SoCal Focus, KCET's daily blog, recently featured a fascinating pictorial essay on LA's major superhighway, the Pasadena Freeway, built along 1.3 miles of what had been the California Cycleway and replacing an earlier plan by Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted, considered the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost park maker, had wanted to build a motorway that would provide "a great deal of incidental recreation and pleasure along the Arroyo Seco." The Cycleway was a 1.3 mile elevated tollway for bicycles that opened in 1900 and ran from Hotel Green in Pasadena to the Raymond Hotel in South Pasadena. It was to have connected Pasadena to downtown LA, but was never extended beyond the first segment.

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A new study by Morgan Stanley and the national nonprofit Low Income Investment Fund finds that integrating transit, jobs and affordable housing reduces unemployment and fosters thriving communities. Jobs in almost all sectors have increasingly moved away from city centers and mass transit. Says LIIF CEO Nancy Andrews, "Moving people to jobs is easier and more efficient than moving jobs to people."

The paper highlights a recent equitable transit-oriented development effort in San Francisco, where LIIF and Morgan Stanley, along with other public and private investors, helped provide loans for affordable housing near public transportation in the city’s low-income Tenderloin district.  The authors note that an increasing number of metropolitan areas around the country (Portland, Seattle, Boston, Baltimore, Charlotte and Atlanta) are currently working to integrate transportation systems and community planning.
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Many American cities are making big investments in their rail depots, including LA, which opened Union Station in 1939, which is often referred to as the "last of the great railway stations in America"  . . .

Read more on Denver Urbanism.

The City Council approved the "modified parking requirement district ordinance yesterday, in recognition, says Streetsblog, that "the city's parking requirements are killing small business": now neighborhoods can choose from a menu of seven options.
Read more on LA Curbed.

 

Ken Alpern, co-chair of Friends of the Green Line, makes the case for Measure J, the extension of the Measure R transportation sales tax.. He concludes: "Measure R makes our transportation dilemma an issue of 'when' and not merely 'if' . . . Measure J ensures that these projects will be built soon, and places the burden on our county to ensure that Measure R-listed projects are but the beginning of what we need to empower the economic vibrancy of LA for both ourselves and future generations."
Read more here.

 

Plunging emissions are in spite of the fact that gasoline consumption in the same period has tripled, according to Good magazine. The study from which Good got this information was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, which concludes: "The results show that the mixing ratios of VOCs and CO have decreased by almost two orders of magnitude during the past five decades at an average annual rate of 7.5%."

Read about it here.

On the Transport Politic blog Yonah Freemark notes the Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan shows the GOP is taking a clear stand on where it wants to take government, and the effects on national transportation policy "could be tremendous."

Would Ryan decrease the role of the federal government in funding infrastructure projects that can't be sponsored through user fees? Would federal environmental regulations be dismantled? Would public services such as transit be privatized?

Freemark notes that Ryan voted against every piece of transportation legislation proposed by Democrats with exception of a bill subsidizing the auto industry. . . .

Read more on Transport Politic.

 

LA Metro is offering to tell you "everything you want to know about the new federal surface transportation bill but were afraid to ask." In the board room at LA Metro on Wednesday, August 15, 9:30 a.m. to noon. RSVP by August 10 to [email protected] Here's the flier.

The loss of state and federal funding halts affordable housing construction at a time of unprecedented need. The biggest loss for local officials has been the $1 billion a year that had flowed from redevelopment agencies across the state, which have all been abolished to close the state's budget gap.

Read it in today's LA Times.

Following last week's two 4.5 magnitude earthquakes, Metro's engineering and operations staff and consultants answer the question: "What magnitude are the tunnels or stations designed to withstand?" It's noted that subways generally survive earthquakes with minimal or no damage, far less than buildings or roads.

Read it on The Source.