big Blue Bus in 2008 — now 40% of the college population arrives on campus by bus. Since schools are typically one of the biggest generators of traffic in a city, these transit pass programs are a big traffic reducer. A recent study by transportation consultants Nelson Nygaard found that of all the transportation improvements that could reduce traffic in the San Gabriel Valley—including completion of the 710 freeway through South Pasadena and Pasadena—providing all students in the Valley with student transit passes would have the biggest effect reducing traffic congestion: VOTE FOR OUR STUDENT TRANSIT PASS PROPOSAL TO THE GOLDHIRSH FOUNDATION HERE.

LA is experiencing one the worst housing crises in our history, and the combination of rising rents and falling incomes is wreaking havoc on low-income people. In January, more than 15,000 families getting CalWORKs and 53,000 individuals getting General Relief were homeless — that’s more homeless people in the county than the entire population of Inglewood, or Burbank, or Santa Monica. LA County has the highest poverty rate in California at 26%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California), and incomes and rents are so out of whack that we have a shortage of over a half million affordable rentals, just in LA County. And 3 out of 4 Metro riders have incomes of less than $25,000/year.

Spent Friday evening with a friend and we started pulling up videos about Los Angeles and then reminiscing about “The Californians,” that soap opera parody in 3 acts with Fred Armisen, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, all in blonde wigs. (And photographed here with Mick Jagger in pink.) These friends are enmeshed in a melodrama in which much of the dialogue consists of descriptions of the routes they advise taking to get around traffic in the city, always using a definite article to precede freeways — as in “the 405,” “the 10,” etc. — described in Wikipedia as “characteristic of Southern California English.”

Voting has begun on the LA2050 2015 GRANTS CHALLENGE. VOTE for MOVE LA’S “ANY LINE ANY TIME” student transit pass proposal we could win $100 THOUSAND DOLLARS to mobilize LA County college students to win UNIVERSAL STUDENT TRANSIT PASSES. Here's the LINK. PLEASE VOTE!

Want to know more? Watch our very short video of LA Trade Tech students (at the link above) explaining the benefits (for all of us!) and read our proposal to the Goldhirsh Foundation (same location)!

You can vote for one proposal in each of 5 categories (that’s 5 votes total*): AGAIN, WE ARE IN THE “LEARN” CATEGORY. The others are “LIVE,” “CONNECT,” “PLAY,” and “CREATE.” The goal is to help make Los Angeles a better place in which to live, learn, connect, play and create!

Student transit pass program benefits include:

*Big increases in student transit ridership;
*Big reductions in traffic around colleges and universities;
*Students can save $2,000/year on cost of getting to school;
*Reduced GHG emissions;
*Reduced demand for parking at/around schools;
*Students can also take transit to work and all destinations;
*LA County builds a transit-responsive culture!

THANK YOU in advance FOR YOUR VOTE!

(*Your 5 votes will help 10 organizations win $100,000 each because in addition to the 5 organizations that win the popular crowd-sourced vote a jury will pick another 5 organizations from among the Top 10 vote-getters in each category.)

When Damien Newton called to ask “What’s the best or worse news out of the 2015 Legislative session?” for his #DamienTalks Streetsblog podcast, we told him that it was discovering that Senate President pro Tem Kevin DeLeon (D-Los Angeles) is a progressive and effective leader who is both substantive and passionate: We applaud his SB 350 for building on the legacy of AB 32, SB 375 and SB 535 — the 3 bills that made California a climate leader — and SB 767 for giving LA County the opportunity to fund a clean and sustainable public transportation system. THANK YOU SENATOR DE LEON! (Refresher course below.) (Photo is DeLeon at the Griffith Observatory for the signing of SB 350.)

• AB 32 (Pavley) gave the Air Resources Board (ARB) the right to regulate sources of GHG emissions including cars and light trucks (transportation emits 40% of GHGs)
• SB 375 (Steinberg) directed the ARB to set regional GHG reduction targets
• SB 535 (DeLeon) directs at least 25% of GHG Reduction Fund money into projects that benefit disadvantaged communities.
• SB 767 (DeLeon) authorizes Metro to put a sales tax measure for transportation on the 2016 ballot.

The Taxi Fare Finder and Ride Guru app helps locals and visitors who are looking for a ride find out how much it will cost to travel from one location to another by taxi or by rideshare in 2,000 cities around the world, and also posts news about the 2 competing industries. The results from this search, for the price of a ride on a Sunday morning from Move LA's downtown office to LAX is pretty interesting . . .

We were hugely honored to be chosen by the Goldhirsh Foundation and LA 2050 to be a part of a 72-hour “ProduceAthon” hosted by Jasmine Youssefzadeh and her Impact Rising “cultural movement” company. She brought together 15 “creatives”—producers, directors, camerapeople, etc.—5 “tastemakers” and 5 nonprofits under 1 roof in a small house in West Hollywood to make 5 videos that tell stories that “inspire, activate and unite people in support of brands and causes that matter.” In the room were Move LA, CicLAvia, Chrysalis, Spark Los Angeles, and Lift Los Angeles.

Many U.S. cities have implemented robust universal student transit pass programs that reduce student costs and dramatically increase ridership—71% to 200%, according to studies by Donald Shoup and other UCLA researchers. There are several successful programs in LA County, most notably at Cal State Long Beach, Santa Monica College and Mount San Antonio College. In this Streetsblog story Joe Linton writes that while most transit agencies in LA County are seeing ridership decline, Foothill Transit's ridership has increased 3.6%. The reason is the agency's Class Pass program at Mount Sac, which was expanded to the University of LaVerne, and may be implemented at Cal Poly Pomona and Citrus College. Move LA ED Denny Zane helped develop the Santa Monica College program and we are working with LA Metro now to determine the feasibility of a countywide universal pass program.