Move LA applauds the choice of Phil Washington as new CEO for LA Metro. Washington comes to LA from Denver, where he was the general manager of Denver's Regional Transportation District. Denver is the only other region in the United Station that has, like Los Angeles County, embarked on an ambitious transit expansion — also funded by a local sales tax and involving a multi-project build-out. "His success in Denver should give us confidence that together we will be successful here," says Move LA Executive Director Denny Zane.

Thank you California Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De Leon (D-Los Angeles) for introducing SB 767 and authorizing LA Metro to put a new half-cent sales tax measure on the 2016 ballot to fund transportation improvements! We like it — especially because it’s broadly worded so as to leave planning decisions about what to fund up to Metro. We encourage the Legislature to respect local decision-making about which projects will go into the Long Range Transportation Plan and be funded by the ballot measure.

Uber says it sees itself as complementing LA's public transit system by getting people to and from transit, and this map suggests it could be true. Read more.

Streetsblog LA's Joe Linton asks the question and tracks improvements in DTLA for people on bikes. HERE.

The KCET blog tracks the whole long story of how rail got reintroduced into LA, the city that had the largest electric trolley system in the world in the 1920s — with 2,000 cars running daily over 1,000 miles of track — and that had no passenger rail system in 1990, until the Blue Line opened. Today we have about 100 miles, though the system will grow to 200 miles when all the Measure R-funded lines are built. On the KCET blog.

A curious but interesting blog post that asks the questions "Is rent stabilization [rent control] enough if we don't also have abundant housing?" and "Will abundant housing be enough to keep rents in check?" On the Let's Go LA blog.

Two major take-aways from the crowded San Fernando Valley Town Hall meeting that Move LA co-hosted with the San Fernando Valley Council of Governments last week: There is a very high level of interest in and support for Measure R2 and for rail projects, and a very high level of support for bike and pedestrian projects as well.

Move LA was local co-host of the Live.Ride.Share conference on shared mobility — carshare, bikeshare, rideshare, etc., topics that trended on twitter in LA the day of the event! — at the Japanese American National Museum Feb. 23. Here is a short sum-up and ideas about next steps.

It makes sense that shared-use mobility evangelists are quite the cutting edge bunch. They are, afterall, pushing for nothing short of a revolutionary overhaul to how we go about our daily lives. But even we were taken aback by the raw volume of Twitter activity on the #LiveRideShare hashtag throughout the day on Monday. It was so massive that we were able to construct pretty close to a blow-by-blow synopsis of the entire day on Storify of the entire conference. 

If you missed the actual event, this is undoubtedly the best way to take in every quality nugget of wisdom, statistic and musing that surfaced this past Monday in downtown Los Angeles:

A new report from the US PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) ranks Los Angeles as 4th best at creating new technology-enabled transportation services including ridesourcing, carsharing, taxi hailing, static and real-time transit info, apps and virtual transit ticketing — LA provides 9 of the 11 services that were considered, ranking just behind Austin (#1), San Francisco (#2) and Washington DC (#3). The study found that among the 70 cities studied, 19 provide access to 8 or more of these services, and that carsharing is available in 69.