Walking in L.A.http://www.good.is/Ryan Bradley heads out on foot to find out what's wrong (and right) with transportation in Los Angeles.Sat, 26 May 2012 20:53:48 -0700CakePHPhourly1en-us <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: The End of the Road?]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-the-end-of-the-road/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-the-end-of-the-road/

The ninth and final post in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

My grandparents bought their house in Brentwood from the widowed wife of an engineer at Douglas Aircraft, in Long Beach, who died on the job. My grandfather knew the widow's brother from law school, so they didn't have to pay a realtor's fee. They were young, and couldn't have afforded the place otherwise. "It was almost rural out here," my grandfather says. "There were mostly avocado orchards, and not more than two blocks were developed north of Sunset. But the bus did run out this far, and I took the bus to work downtown." 

"At 7:05 a.m.," my grandmother says. She is cutting carrots. 

"There was a guy I rode the bus with," my grandfather says, "he was a superior court judge." 

Then I say something like: "So a superior court judge and a young downtown lawyer rode the bus to work together?"

And my grandfather leans back in his stool and smiles. "Ah yes, those were more democratic times."

My grandparents are old and sensible enough to have given up driving. Even though my grandmother is a dynamo and treks to the grocery store and back regularly—a mile and a half round trip—she’s nearing 90 and my grandfather just got there. When I leave the next morning, they walk with me for a while, but the pace is slow. They know their neighborhood well, having lived here for six decades. We go as far as a small koi pond in a yard around the corner, separated from the sidewalk by a picket fence with bougainvillea growing over it. The fence is low and white and easy to peer over, so we stop and watch the fish, waiting for them to chance a swim into the sunlight. My grandparents visit these fish on their walks, they tell me. They point down the road to a construction site, then across the street to where some of the old neighborhood used to be but has since been rebuilt. The more recently constructed houses have short driveways and are so large they consume entire properties. They don't have gardens or fish ponds or dogs to visit. It's getting late already, and I hug my grandparents goodbye and walk on.

I zig-zag southwest from 26th Street and San Vicente, to Ocean Avenue and the sea. There are coral trees lining San Vicente and figs along La Mesa Drive. On Santa Monica Boulevard, where the street is lined with car dealerships and no one walks, something amazing happens: I run into a friend. Her car is in the shop, so she's walking. There is a particularly “L.A.” detail about this encounter and that is the fact that my friend is a famous musician. We chat about what she is up to, and what I am up to; she tells me about recording her second album and the photo shoot for it, and I tell her about walking across Los Angeles; and then we kind of look at each other and consider how funny and fortunate and strange our lives are before we say goodbye.

Not long after that, I reach Santa Monica and the end of the continent.

Yesterday I hiked into the hills above Will Rogers State Park and I looked out over the Pacific and the basin I walked across. Will Rogers loved flying, and once famously said, "If you can't fly, you might as well walk." The old cowboy wasn't wrong—flight may get you there faster, but walking you really get a feel for a place. I never understood Los Angeles until I spent some time slowly moving through it.

When I set out, I wanted to understand whether Los Angeles was becoming a better city. It has wisely set aside millions to address its transportation issues, but is it addressing the right ones? It’s developing, but is it developing the right way? I don't have a simple answer, or even a definitive one. All I can say is that the most wonderful parts of Los Angeles are the product of concerned, civic-minded, extraordinary Angelinos who know, viscerally, what this place is and what is best for it. Rodia built his towers; Koeppel maps staircases; and though Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska, his wife willed to the public the 186 acres for the state park. Los Angeles, like any city, is only as good as its citizens, the ones who really live in this place and plant roots here—metaphoric and literal roots.

There is a high onshore wind and the sea is filled with whitecaps. Sand gets in my eyes and stings my cheeks and piles in drifts over the bike paths that run south to Venice. The beach is nearly deserted as I move south and the wind picks up and upends some of the street vendors' tables along the boardwalk.

In 1931 the Los Angeles Times celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and asked some prominent Angelinos to predict what 50 years into the future might look like. William B. Stout said that "One can leave New York after breakfast and arrive in Los Angeles in time for evening dinner," but this turned out to be possible well before 1981. A Dr. R. A. Millikan predicted that "When coal and oil are gone, science will find a way to utilize the energy of the sun." We're doing our darndest to get there, fast. Fifty years is a long, long time when it comes to the history of Los Angeles. What might happen in the next five decades is anyone’s guess, but I’m optimistic. It’s hard to be otherwise here in the sun and the sea air.

I met a man on my walk who was weathered and bearded. It was impossible to tell how old he was—anywhere between 35 and 60. He wore a beat-up raincoat and cracked sandals and had an expensive-looking backpack on. He walked everywhere in Los Angeles, he said, but only on weekends. During the week he had a car and drove. He liked to set out on a different trek each time and walk until he got lost. He made his way back home using the mountains. If you can see the San Bernadinos to the East, he said, you're fine. 

I want to say that I met this man on the beach at Venice because that would sure be a nice, literary coda to this walk. But I didn't. I met him on the first day on the corner of Rodeo Road and La Cienaga Boulevard, outside the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. A few blocks later I snapped a photo of a traffic camera and then, four days later and four stories underground, I watched the same intersection on one of the 16 screens at ATSAC.

Before parting, I asked him what he enjoyed about walking in the city and he said that he just liked the feeling of getting lost and finding his way back home, and that given enough time he'd wander this city forever. I get what he means and I didn't disagree and kept walking. I still had to make downtown before nightfall. Seven miles to go. Seven miles, that's 10,560 steps.

Photos by Ryan Bradley

]]>

The ninth and final post in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

My grandparents bought their house in Brentwood from the widowed wife of an engineer at Douglas Aircraft, in Long Beach, who died on the job. My grandfather knew the widow's brother from law school, so they didn't have to pay a realtor's fee. They were young, and couldn't have afforded the place otherwise. "It was almost rural out here," my grandfather says. "There were mostly avocado orchards, and not more than two blocks were developed north of Sunset. But the bus did run out this far, and I took the bus to work downtown." 

"At 7:05 a.m.," my grandmother says. She is cutting carrots. 

"There was a guy I rode the bus with," my grandfather says, "he was a superior court judge." 

Then I say something like: "So a superior court judge and a young downtown lawyer rode the bus to work together?"

And my grandfather leans back in his stool and smiles. "Ah yes, those were more democratic times."

My grandparents are old and sensible enough to have given up driving. Even though my grandmother is a dynamo and treks to the grocery store and back regularly—a mile and a half round trip—she’s nearing 90 and my grandfather just got there. When I leave the next morning, they walk with me for a while, but the pace is slow. They know their neighborhood well, having lived here for six decades. We go as far as a small koi pond in a yard around the corner, separated from the sidewalk by a picket fence with bougainvillea growing over it. The fence is low and white and easy to peer over, so we stop and watch the fish, waiting for them to chance a swim into the sunlight. My grandparents visit these fish on their walks, they tell me. They point down the road to a construction site, then across the street to where some of the old neighborhood used to be but has since been rebuilt. The more recently constructed houses have short driveways and are so large they consume entire properties. They don't have gardens or fish ponds or dogs to visit. It's getting late already, and I hug my grandparents goodbye and walk on.

I zig-zag southwest from 26th Street and San Vicente, to Ocean Avenue and the sea. There are coral trees lining San Vicente and figs along La Mesa Drive. On Santa Monica Boulevard, where the street is lined with car dealerships and no one walks, something amazing happens: I run into a friend. Her car is in the shop, so she's walking. There is a particularly “L.A.” detail about this encounter and that is the fact that my friend is a famous musician. We chat about what she is up to, and what I am up to; she tells me about recording her second album and the photo shoot for it, and I tell her about walking across Los Angeles; and then we kind of look at each other and consider how funny and fortunate and strange our lives are before we say goodbye.

Not long after that, I reach Santa Monica and the end of the continent.

Yesterday I hiked into the hills above Will Rogers State Park and I looked out over the Pacific and the basin I walked across. Will Rogers loved flying, and once famously said, "If you can't fly, you might as well walk." The old cowboy wasn't wrong—flight may get you there faster, but walking you really get a feel for a place. I never understood Los Angeles until I spent some time slowly moving through it.

When I set out, I wanted to understand whether Los Angeles was becoming a better city. It has wisely set aside millions to address its transportation issues, but is it addressing the right ones? It’s developing, but is it developing the right way? I don't have a simple answer, or even a definitive one. All I can say is that the most wonderful parts of Los Angeles are the product of concerned, civic-minded, extraordinary Angelinos who know, viscerally, what this place is and what is best for it. Rodia built his towers; Koeppel maps staircases; and though Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska, his wife willed to the public the 186 acres for the state park. Los Angeles, like any city, is only as good as its citizens, the ones who really live in this place and plant roots here—metaphoric and literal roots.

There is a high onshore wind and the sea is filled with whitecaps. Sand gets in my eyes and stings my cheeks and piles in drifts over the bike paths that run south to Venice. The beach is nearly deserted as I move south and the wind picks up and upends some of the street vendors' tables along the boardwalk.

In 1931 the Los Angeles Times celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and asked some prominent Angelinos to predict what 50 years into the future might look like. William B. Stout said that "One can leave New York after breakfast and arrive in Los Angeles in time for evening dinner," but this turned out to be possible well before 1981. A Dr. R. A. Millikan predicted that "When coal and oil are gone, science will find a way to utilize the energy of the sun." We're doing our darndest to get there, fast. Fifty years is a long, long time when it comes to the history of Los Angeles. What might happen in the next five decades is anyone’s guess, but I’m optimistic. It’s hard to be otherwise here in the sun and the sea air.

I met a man on my walk who was weathered and bearded. It was impossible to tell how old he was—anywhere between 35 and 60. He wore a beat-up raincoat and cracked sandals and had an expensive-looking backpack on. He walked everywhere in Los Angeles, he said, but only on weekends. During the week he had a car and drove. He liked to set out on a different trek each time and walk until he got lost. He made his way back home using the mountains. If you can see the San Bernadinos to the East, he said, you're fine. 

I want to say that I met this man on the beach at Venice because that would sure be a nice, literary coda to this walk. But I didn't. I met him on the first day on the corner of Rodeo Road and La Cienaga Boulevard, outside the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. A few blocks later I snapped a photo of a traffic camera and then, four days later and four stories underground, I watched the same intersection on one of the 16 screens at ATSAC.

Before parting, I asked him what he enjoyed about walking in the city and he said that he just liked the feeling of getting lost and finding his way back home, and that given enough time he'd wander this city forever. I get what he means and I didn't disagree and kept walking. I still had to make downtown before nightfall. Seven miles to go. Seven miles, that's 10,560 steps.

Photos by Ryan Bradley

]]> Ryan Bradley Tue, 8 Jun 2010 06:30:00 PDT <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: What Is Happiness and Can It Run You over?]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-what-is-happiness-and-can-it-run-you-over/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-what-is-happiness-and-can-it-run-you-over/

Part eight in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

This is the part of the walk where I almost die, and it happens in the most unexpected and silly place. After visiting the underground transportation nerve center of Los Angeles, I head north (cheating briefly, by riding the Red Line subway) where I find Sunset Boulevard and spend the rest of the day working my way west towards Brentwood. The most interesting thing about Sunset isn't that its 22 storied miles wind through some of the ritziest zip-codes in Los Angeles (though they do), but how miserable it is to walk along.

Sunset is treacherous. The reasons for this are best described by Jan and Dean, who are not, in fact, transportation experts but a rock and roll duo from the 1960s. Their song "Dead Man's Curve" is about Sunset, specifically the section of Sunset immediately west of Beverly Hills. Jan and Dean are singing about a drag race along this strip. Over some excellent tire screeching and engine revving sounds, Jan sings in a high falsetto: "Won't come back from dead man's cuuuuuurve." Two years after the song became a hit, Jan bashed his head in and suffered brain damage after crashing his car along this same windy stretch of pavement.

Walking on Sunset is just as bad. If not for the driveway at 10350 Sunset I don't think I would have come back either. Along this stretch, the sidewalk gives way to dirt and then overgrowth so thick that walking along the shoulder becomes impossible. This means I have to cross the street—again and again. At first, darting out into oncoming traffic, playing a high-stakes game of Frogger, is kind of interesting. But then a BMW whips around a hairpin turn and I narrowly avoid death by diving back into the overgrowth. In that moment I realize two things. One: Maiming myself for the sake of this investigation feels incredibly dumb. Two: People love to drive.

The American dream is driving—particularly if it’s fast, through wide-open spaces. Driving is freedom. And this feeling of freedom? It makes people happy. Now, happiness is a vague, fuzzy thing but cars undoubtedly make a lot of people really happy. But only for a little while.

Pretend, for a moment, that happiness leads to well-being and long life. Actually, don’t pretend because the notion is real, although it’s only now taking hold. Transportation academics are just scratching the surface of what this means. Eric Morris—the UCLA doctoral student—is in the process of creating well-being surveys that will, as he puts it, "see how levels of access to various transportation modes relate to a host of life outcomes, including overall happiness." He's using all the new 2010 census data, and even studying the benefits of driving because, he says, "it enriches our lives to be able to travel so quickly and conveniently." Which is true, I guess, but I'd still much rather be mowed over by a walker on Dead Man's Curve.

Speed and convenience may not bring us meaningful happiness anyway. Consider the Seventh Day Adventists over in Loma Linda, about 70 miles from the ivy patch were I now sit. These are measurably happier, more fulfilled people who live much longer than most—six to ten years longer than the average American, in fact. Their longevity has been studied, their happiness quantified, and the research has proven that these folks do not drive so much. And at every Saturday, they go for a walk. You could say that it's a religious thing (which it is, kind of) but I see it more as a wellness thing. So does Dan Buettner, who finds long-living communities and sets out to discover what makes them tick. Buettner holds the Guinness World Record for distance biking, for a 15,500-mile ride from Alaska to Argentina, but his longevity studies are what he's famous for (Dr. Oz and Oprah are fans). What Buettner and his team of researchers do may sound as vague and fuzzy as happiness, but more and more scientists and scholars are taking note. Sure, you can't buy happiness or long-life, but you just might be able to engineer it.

The driveway at 10350 Sunset isn't particularly special, it's just the first driveway I come across after an extended, harrowing march along Sunset's sidewalk-less stretch. Here the houses are large and recessed and hidden behind high walls and iron gates. The house at 10350 is no exception—although the wall isn't all that tall. This whole day, through Beverly Hills and now Bel Air and later in Brentwood, I've felt unwelcome, constantly reminded that I am outside the home of someone who has gone to great lengths to keep me there. Are these people, shut away in their walled-off homes, happy? It's not a trite question, because another crucial factor when measuring happiness and long life is the importance of community, specifically your relationship to the people around you—your family, sure, but friends and neighbors too. Buettner calls this "belonging to the right tribe." So if your tribe happens to go walking regularly, chances are you will too, and you'll be happier and healthier and live longer for it.

It's evening when I cross the 405 freeway and I am limping. It's been a long day on a terrible stretch of road and I badly want to reach my destination. It's a place I know and love, the home where my father grew up and my grandparents still live. I turn off Sunset in the gloaming and they are there to greet me in the same home they have been in for more than 60 years. For a moment, I feel like time has stopped and death is still very near.  

Next up: It began with a step and it ends with one too.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.

]]>

Part eight in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

This is the part of the walk where I almost die, and it happens in the most unexpected and silly place. After visiting the underground transportation nerve center of Los Angeles, I head north (cheating briefly, by riding the Red Line subway) where I find Sunset Boulevard and spend the rest of the day working my way west towards Brentwood. The most interesting thing about Sunset isn't that its 22 storied miles wind through some of the ritziest zip-codes in Los Angeles (though they do), but how miserable it is to walk along.

Sunset is treacherous. The reasons for this are best described by Jan and Dean, who are not, in fact, transportation experts but a rock and roll duo from the 1960s. Their song "Dead Man's Curve" is about Sunset, specifically the section of Sunset immediately west of Beverly Hills. Jan and Dean are singing about a drag race along this strip. Over some excellent tire screeching and engine revving sounds, Jan sings in a high falsetto: "Won't come back from dead man's cuuuuuurve." Two years after the song became a hit, Jan bashed his head in and suffered brain damage after crashing his car along this same windy stretch of pavement.

Walking on Sunset is just as bad. If not for the driveway at 10350 Sunset I don't think I would have come back either. Along this stretch, the sidewalk gives way to dirt and then overgrowth so thick that walking along the shoulder becomes impossible. This means I have to cross the street—again and again. At first, darting out into oncoming traffic, playing a high-stakes game of Frogger, is kind of interesting. But then a BMW whips around a hairpin turn and I narrowly avoid death by diving back into the overgrowth. In that moment I realize two things. One: Maiming myself for the sake of this investigation feels incredibly dumb. Two: People love to drive.

The American dream is driving—particularly if it’s fast, through wide-open spaces. Driving is freedom. And this feeling of freedom? It makes people happy. Now, happiness is a vague, fuzzy thing but cars undoubtedly make a lot of people really happy. But only for a little while.

Pretend, for a moment, that happiness leads to well-being and long life. Actually, don’t pretend because the notion is real, although it’s only now taking hold. Transportation academics are just scratching the surface of what this means. Eric Morris—the UCLA doctoral student—is in the process of creating well-being surveys that will, as he puts it, "see how levels of access to various transportation modes relate to a host of life outcomes, including overall happiness." He's using all the new 2010 census data, and even studying the benefits of driving because, he says, "it enriches our lives to be able to travel so quickly and conveniently." Which is true, I guess, but I'd still much rather be mowed over by a walker on Dead Man's Curve.

Speed and convenience may not bring us meaningful happiness anyway. Consider the Seventh Day Adventists over in Loma Linda, about 70 miles from the ivy patch were I now sit. These are measurably happier, more fulfilled people who live much longer than most—six to ten years longer than the average American, in fact. Their longevity has been studied, their happiness quantified, and the research has proven that these folks do not drive so much. And at every Saturday, they go for a walk. You could say that it's a religious thing (which it is, kind of) but I see it more as a wellness thing. So does Dan Buettner, who finds long-living communities and sets out to discover what makes them tick. Buettner holds the Guinness World Record for distance biking, for a 15,500-mile ride from Alaska to Argentina, but his longevity studies are what he's famous for (Dr. Oz and Oprah are fans). What Buettner and his team of researchers do may sound as vague and fuzzy as happiness, but more and more scientists and scholars are taking note. Sure, you can't buy happiness or long-life, but you just might be able to engineer it.

The driveway at 10350 Sunset isn't particularly special, it's just the first driveway I come across after an extended, harrowing march along Sunset's sidewalk-less stretch. Here the houses are large and recessed and hidden behind high walls and iron gates. The house at 10350 is no exception—although the wall isn't all that tall. This whole day, through Beverly Hills and now Bel Air and later in Brentwood, I've felt unwelcome, constantly reminded that I am outside the home of someone who has gone to great lengths to keep me there. Are these people, shut away in their walled-off homes, happy? It's not a trite question, because another crucial factor when measuring happiness and long life is the importance of community, specifically your relationship to the people around you—your family, sure, but friends and neighbors too. Buettner calls this "belonging to the right tribe." So if your tribe happens to go walking regularly, chances are you will too, and you'll be happier and healthier and live longer for it.

It's evening when I cross the 405 freeway and I am limping. It's been a long day on a terrible stretch of road and I badly want to reach my destination. It's a place I know and love, the home where my father grew up and my grandparents still live. I turn off Sunset in the gloaming and they are there to greet me in the same home they have been in for more than 60 years. For a moment, I feel like time has stopped and death is still very near.  

Next up: It began with a step and it ends with one too.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.

]]> Ryan Bradley Thu, 3 Jun 2010 15:30:00 PDT <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: The Data Driven City]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-the-data-driven-city/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-the-data-driven-city/

Part seven in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

I'm four stories below ground, across the street from City Hall, in a room with immense steel doors leading to it. There are 16 screens splayed across the semi-circular wall in front of me. Some of the screens are subdivided into smaller screens, and men at desks stare into still more screens surrounded by blinking lights and important-looking buttons. I don't touch anything, except for my pen and notepad and even this happens rarely because, as I stare at all the screens and buttons and listen to the low hum of billions of bytes of data getting processed every second, I find myself falling into a trance.

If Los Angeles does, in fact, have a center for transportation, then I'm standing right in it. And if you happen to be walking, driving, or riding the bus through one of 3,268 intersections throughout the city at approximately 11:15 on this Wednesday morning in late April, then maybe, on one of these 16-plus screens, I'm looking at you. I'm in the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control center, a place straight out of War Games or Enemy of the State or Live Free or Die Hard or any number of movies featuring a really futuristic-looking command center. The place even has a Hollywood-ready acronym: ATSAC.

ATSAC was created for two reasons. First, to adjust traffic signals in real time to respond to events that may cause congestion, like a car accident or a Lakers championship. Before ATSAC, the Department of Transportation had to send someone out into the field to adjust traffic signals. Now, these adjustments can be made throughout the city from this underground bunker next to City Hall, by those men watching those 16 screens, as thousands of cameras trained on thousands of intersections record the goings-on on the streets above. ATSAC was created right before the 1984 Olympics, and the year of ATSAC's creation and the title of George Orwell's famous dystopian novel about Big Brother is one of those neat correlations that writers live to point out.

The second reason ATSAC was created is more prescient and, for our purposes, more important: data. ATSAC collects data about how people move through Los Angeles using street sensors and bus sensors and those thousands of video cameras trained on thousands of city intersections. The engineers working at ATSAC (and it's only engineers working at ATSAC) then calculate travel times, travel speed, air emissions, fuel consumption, and the number of stops from here to there and back again. The super-nerds at ATSAC then spit out algorithms that determine the very rhythm of the city—controlling traffic lights, slowing or speeding up city buses, even plotting new roads.

They're pretty good at what they do, too. In its first 10 years, ATSAC improved travel time and travel speed by 12 percent, reduced traffic delay by 30 percent, and dramatically reduced air emissions. (These figures, and even the word "dramatically," come from ATSAC's own study of itself, so however good it may be at number-crunching, these successes should be taken with a sizable lump of salt—bureaucrats are especially good at making a case for their continued existence.) If ATSAC's engineers could strap a sensor to every car, cyclist, and pedestrian in Los Angeles and record their every movement, they would. In fact, they aren't far from doing just that. 

We are not efficient movers. We are bad at driving, terrible in traffic, and worse still if there's a roadside accident. In his fascinating book on traffic (titled, appropriately, Traffic) Tom Vanderbilt writes that "many of us may spend more time in traffic than we do eating meals with our family, going on vacation, or having sex.... We spend more on driving than on food or health care." ATSAC wants to fix this. Somewhere in all that data is, if not the answer, certainly some improvements. I'm here this morning to hobnob with a group of engineers and see the latest, greatest innovation in people-moving in action. It's called a scramble crosswalk, and it comes from Kansas City by way of Tokyo's Shibuya Square, the scramble-y-est of all the scramble crosswalks. 

The scramble crosswalk embraces one efficient truth: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It shuts down an intersection in all four directions and allows pedestrians to walk across it any way they want (including diagonally). Benjamin Chan, a transportation engineer at ATSAC, pulls up on screen one of eight scramble crosswalks currently in Los Angeles, right next to USC. There is a lull as the lights change and the intersection empties itself of automobiles. "And..." Chan pauses dramatically, "Go!" he says, and a biker and a few groups of backpacked pedestrians (almost certainly students) pass each other in the middle of the street. There's another scramble crosswalk by UCLA, one on Rodeo Boulevard, and another in Old Town Pasadena. There were, originally, 10 scramble crosswalks throughout the city, but a few in the Garment District were shut down because they were deemed inefficient ("Boxes of clothing were falling down in the middle of the intersection," Chan explains). What this has to do with traffic congestion in Los Angeles is simple: More people walking means fewer cars are on the road. The more efficient walking is, the more desirable it might be. But there is no algorithm for desire.

There are people on the third floor of the CalTrans building with their feet in the air, legs churning upward towards the fluorescent ceiling. It's a familiar motion—they're walking, more or less, but upside down and for exercise only. It looks pretty inefficient and no fun. And it's part of a larger problem, the problem of perception. Specifically, the perception that nobody walks in Los Angeles, and that you, or an employee of the California Department of Transportation, would have to get in exercise by looking like a fool as you upside-down walk in front of a glass window-wall. The truth of it is that walking is good for you and good for the environment and Los Angeles is a great city to walk in—the weather is perfect year-round, there are plenty of sidewalks, and there's a very good chance that, if you live here, you're living about a mile from basic amenities like a grocery store. That's less than a 20-minute walk. But do you walk for your errands? I doubt it. This is why Bruce Gillman is frustrated.

Bruce Gillman is the Los Angeles Department of Transportation's Public Information Officer, which means a lot of people are mad at him and his department a lot of the time. He's trying, but for the most part he's given up on you and moved on to a group of people the DOT actually has a chance of changing. He's focused on school-kids. "People are too stubborn," he says, "If we can get teachers to get their kids walking, to lead by example, we can combat child obesity and reduce traffic all at once." Gillman, like a lot of new arrivals to Los Angeles (he's been here just three years) is fascinated and horrified by the entrenched car culture, which runs so deep Joan Didion once described "the freeway experience" as "the only secular communion Los Angeles has." Gillman is battling this culture war with a campaign for school kids.

But back at ATSAC, they need more data.

Last year, it was announced that ATSAC would receive $150 million to enhance its system. There is talk of using in-car GPS to trace the movements of individual cars throughout the city. They want to add sensors to more city buses. Chan, wide-eyed, recalls a demonstration of London's extensive camera system, where engineers actually zoomed in on individual drivers. "The image was so clear," he says "you could see the driver's face."

And then Chan turns back to his console and the room continues to hum and I walk out the big steel doors and up into the bright, late-morning. I haven't gone half a block before I notice my first video camera, drab and stationary in its white metal box. It's an impersonal thing and yet intensely personal—I am being watched, being added to their data. I don't quite know how to take it, so I quickly continue on, heading north toward Hollywood.

Next up: The relationship between transportation and happiness is... complicated.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.

]]>

Part seven in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

I'm four stories below ground, across the street from City Hall, in a room with immense steel doors leading to it. There are 16 screens splayed across the semi-circular wall in front of me. Some of the screens are subdivided into smaller screens, and men at desks stare into still more screens surrounded by blinking lights and important-looking buttons. I don't touch anything, except for my pen and notepad and even this happens rarely because, as I stare at all the screens and buttons and listen to the low hum of billions of bytes of data getting processed every second, I find myself falling into a trance.

If Los Angeles does, in fact, have a center for transportation, then I'm standing right in it. And if you happen to be walking, driving, or riding the bus through one of 3,268 intersections throughout the city at approximately 11:15 on this Wednesday morning in late April, then maybe, on one of these 16-plus screens, I'm looking at you. I'm in the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control center, a place straight out of War Games or Enemy of the State or Live Free or Die Hard or any number of movies featuring a really futuristic-looking command center. The place even has a Hollywood-ready acronym: ATSAC.

ATSAC was created for two reasons. First, to adjust traffic signals in real time to respond to events that may cause congestion, like a car accident or a Lakers championship. Before ATSAC, the Department of Transportation had to send someone out into the field to adjust traffic signals. Now, these adjustments can be made throughout the city from this underground bunker next to City Hall, by those men watching those 16 screens, as thousands of cameras trained on thousands of intersections record the goings-on on the streets above. ATSAC was created right before the 1984 Olympics, and the year of ATSAC's creation and the title of George Orwell's famous dystopian novel about Big Brother is one of those neat correlations that writers live to point out.

The second reason ATSAC was created is more prescient and, for our purposes, more important: data. ATSAC collects data about how people move through Los Angeles using street sensors and bus sensors and those thousands of video cameras trained on thousands of city intersections. The engineers working at ATSAC (and it's only engineers working at ATSAC) then calculate travel times, travel speed, air emissions, fuel consumption, and the number of stops from here to there and back again. The super-nerds at ATSAC then spit out algorithms that determine the very rhythm of the city—controlling traffic lights, slowing or speeding up city buses, even plotting new roads.

They're pretty good at what they do, too. In its first 10 years, ATSAC improved travel time and travel speed by 12 percent, reduced traffic delay by 30 percent, and dramatically reduced air emissions. (These figures, and even the word "dramatically," come from ATSAC's own study of itself, so however good it may be at number-crunching, these successes should be taken with a sizable lump of salt—bureaucrats are especially good at making a case for their continued existence.) If ATSAC's engineers could strap a sensor to every car, cyclist, and pedestrian in Los Angeles and record their every movement, they would. In fact, they aren't far from doing just that. 

We are not efficient movers. We are bad at driving, terrible in traffic, and worse still if there's a roadside accident. In his fascinating book on traffic (titled, appropriately, Traffic) Tom Vanderbilt writes that "many of us may spend more time in traffic than we do eating meals with our family, going on vacation, or having sex.... We spend more on driving than on food or health care." ATSAC wants to fix this. Somewhere in all that data is, if not the answer, certainly some improvements. I'm here this morning to hobnob with a group of engineers and see the latest, greatest innovation in people-moving in action. It's called a scramble crosswalk, and it comes from Kansas City by way of Tokyo's Shibuya Square, the scramble-y-est of all the scramble crosswalks. 

The scramble crosswalk embraces one efficient truth: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It shuts down an intersection in all four directions and allows pedestrians to walk across it any way they want (including diagonally). Benjamin Chan, a transportation engineer at ATSAC, pulls up on screen one of eight scramble crosswalks currently in Los Angeles, right next to USC. There is a lull as the lights change and the intersection empties itself of automobiles. "And..." Chan pauses dramatically, "Go!" he says, and a biker and a few groups of backpacked pedestrians (almost certainly students) pass each other in the middle of the street. There's another scramble crosswalk by UCLA, one on Rodeo Boulevard, and another in Old Town Pasadena. There were, originally, 10 scramble crosswalks throughout the city, but a few in the Garment District were shut down because they were deemed inefficient ("Boxes of clothing were falling down in the middle of the intersection," Chan explains). What this has to do with traffic congestion in Los Angeles is simple: More people walking means fewer cars are on the road. The more efficient walking is, the more desirable it might be. But there is no algorithm for desire.

There are people on the third floor of the CalTrans building with their feet in the air, legs churning upward towards the fluorescent ceiling. It's a familiar motion—they're walking, more or less, but upside down and for exercise only. It looks pretty inefficient and no fun. And it's part of a larger problem, the problem of perception. Specifically, the perception that nobody walks in Los Angeles, and that you, or an employee of the California Department of Transportation, would have to get in exercise by looking like a fool as you upside-down walk in front of a glass window-wall. The truth of it is that walking is good for you and good for the environment and Los Angeles is a great city to walk in—the weather is perfect year-round, there are plenty of sidewalks, and there's a very good chance that, if you live here, you're living about a mile from basic amenities like a grocery store. That's less than a 20-minute walk. But do you walk for your errands? I doubt it. This is why Bruce Gillman is frustrated.

Bruce Gillman is the Los Angeles Department of Transportation's Public Information Officer, which means a lot of people are mad at him and his department a lot of the time. He's trying, but for the most part he's given up on you and moved on to a group of people the DOT actually has a chance of changing. He's focused on school-kids. "People are too stubborn," he says, "If we can get teachers to get their kids walking, to lead by example, we can combat child obesity and reduce traffic all at once." Gillman, like a lot of new arrivals to Los Angeles (he's been here just three years) is fascinated and horrified by the entrenched car culture, which runs so deep Joan Didion once described "the freeway experience" as "the only secular communion Los Angeles has." Gillman is battling this culture war with a campaign for school kids.

But back at ATSAC, they need more data.

Last year, it was announced that ATSAC would receive $150 million to enhance its system. There is talk of using in-car GPS to trace the movements of individual cars throughout the city. They want to add sensors to more city buses. Chan, wide-eyed, recalls a demonstration of London's extensive camera system, where engineers actually zoomed in on individual drivers. "The image was so clear," he says "you could see the driver's face."

And then Chan turns back to his console and the room continues to hum and I walk out the big steel doors and up into the bright, late-morning. I haven't gone half a block before I notice my first video camera, drab and stationary in its white metal box. It's an impersonal thing and yet intensely personal—I am being watched, being added to their data. I don't quite know how to take it, so I quickly continue on, heading north toward Hollywood.

Next up: The relationship between transportation and happiness is... complicated.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.

]]> Ryan Bradley Wed, 2 Jun 2010 05:00:00 PDT <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: Transit Activism Is Cooler Than You Think]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-transit-activism-is-cooler-than-you-think/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-transit-activism-is-cooler-than-you-think/

Part six in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

I've been east of Downtown Los Angeles a day before I find them: the walkers. There are 16 of us, men and women, thirtysomethings and the middle-aged, fanny-packed and sweat-suited we stand at the ready. Before I was here in the parking lot of Baller Hardware on Hyperion Avenue, I was in Griffith Park. Before that: Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Solano Canyon, and Angelino Heights—lovely hilly places all, and wonderful for walking. It’s just after 7:30 p.m., and we are listening to the man we have come here to see, the man who will lead us on this night walk. Our route will be three miles long and circuitous, taking us up and down 14 stairways, though never the same stairs twice. The man’s name is Dan Koeppel.

"We try to walk the pace of the slowest person, but we lost someone last week, so keep together,” Koeppel tells us. Then he gives us an exciting pitch: "Tomorrow night we’re doing a full moon walk across Griffith Park to the Hollywood sign. It’s 14 miles."

There is a short silence followed by a few questions, like how long that will take. "I have no clue how long it will take. It could take all night," Koeppel responds. Someone else asks if the park is really open all night and Koeppel answers with confidence: "Sure, if you keep moving."

Koeppel grew up in New York City and remembers taking the subway to midtown when he was young and loving the crush of people and the fact that you had to deal with it. He moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and about 10 years later, while he was writing a book that had nothing to do with walking, Koeppel began to seek out the public stairways in his Silver Lake neighborhood. Because he is meticulous and a little bit obsessive, he started mapping his routes very carefully. And because he is a writer, he wrote about his hobby. And because he is a generous person, he started leading people on his walks. And, well, now “I’ve kind of become this gadfly journalist-activist,” he says, as if it were bound to happen given enough time.

And here I have to add: I know Dan Koeppel because he wrote for National Geographic Adventure, a magazine I used to work for. Dan wrote a brilliant story about a banana that would save all other bananas from a terrible blight, but could only be found in deepest Congo. He told our photo editor she could only assign him a photographer who would be able to ride a motorcycle through the jungle at high speeds, to keep up with him. The story never ran because the magazine shut down, but there in the Congo Dan found his grail banana.

What is interesting about Koeppel for the purposes of this story is that, when he moved to Los Angeles from New York, he brought with him the image of what vibrant city life should look like. And slowly, over time, through some obsession and a lot of civic pride, he did something about it—he became a transit activist, a title I bet he hates. East of the 101 freeway, in these hilly old neighborhoods, this same basic story line has been repeated everywhere: from illegally painted bike lanes by the Department of DIY to the Bicycle Kitchen or L.A. Eco-Village. Koeppel’s contribution, beyond these evening jaunts, is The Big Parade, a 35-mile, two day long trek through the city and its stairs with a 8,250 foot elevation gain which, Koeppel likes to point out, is the equivalent of climbing Mount Whitney. (GOOD's in-house walking expert, the aptly named Alissa Walker, wrote about last year’s Big Parade here and leads architecture themed walks with Koeppel).

The important part about Koeppel’s walks, even his epic ones, isn't that they prove how gnarly city walking can be, but how enjoyable. The Big Parade is segmented so participants can join for as long (or as short) a distance as they want, and a friendlier, more jovial scene there ain’t (this is what I’ve been told. If I was in Los Angeles on June 12 I’d walk it too). After all, once enough people come and bring their friends, and their friends' friends, well, pretty soon you have a movement, and when you have a movement maybe things will actually change. Or, you can just go out and paint a bike lane or build a 99-foot tower in your backyard by yourself.

The next day, I learn that the Griffith Park 14-miler has been shorted to seven miles, probably so more people could participate. But also, I think, because walking 14 miles throughout the night for pleasure seems a little insane. 

We start to talk, the walkers and I, and we agree that it’s kind of novel, walking in a city that isn’t supposed to be walkable. We start to swap city secrets, trade inside information, one-up each other with our street intel. I learn about a vineyard in the Hollywood Hills after I mention the dog-park there. I find out that much of this neighborhood, when it was being developed at the beginning of the 20th century, is named after Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and that the stairs were built in the 1920s and are considered public streets, and that, not far from here, there’s a city road a mile long that’s still completely dirt, same as it was a century ago. Then I make an amateur move: I tell a few of my fellow walkers that I'm writing a story about walking in Los Angeles, that I've been walking across the city, and so ends the secret-sharing; which is fine because frankly, climbing a lot of stairs and talking is hard.

By the end of the three miles it’s dark out and some of the spookier stairways require a significant amount of trust, or a flashlight. Descending the last flight of the night, three teenagers emerge from the shadows, red-eyed and sheepish. There’s the faintest smell of weed in the air, and they stand back against the concrete and watch the group pass by in silence. I’m near the back, and one of them asks, softly:

“What are you guys doing?”

“Just walking,” I say.

“You guys, like, united or something?”

“Yeah. We're united.”

Next up: I am inside a scene from a movie, specifically Live Free or Die Hard. You know, the one where terrorists hacked into the system that controls all the traffic signal and wrecked havoc. That's the one.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.
 

]]>

Part six in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

I've been east of Downtown Los Angeles a day before I find them: the walkers. There are 16 of us, men and women, thirtysomethings and the middle-aged, fanny-packed and sweat-suited we stand at the ready. Before I was here in the parking lot of Baller Hardware on Hyperion Avenue, I was in Griffith Park. Before that: Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Solano Canyon, and Angelino Heights—lovely hilly places all, and wonderful for walking. It’s just after 7:30 p.m., and we are listening to the man we have come here to see, the man who will lead us on this night walk. Our route will be three miles long and circuitous, taking us up and down 14 stairways, though never the same stairs twice. The man’s name is Dan Koeppel.

"We try to walk the pace of the slowest person, but we lost someone last week, so keep together,” Koeppel tells us. Then he gives us an exciting pitch: "Tomorrow night we’re doing a full moon walk across Griffith Park to the Hollywood sign. It’s 14 miles."

There is a short silence followed by a few questions, like how long that will take. "I have no clue how long it will take. It could take all night," Koeppel responds. Someone else asks if the park is really open all night and Koeppel answers with confidence: "Sure, if you keep moving."

Koeppel grew up in New York City and remembers taking the subway to midtown when he was young and loving the crush of people and the fact that you had to deal with it. He moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and about 10 years later, while he was writing a book that had nothing to do with walking, Koeppel began to seek out the public stairways in his Silver Lake neighborhood. Because he is meticulous and a little bit obsessive, he started mapping his routes very carefully. And because he is a writer, he wrote about his hobby. And because he is a generous person, he started leading people on his walks. And, well, now “I’ve kind of become this gadfly journalist-activist,” he says, as if it were bound to happen given enough time.

And here I have to add: I know Dan Koeppel because he wrote for National Geographic Adventure, a magazine I used to work for. Dan wrote a brilliant story about a banana that would save all other bananas from a terrible blight, but could only be found in deepest Congo. He told our photo editor she could only assign him a photographer who would be able to ride a motorcycle through the jungle at high speeds, to keep up with him. The story never ran because the magazine shut down, but there in the Congo Dan found his grail banana.

What is interesting about Koeppel for the purposes of this story is that, when he moved to Los Angeles from New York, he brought with him the image of what vibrant city life should look like. And slowly, over time, through some obsession and a lot of civic pride, he did something about it—he became a transit activist, a title I bet he hates. East of the 101 freeway, in these hilly old neighborhoods, this same basic story line has been repeated everywhere: from illegally painted bike lanes by the Department of DIY to the Bicycle Kitchen or L.A. Eco-Village. Koeppel’s contribution, beyond these evening jaunts, is The Big Parade, a 35-mile, two day long trek through the city and its stairs with a 8,250 foot elevation gain which, Koeppel likes to point out, is the equivalent of climbing Mount Whitney. (GOOD's in-house walking expert, the aptly named Alissa Walker, wrote about last year’s Big Parade here and leads architecture themed walks with Koeppel).

The important part about Koeppel’s walks, even his epic ones, isn't that they prove how gnarly city walking can be, but how enjoyable. The Big Parade is segmented so participants can join for as long (or as short) a distance as they want, and a friendlier, more jovial scene there ain’t (this is what I’ve been told. If I was in Los Angeles on June 12 I’d walk it too). After all, once enough people come and bring their friends, and their friends' friends, well, pretty soon you have a movement, and when you have a movement maybe things will actually change. Or, you can just go out and paint a bike lane or build a 99-foot tower in your backyard by yourself.

The next day, I learn that the Griffith Park 14-miler has been shorted to seven miles, probably so more people could participate. But also, I think, because walking 14 miles throughout the night for pleasure seems a little insane. 

We start to talk, the walkers and I, and we agree that it’s kind of novel, walking in a city that isn’t supposed to be walkable. We start to swap city secrets, trade inside information, one-up each other with our street intel. I learn about a vineyard in the Hollywood Hills after I mention the dog-park there. I find out that much of this neighborhood, when it was being developed at the beginning of the 20th century, is named after Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and that the stairs were built in the 1920s and are considered public streets, and that, not far from here, there’s a city road a mile long that’s still completely dirt, same as it was a century ago. Then I make an amateur move: I tell a few of my fellow walkers that I'm writing a story about walking in Los Angeles, that I've been walking across the city, and so ends the secret-sharing; which is fine because frankly, climbing a lot of stairs and talking is hard.

By the end of the three miles it’s dark out and some of the spookier stairways require a significant amount of trust, or a flashlight. Descending the last flight of the night, three teenagers emerge from the shadows, red-eyed and sheepish. There’s the faintest smell of weed in the air, and they stand back against the concrete and watch the group pass by in silence. I’m near the back, and one of them asks, softly:

“What are you guys doing?”

“Just walking,” I say.

“You guys, like, united or something?”

“Yeah. We're united.”

Next up: I am inside a scene from a movie, specifically Live Free or Die Hard. You know, the one where terrorists hacked into the system that controls all the traffic signal and wrecked havoc. That's the one.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.
 

]]> Ryan Bradley Fri, 28 May 2010 06:00:00 PDT <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: Race and Rail Lines]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-race-and-rail-lines/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-race-and-rail-lines/

Part five in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

There are two fighter jets, gray and decaying, along the north wall of the Compton Airport. On the other side of the wall is a line of single-family homes. It's hotter here than downtown, and the haze makes it impossible to see much of anything in the distance—not the 10,000-foot San Bernadino mountains, rising abruptly 20 miles from here, and not downtown’s skyscrapers, just 10 miles away. With nothing breaking the horizon I get disoriented and feel like I'm in some forgotten corner of the county, and in some ways I am.

Most everyone I've seen out walking hasn't looked like me, not just in the City of Compton (where the population is about 57 percent Latino, 40 percent black, and 1 percent white) but in the rest of Los Angeles County (where about seven out of 10 people aren't white either). To write about public transportation and walking in Los Angeles, specifically who's riding rails and buses and walking to stations and stops, I have to write about race in Los Angeles, and that can get uncomfortable real quick because, honestly, the history of Los Angeles is the history of constructing a white city in a place that isn't—never was.

When it was founded within Rancho San Pedro in 1867, Compton was no more than a loose connection of some 30 hardscrabble families. They traveled here by wagon-train from Stockton, led by one Griffith D. Compton. The land was rough and inimical, and in 1868 floodwaters nearly wiped the settlers out to sea. If the weather held, a few of the Comptonites would be sent on a three-day trek to Pasadena for firewood. In 1994, when the MTA increased bus fare after decades of neglected service, the situation facing Compton and many other non-white, working-class communities in the basin was similarly dire.

That year, the Los Angeles MTA board voted to increase fares from $1.10 to $1.35 and eliminate $40 monthly bus passes altogether. The decision was handed down following hours of public hearings, where riders pleaded with the MTA for improved service ("We want to have a better life," the Los Angeles Times reported one woman saying, describing how she used the bus to attend night classes. "We want to speak with teachers and help [our children] with their homework.") A week after the announced fare hikes, the MTA green-lighted a $123 billion budget for a light rail line to Pasadena, where the population is more than 55 percent white. Los Angeles has the second largest and most heavily used bus system in the country (the first is New York). Of the approximately 500,000 daily bus riders in the city, 58 percent are Latino, 22 percent are black, and just 12 percent are white.

For its decisions, the MTA got taken to court, lost, and was handed a restraining order that halted the fare increase. Four-hundred-thousand bus-riders of color brought a class action suit against the MTA and, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the MTA lost again. To support their case, the plaintiffs cited the MTA's spending 70 percent of its budget on rail passengers, who accounted for just 6 percent of its ridership. For the first time in history, the Civil Rights Act had been successfully used to halt a large transportation agency from enacting what the court considered racist policies.

In a paper explaining the case, Environmental Defense attorney Robert Garcia writes that, "The settlement improved equity and mobility, reduced pollution and congestion, improved the bus system and blocked the MTA's runaway plans for an exorbitantly expensive and inefficient rail system in Los Angeles County." That Garcia works for an organization with "environmental" in its title, and that he would come out against Los Angeles's rail system is telling—such is the complex web of transit and race and the misguided dream of the city's trains.

I have sinned on a Sunday: even though I'm supposed to be walking across this basin, I take the Blue Line from downtown south to Compton, then north to Watts. I get a seat by the window, even though the train is still underground at the 7th St. Metro Center, and as it sits in the station humming it begins to fill up. The Blue Line is the oldest and longest of the MTA's light-rail lines—it runs 22 miles from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles—and the second busiest in the country, averaging 80,000 passengers every weekday. It's a short ride south to the Compton stop, no more than 25 minutes. Along the way I notice a remarkable number of scrap metal yards lining Long Beach Avenue.

To have a functioning rail system, you need a hub from which all tracks radiate, like Times Square in New York or Chicago's Loop. I talk to Eric Morris, a doctoral student at UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies and a frequent contributor to The New York Times's Freakonomics blog, about the rail issue. "The problem is thinking that downtown Los Angeles will be ever be the real hub,” Morris tells me. “This city has launched the largest public transportation campaign in America. But it’s also one of the most decentralized cities in America. While they've created the supply, in some cases they are having a very hard time creating demand," he says. It’s also likely that, hard as the city might try, the task of filling its rail cars is simply impossible. Given the nature of development and population density in Los Angeles, Garcia estimates that "even if an entire rail system were built, it would only serve 11 percent of the population—those who live within a half mile of a rail station." Why, then, would the city build nearly 80 miles of tracks, with plans well underway for more?

While the Blue Line is the most heavily used rail system in Los Angeles, the Green Line is the least, and averages about 44,000 riders per weekday. Its construction in the late-1980s was tied directly, legislatively, to the 105 freeway. In order for the freeway to exist, the state mandated that Caltrans build a “transit corridor” in the median. The Green Line cost $718 million and served an area that, during the Cold War, was a bedroom community to the aerospace industry. Only by the time the Green Line was completed the Cold War was over, and the neighborhoods it served were now filled with working-class minorities who rode the bus. The Green Line’s construction was also used against the MTA in that 1994 class-action suit. I think about how, if you want to do something big, historically big, sometimes you have to go right out and do it—fight the powers that be. And while I’m thinking this we pull into 103rd Street station and I see them: two spindly spires rising 97 and 99 feet in the air. The third tower is lower, 55 feet, but no less impressive. Simon Rodia, the Italian construction worker who built the Watts Towers, spent 33 years fixing mortar to steel pipe and wire mesh and glass and tiles and sea shells. He explained why in such a beautifully straightforward way: I had in mind to do something big, and I did.

I'm not actually here for the towers, I tell myself. I'm here to walk around and get a sense of this place. But really, the fact is that when I ride the rails or take a bus or even just walking around, I'm a tourist—not just in Watts and Compton, but in all of Los Angeles. The honest truth is that if I suddenly had to pick up and move here today, odds are—based on my income and skin color—I’d have a car. But even if I never used the bus or rail systems, I have a stake in them for the same reason Garcia, the Environmental Defense lawyer, has a stake in them. For the same reason we all have a stake in them. When the city decides to build rail lines, it takes money out of the transportation budget that could go into improved bus service. It makes a lot more sense—economically, environmentally, socially-- to invest in buses that people will use than rail that people won’t.

I walk past a group outside a pale-yellow stucco church: two men, a boy, and a woman, all in dark suits despite the heat. The woman is wearing a large purple hat and has a wide friendly face. As I walk by the boy offers me a free meal if I sign up for church service. I smile and say that's fine, but I'm going to pass.

"You here to see the towers?" asks the woman.
"Not really," I say. "I thought I'd walk around for a bit first. I'm walking acr—"
"Oh you need to see the towers," she interrupts. "You'll love them."
And she's right. I do.

Next up: Among the walkers

Photos by Ryan Bradley.
 

]]>

Part five in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

There are two fighter jets, gray and decaying, along the north wall of the Compton Airport. On the other side of the wall is a line of single-family homes. It's hotter here than downtown, and the haze makes it impossible to see much of anything in the distance—not the 10,000-foot San Bernadino mountains, rising abruptly 20 miles from here, and not downtown’s skyscrapers, just 10 miles away. With nothing breaking the horizon I get disoriented and feel like I'm in some forgotten corner of the county, and in some ways I am.

Most everyone I've seen out walking hasn't looked like me, not just in the City of Compton (where the population is about 57 percent Latino, 40 percent black, and 1 percent white) but in the rest of Los Angeles County (where about seven out of 10 people aren't white either). To write about public transportation and walking in Los Angeles, specifically who's riding rails and buses and walking to stations and stops, I have to write about race in Los Angeles, and that can get uncomfortable real quick because, honestly, the history of Los Angeles is the history of constructing a white city in a place that isn't—never was.

When it was founded within Rancho San Pedro in 1867, Compton was no more than a loose connection of some 30 hardscrabble families. They traveled here by wagon-train from Stockton, led by one Griffith D. Compton. The land was rough and inimical, and in 1868 floodwaters nearly wiped the settlers out to sea. If the weather held, a few of the Comptonites would be sent on a three-day trek to Pasadena for firewood. In 1994, when the MTA increased bus fare after decades of neglected service, the situation facing Compton and many other non-white, working-class communities in the basin was similarly dire.

That year, the Los Angeles MTA board voted to increase fares from $1.10 to $1.35 and eliminate $40 monthly bus passes altogether. The decision was handed down following hours of public hearings, where riders pleaded with the MTA for improved service ("We want to have a better life," the Los Angeles Times reported one woman saying, describing how she used the bus to attend night classes. "We want to speak with teachers and help [our children] with their homework.") A week after the announced fare hikes, the MTA green-lighted a $123 billion budget for a light rail line to Pasadena, where the population is more than 55 percent white. Los Angeles has the second largest and most heavily used bus system in the country (the first is New York). Of the approximately 500,000 daily bus riders in the city, 58 percent are Latino, 22 percent are black, and just 12 percent are white.

For its decisions, the MTA got taken to court, lost, and was handed a restraining order that halted the fare increase. Four-hundred-thousand bus-riders of color brought a class action suit against the MTA and, under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the MTA lost again. To support their case, the plaintiffs cited the MTA's spending 70 percent of its budget on rail passengers, who accounted for just 6 percent of its ridership. For the first time in history, the Civil Rights Act had been successfully used to halt a large transportation agency from enacting what the court considered racist policies.

In a paper explaining the case, Environmental Defense attorney Robert Garcia writes that, "The settlement improved equity and mobility, reduced pollution and congestion, improved the bus system and blocked the MTA's runaway plans for an exorbitantly expensive and inefficient rail system in Los Angeles County." That Garcia works for an organization with "environmental" in its title, and that he would come out against Los Angeles's rail system is telling—such is the complex web of transit and race and the misguided dream of the city's trains.

I have sinned on a Sunday: even though I'm supposed to be walking across this basin, I take the Blue Line from downtown south to Compton, then north to Watts. I get a seat by the window, even though the train is still underground at the 7th St. Metro Center, and as it sits in the station humming it begins to fill up. The Blue Line is the oldest and longest of the MTA's light-rail lines—it runs 22 miles from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles—and the second busiest in the country, averaging 80,000 passengers every weekday. It's a short ride south to the Compton stop, no more than 25 minutes. Along the way I notice a remarkable number of scrap metal yards lining Long Beach Avenue.

To have a functioning rail system, you need a hub from which all tracks radiate, like Times Square in New York or Chicago's Loop. I talk to Eric Morris, a doctoral student at UCLA's Institute of Transportation Studies and a frequent contributor to The New York Times's Freakonomics blog, about the rail issue. "The problem is thinking that downtown Los Angeles will be ever be the real hub,” Morris tells me. “This city has launched the largest public transportation campaign in America. But it’s also one of the most decentralized cities in America. While they've created the supply, in some cases they are having a very hard time creating demand," he says. It’s also likely that, hard as the city might try, the task of filling its rail cars is simply impossible. Given the nature of development and population density in Los Angeles, Garcia estimates that "even if an entire rail system were built, it would only serve 11 percent of the population—those who live within a half mile of a rail station." Why, then, would the city build nearly 80 miles of tracks, with plans well underway for more?

While the Blue Line is the most heavily used rail system in Los Angeles, the Green Line is the least, and averages about 44,000 riders per weekday. Its construction in the late-1980s was tied directly, legislatively, to the 105 freeway. In order for the freeway to exist, the state mandated that Caltrans build a “transit corridor” in the median. The Green Line cost $718 million and served an area that, during the Cold War, was a bedroom community to the aerospace industry. Only by the time the Green Line was completed the Cold War was over, and the neighborhoods it served were now filled with working-class minorities who rode the bus. The Green Line’s construction was also used against the MTA in that 1994 class-action suit. I think about how, if you want to do something big, historically big, sometimes you have to go right out and do it—fight the powers that be. And while I’m thinking this we pull into 103rd Street station and I see them: two spindly spires rising 97 and 99 feet in the air. The third tower is lower, 55 feet, but no less impressive. Simon Rodia, the Italian construction worker who built the Watts Towers, spent 33 years fixing mortar to steel pipe and wire mesh and glass and tiles and sea shells. He explained why in such a beautifully straightforward way: I had in mind to do something big, and I did.

I'm not actually here for the towers, I tell myself. I'm here to walk around and get a sense of this place. But really, the fact is that when I ride the rails or take a bus or even just walking around, I'm a tourist—not just in Watts and Compton, but in all of Los Angeles. The honest truth is that if I suddenly had to pick up and move here today, odds are—based on my income and skin color—I’d have a car. But even if I never used the bus or rail systems, I have a stake in them for the same reason Garcia, the Environmental Defense lawyer, has a stake in them. For the same reason we all have a stake in them. When the city decides to build rail lines, it takes money out of the transportation budget that could go into improved bus service. It makes a lot more sense—economically, environmentally, socially-- to invest in buses that people will use than rail that people won’t.

I walk past a group outside a pale-yellow stucco church: two men, a boy, and a woman, all in dark suits despite the heat. The woman is wearing a large purple hat and has a wide friendly face. As I walk by the boy offers me a free meal if I sign up for church service. I smile and say that's fine, but I'm going to pass.

"You here to see the towers?" asks the woman.
"Not really," I say. "I thought I'd walk around for a bit first. I'm walking acr—"
"Oh you need to see the towers," she interrupts. "You'll love them."
And she's right. I do.

Next up: Among the walkers

Photos by Ryan Bradley.
 

]]> Ryan Bradley Tue, 25 May 2010 10:15:00 PDT <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: Downtown Is a Big, Expensive Urban Experiment]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-downtown-is-a-big-expensive-urban-experiment/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-downtown-is-a-big-expensive-urban-experiment/

Part four in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

Sunday arrives warm and glorious and I wake up feeling terrible. I've walked myself into a hangover.

What happened yesterday was this: After heading east on Jefferson Boulevard for an hour, past barber shops adorned with beautiful murals and tiny taquerías with bars over the windows and a frail woman who squatted in the middle of the street and barked at traffic, I was tired. Most pedestrians—even slow ones—can cover three miles in 60 minutes, but after walking 13-plus miles from LAX, my pace really dropped off. The problem was either my shoes (boots, actually) or my socks (the heavy wool kind). I thought hiking gear would work in the urban jungle.

Between the sun and the boots and the wool my feet were tenderized, and by the time I reached USC I ached like I had traveled for days and could feel one big toe turning into a single mega-blister. I sat down on a lawn, took off my boots and socks and let my feet have a rest, and took in the sudden strangeness of the USC campus. In 2008, USC introduced the "University Park Campus Master Plan" which, among its guiding principles, seeks to "encourage and participate in neighborhood development." But the real changes—the narrowing of Jefferson to make it pedestrian friendly, the rail line stations— all happen within a few blocks of the school's campus. For a university that is the largest employer in town other than the city itself, which claims to add $4 billion a year to the local economy and boasts an endowment larger than the GDP of Gambia, this seems like a weak effort. The "Master Plan" feels more like an attempt to create a nice buffer around campus for students to live and shop in, and the contrast between the red-brick-and-ivy university and its surroundings is still dramatic.

From USC I marched north on Figueroa Street, east on Adams, then north again up Grand, passing by warehouses and parking structures, Los Angeles Trade and Technical College, and the immense Glory Church of Jesus Christ and its building-sized mural of Jesus, hand extended, bursting through aquamarine waves. After another hour I reached downtown, and eventually found my friend's apartment on South 8th Street and Grand.

I showered and we headed out for the evening. The first stop was Cole's, the oldest restaurant in Los Angeles, for French dip sandwiches. Afterwards, we stopped in at the Varnish Room, a semi-secret wood-paneled cocktail bar hidden within Cole's. We ended the night at Seven Grand, a bar that's styled after the old places like Cole's but has only been open a few years, where I had whisky and played a bad game of pool. The whole evening, going from crowded restaurant to speakeasy to bar, I was thinking: This is like some Los Angeles of the past, from The Big Sleep maybe, only instead of Bogart and Bacall there are a bunch of yuppies. I mulled over my generation's—hell, every generation's—nostalgia for a Los Angeles past. One whiskey led to another and, well, here it is 9 a.m. on a Sunday and I need coffee and Advil for my feet and head both.

I splash some water on my face and go outside. Based on last night's downtown performance I suppose that in a few blocks I will find a nice cafe owned by a French ex-pat. Maybe there will be fresh croissants. How wrong I am.

On a bright and sunny Sunday morning downtown Los Angeles is like a western before the big shootout—everything's still except for the wind. I hobble past the Trinity Auditorium Building, the first home of the L.A. Philharmonic, now boarded up and abandoned, then west on South 9th Street past new construction (glass and steel, condos mostly). A ragged-looking gentleman hobbles towards me spouting menacing crazytalk. I walk on, past what feels like miles upon miles of empty parking lots.

If you took all of the parking spaces in Los Angeles's central business district and spread them horizontally in a surface lot, they would cover 81 percent of downtown. I know this because of a paper called "People, Parking, and Cities" by Michael Manville and Donald Shoup at UCLA's Department of Urban Planning. This “parking coverage rate,” they write, is "higher in downtown L.A. than in any other downtown on earth. In San Francisco, for instance, the coverage rate is 31 percent, and in New York it is only 18 percent." Their paper goes on to show how this glut of parking keeps downtown from having a vibrant city center, because downtowns in general "thrive on high density ... the prime advantage they offer over other parts of a metropolitan area is proximity—the immediate availability of a wide variety of activities.... So long as its zoning assumes that almost every new person will also bring a car—and requires parking for that car," they conclude "[downtown Los Angeles] will never develop the sort of vital core we associate with older urban centers."

I walk south on Figueroa and into L.A. Live, one of the biggest private developments in Los Angeles history, and the city's latest attempt to establish some kind of center among the empty lots. In her ur-text for urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs describes the city as "an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success..." If the city is a laboratory, then L.A. Live is a $2.5-billion, 4-million-square-foot experiment that I do not understand. Flanked by the Staples Center arena and a newly completed 54-story hotel and condo tower (the city's tallest residential building), L.A. Live boasts an ESPN Zone restaurant and bar, a Nokia Theater, and a Trader Vics. The Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne says it best, writing that L.A. Live is "fundamentally not really architecture at all but an extensive series of armatures on which the developer and its tenants can hang logos, video screens and a sophisticated range of lighting effects." Let me tell you: At 10:30 on a Sunday morning, no one wants to see giant video screens. Also, the ESPN Zone sucks as a substitute coffee shop.

Despite my Sunday morning pre-coffee angst, something must be going right here in downtown Los Angeles, where there's been a nearly 40 percent increase in the population for the past two years, back to back. Even here, against the glint of the sun off the steel and the annoying video screens, people are out in, well, maybe not in great numbers. But there are about a dozen pedestrians in sight. And my friend's loft apartment? It used to be a parking lot. To hear him tell it, the downtown of just three years ago was even emptier on weekends. "We used to stand on our balcony and yell 'Is anybody out there?' and nobody was. A car driving by was like an event."

From Figueroa I take Flower to Grand to Olive to Hill and suddenly, I'm at Angels Flight, "The World's Shortest Railway," and it's running. When the tiny funicular railway opened on New Year's Eve in 1901, running a short way up 3rd Street and Hill to the top of Bunker Hill, passengers got a free ride and a shot of fruit punch. I hop aboard and the car fills up with passengers. We pay a quarter at the top and it feels like a steal. The two brown-trimmed orange carriages were dismantled in 1969, and the rest of this historic urban neighborhood, Victorian houses and all, got bulldozed and rebuilt in the 1970s. After it was moved and opened and shut down again in 2001, the railway started running once more just weeks ago.

But the new Bunker Hill is nothing like the old Bunker Hill—it's like L.A. Live. The railway opens up to an empty plaza with a strange stage filled with water, buttressed by tall pillars of fancy lighting for effects. A German man approaches me. "Excuse me," he says, "Do you have any idea what's around here?" I don't. Not really. The cityscape Angels Flight empties into could stand in for a downtown anywhere. It's built up but says nothing, asks nothing, demands nothing. If people are going to engage with a city by walking or biking or taking Segway tours through it, there's got to be something to engage with. Lighting effects and video screens, no matter how fancy, don't cut it.

I walk from Bunker Hill to Broadway, which is now packed with the beginnings of a Mexican street festival. I hear music in the distance and smell that artificially sweet tang of cotton candy in the air. In a sense, downtown Los Angeles is a microcosm of the rest of the city. There are vibrant, bustling pockets just a stone's throw from seemingly empty corridors.

Los Angeles's conspicuous lack of a single, dense center hides an interesting fact though. Believe it or not, greater Los Angeles is actually the most densely populated "urbanized area" (a city plus its suburbs) in the United States. The authors of "People, Parking, and Cities" explain:

Without doubt, the cities of New York and San Francisco are denser than the city of L.A. But sprawl is a regional attribute, and Los Angeles has much denser suburbs than New York or San Francisco. Indeed, the L.A. region’s distinguishing characteristic may be the uniformity of its density; its suburbs have 82 percent of the density of its central city. In contrast, New York’s suburban density is a mere 12 percent...New York and San Francisco look like Hong Kong surrounded by Phoenix, while Los Angeles looks like Los Angeles surrounded by ... well, Los Angeles.

Still, it's not always welcoming for the pedestrian. If not for all the attempts to allow its citizens to live in their own domestic bubbles, to drive cars everywhere and always find parking, Los Angeles might just force some life into its downtown streets. It might no longer look like itself, but from where I'm standing, right now, that isn't such a bad thing.  

By 2014, these three pieces of urban L.A.—Broadway, Bunker Hill, and L.A. Live—will all be connected by streetcar. The project will cost is an estimated $95 million. I wonder if, for $95 million, the city can buy back the personality it bulldozed out of downtown. The city is a lab and the experiment continues. I walk on.

Next up: When you talk about transportation in Los Angeles you're also talking about race in Los Angeles, and that gets dicey real quick.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.

 

]]>

Part four in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

Sunday arrives warm and glorious and I wake up feeling terrible. I've walked myself into a hangover.

What happened yesterday was this: After heading east on Jefferson Boulevard for an hour, past barber shops adorned with beautiful murals and tiny taquerías with bars over the windows and a frail woman who squatted in the middle of the street and barked at traffic, I was tired. Most pedestrians—even slow ones—can cover three miles in 60 minutes, but after walking 13-plus miles from LAX, my pace really dropped off. The problem was either my shoes (boots, actually) or my socks (the heavy wool kind). I thought hiking gear would work in the urban jungle.

Between the sun and the boots and the wool my feet were tenderized, and by the time I reached USC I ached like I had traveled for days and could feel one big toe turning into a single mega-blister. I sat down on a lawn, took off my boots and socks and let my feet have a rest, and took in the sudden strangeness of the USC campus. In 2008, USC introduced the "University Park Campus Master Plan" which, among its guiding principles, seeks to "encourage and participate in neighborhood development." But the real changes—the narrowing of Jefferson to make it pedestrian friendly, the rail line stations— all happen within a few blocks of the school's campus. For a university that is the largest employer in town other than the city itself, which claims to add $4 billion a year to the local economy and boasts an endowment larger than the GDP of Gambia, this seems like a weak effort. The "Master Plan" feels more like an attempt to create a nice buffer around campus for students to live and shop in, and the contrast between the red-brick-and-ivy university and its surroundings is still dramatic.

From USC I marched north on Figueroa Street, east on Adams, then north again up Grand, passing by warehouses and parking structures, Los Angeles Trade and Technical College, and the immense Glory Church of Jesus Christ and its building-sized mural of Jesus, hand extended, bursting through aquamarine waves. After another hour I reached downtown, and eventually found my friend's apartment on South 8th Street and Grand.

I showered and we headed out for the evening. The first stop was Cole's, the oldest restaurant in Los Angeles, for French dip sandwiches. Afterwards, we stopped in at the Varnish Room, a semi-secret wood-paneled cocktail bar hidden within Cole's. We ended the night at Seven Grand, a bar that's styled after the old places like Cole's but has only been open a few years, where I had whisky and played a bad game of pool. The whole evening, going from crowded restaurant to speakeasy to bar, I was thinking: This is like some Los Angeles of the past, from The Big Sleep maybe, only instead of Bogart and Bacall there are a bunch of yuppies. I mulled over my generation's—hell, every generation's—nostalgia for a Los Angeles past. One whiskey led to another and, well, here it is 9 a.m. on a Sunday and I need coffee and Advil for my feet and head both.

I splash some water on my face and go outside. Based on last night's downtown performance I suppose that in a few blocks I will find a nice cafe owned by a French ex-pat. Maybe there will be fresh croissants. How wrong I am.

On a bright and sunny Sunday morning downtown Los Angeles is like a western before the big shootout—everything's still except for the wind. I hobble past the Trinity Auditorium Building, the first home of the L.A. Philharmonic, now boarded up and abandoned, then west on South 9th Street past new construction (glass and steel, condos mostly). A ragged-looking gentleman hobbles towards me spouting menacing crazytalk. I walk on, past what feels like miles upon miles of empty parking lots.

If you took all of the parking spaces in Los Angeles's central business district and spread them horizontally in a surface lot, they would cover 81 percent of downtown. I know this because of a paper called "People, Parking, and Cities" by Michael Manville and Donald Shoup at UCLA's Department of Urban Planning. This “parking coverage rate,” they write, is "higher in downtown L.A. than in any other downtown on earth. In San Francisco, for instance, the coverage rate is 31 percent, and in New York it is only 18 percent." Their paper goes on to show how this glut of parking keeps downtown from having a vibrant city center, because downtowns in general "thrive on high density ... the prime advantage they offer over other parts of a metropolitan area is proximity—the immediate availability of a wide variety of activities.... So long as its zoning assumes that almost every new person will also bring a car—and requires parking for that car," they conclude "[downtown Los Angeles] will never develop the sort of vital core we associate with older urban centers."

I walk south on Figueroa and into L.A. Live, one of the biggest private developments in Los Angeles history, and the city's latest attempt to establish some kind of center among the empty lots. In her ur-text for urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs describes the city as "an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success..." If the city is a laboratory, then L.A. Live is a $2.5-billion, 4-million-square-foot experiment that I do not understand. Flanked by the Staples Center arena and a newly completed 54-story hotel and condo tower (the city's tallest residential building), L.A. Live boasts an ESPN Zone restaurant and bar, a Nokia Theater, and a Trader Vics. The Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne says it best, writing that L.A. Live is "fundamentally not really architecture at all but an extensive series of armatures on which the developer and its tenants can hang logos, video screens and a sophisticated range of lighting effects." Let me tell you: At 10:30 on a Sunday morning, no one wants to see giant video screens. Also, the ESPN Zone sucks as a substitute coffee shop.

Despite my Sunday morning pre-coffee angst, something must be going right here in downtown Los Angeles, where there's been a nearly 40 percent increase in the population for the past two years, back to back. Even here, against the glint of the sun off the steel and the annoying video screens, people are out in, well, maybe not in great numbers. But there are about a dozen pedestrians in sight. And my friend's loft apartment? It used to be a parking lot. To hear him tell it, the downtown of just three years ago was even emptier on weekends. "We used to stand on our balcony and yell 'Is anybody out there?' and nobody was. A car driving by was like an event."

From Figueroa I take Flower to Grand to Olive to Hill and suddenly, I'm at Angels Flight, "The World's Shortest Railway," and it's running. When the tiny funicular railway opened on New Year's Eve in 1901, running a short way up 3rd Street and Hill to the top of Bunker Hill, passengers got a free ride and a shot of fruit punch. I hop aboard and the car fills up with passengers. We pay a quarter at the top and it feels like a steal. The two brown-trimmed orange carriages were dismantled in 1969, and the rest of this historic urban neighborhood, Victorian houses and all, got bulldozed and rebuilt in the 1970s. After it was moved and opened and shut down again in 2001, the railway started running once more just weeks ago.

But the new Bunker Hill is nothing like the old Bunker Hill—it's like L.A. Live. The railway opens up to an empty plaza with a strange stage filled with water, buttressed by tall pillars of fancy lighting for effects. A German man approaches me. "Excuse me," he says, "Do you have any idea what's around here?" I don't. Not really. The cityscape Angels Flight empties into could stand in for a downtown anywhere. It's built up but says nothing, asks nothing, demands nothing. If people are going to engage with a city by walking or biking or taking Segway tours through it, there's got to be something to engage with. Lighting effects and video screens, no matter how fancy, don't cut it.

I walk from Bunker Hill to Broadway, which is now packed with the beginnings of a Mexican street festival. I hear music in the distance and smell that artificially sweet tang of cotton candy in the air. In a sense, downtown Los Angeles is a microcosm of the rest of the city. There are vibrant, bustling pockets just a stone's throw from seemingly empty corridors.

Los Angeles's conspicuous lack of a single, dense center hides an interesting fact though. Believe it or not, greater Los Angeles is actually the most densely populated "urbanized area" (a city plus its suburbs) in the United States. The authors of "People, Parking, and Cities" explain:

Without doubt, the cities of New York and San Francisco are denser than the city of L.A. But sprawl is a regional attribute, and Los Angeles has much denser suburbs than New York or San Francisco. Indeed, the L.A. region’s distinguishing characteristic may be the uniformity of its density; its suburbs have 82 percent of the density of its central city. In contrast, New York’s suburban density is a mere 12 percent...New York and San Francisco look like Hong Kong surrounded by Phoenix, while Los Angeles looks like Los Angeles surrounded by ... well, Los Angeles.

Still, it's not always welcoming for the pedestrian. If not for all the attempts to allow its citizens to live in their own domestic bubbles, to drive cars everywhere and always find parking, Los Angeles might just force some life into its downtown streets. It might no longer look like itself, but from where I'm standing, right now, that isn't such a bad thing.  

By 2014, these three pieces of urban L.A.—Broadway, Bunker Hill, and L.A. Live—will all be connected by streetcar. The project will cost is an estimated $95 million. I wonder if, for $95 million, the city can buy back the personality it bulldozed out of downtown. The city is a lab and the experiment continues. I walk on.

Next up: When you talk about transportation in Los Angeles you're also talking about race in Los Angeles, and that gets dicey real quick.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.

 

]]> Ryan Bradley Fri, 21 May 2010 16:45:00 PDT <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: Los Angeles Plays Itself]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-los-angeles-plays-itself/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-los-angeles-plays-itself/

Part three in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

The culvert ends by a beat-up old RV festooned with old water jugs, three spare tires, a Dutch-style bicycle, and several Colorado license plates. On the back of the rig, in what looks like Sharpie, someone has written "Honey." I rejoin Sepulveda Boulevard until I reach Westfield Fox Hills Mall, where it merges into Jefferson. I take it. Chop shop, pawn shop, liquor shop, cruiser bike shop; Jefferson to Overland to Culver, past the Sony Studios and into downtown Culver City, which was not very nice but now is. Later someone tells me that this is because after Sony signed Will Smith in 1997, he complained about having to spend so much time here, so Sony started pouring money into developing Culver's downtown. That's not so far from the truth.

When Sony relocated to Culver in 1996 the influx of jobs and cash worked wonders. A new police station was built the following year, the historic Culver Hotel re-opened, and a new transportation facility broke ground. Today, Culver's transportation system is gloriously enlightened—there's a comprehensive local bus system and it works in concert with some of the larger citywide lines. In fact, the only place in Los Angeles where you can purchase a card that works on all transit throughout Los Angeles County is the Culver City Hall. I met a few east-siders who trek all the way out here just for that.

Culver City is a part of Los Angeles while being apart, because Culver, like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, is its own incorporated city. But try taking the transit around Los Angeles and you will soon experience what one seasoned rider described to me as "urban moats": cities within Los Angeles County that aren't as progressive as Culver and fight large-scale public transit tooth-and-nail. Transferring from rail to bus to bus to rail is often the only way to get from here to there. And it's a bitch.

Culver City is a company town, like Universal City or Century City (though unlike Culver, Universal City and Century City aren't incorporated—they're part of the City of Los Angeles) and the films they've been producing have often reflected the fraught role of mobility in people's lives here.

"The best films about Los Angeles are, at least partly, about modes of transportation," Encke King says. King is narrating Thom Andersen's film, Los Angeles Plays Itself. Made up of more than 200 film clips, many of the movies Anderson highlights deal with the frustrations of transit in Los Angeles. If not for that hellish traffic jam that begins Falling Down, would Michael Douglas's character have gone postal and marched across the city with an uzi? If Joe Gillis' car hadn't busted a flat, would he ever have ended up in Norma Desmond's driveway in Sunset Boulevard? Perhaps the best example Anderson uses is Chinatown:

What gives Chinatown its special significance is its subsidiary theme: the struggle to get around Los Angeles without a car. Jack Giddes [played by Jack Nicholson] loses his wheels halfway through the film... and for the second half of the movie, he's dependent on others. His sense of mastery disappears. He's always one or two steps behind and he never catches up...The loss of the car is a form of symbolic castration, both in the movies, and in life.

Two ironies here: The first is that this great film about the city, Los Angeles Plays Itself, can only be seen in festivals (or illegally on the internet) because it's impossible to clear all the rights for those 200-plus movies. The second is that the film industry, like the city itself, has recently turned a significant corner on its portrayal of walking in Los Angeles.

In Greenberg, the title character (Ben Stiller) doesn't have a car and doesn't drive—he walks. Greenberg is notable for being a movie that's true to Los Angeles without showing any of its notable features. Not Downtown, not the Hollywood sign, not even the beach makes an appearance. Though Greenberg isn't a very likable character, the film is about him, and we have to deal with the fact that he's walking almost everywhere. Even though he's so easily aggravated, walking never seems all that bad. Except for when a car nearly runs him over, walking in Los Angeles actually looks pretty nice. When the film played at the storied Arclight theater in Hollywood, there was a large printed map of the city showing where it had been filmed: a bus stop on La Cienega Boulevard, the Highland Gardens Hotel, the Silver Lake Lounge. It seemed, in part, a challenge to the public to go out and find these pieces of the city. This may seem trivial, but Greenberg marks an important cultural shift in how audiences look at walking in Los Angeles. It's normalizing the idea.

In Culver's case, the Sony studio's presence has had a tangible effect on city planning. Up on the other side of the hill that separates Hollywood and the rest of Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley, Universal City's Evolution development is upping the ante. Universal City is 391 acres of Los Angeles owned by NBC Universal. "Evolution" is NBC Universal's gargantuan, $3 billion dollar, 20-year long development project for their "city." Along with 2,900 new apartments and 35-acres of open space, NBC Universal plans to pour in $100 million to improve traffic flow, which will, according to a company spokesperson, "serve as a catalyst to accelerate local ... improvements in the Valley."

Things are changing in American cities today. Ten years ago, people wanted to live in large-lot suburbs. Now, walkable urban neighborhoods typically have the highest property values, and keep them. High-density homes and apartments with access to good public transit have proven themselves recession-proof, while many of the McMansions in America's suburban sprawl are now worth less than their raw materials. So NBC Universal isn't putting a lot of money into urban renewal because it's the right thing to do. NBC Universal is putting a lot of money down because, through walking-friendly redevelopment, it stands to make even more. On the blog LAist, a commenter with the handle "LABornAndRaised" explains what a high-density, walking friendly urban center like Evolution might mean: "...it will be a huge plus for my property values."

Out of Culver City Jefferson Boulevard zig-zags before it heads east off of National Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard. I hang on a chain link fence on Exposition and stare down two lines of railroad tracks, east to west, heading from downtown Culver City all the way into downtown Los Angeles.

I've lingered here too long, but the promise of this railway's completion hangs heavy in the afternoon air. This new Expo-line will only improve Culver's booming downtown, and much of the city's plans for 2010 center around its completion. Culver must know by now, as well as anyplace in Los Angeles, that transportation drives development.

Next up: Downtown is a petri dish.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.
 

]]>

Part three in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

The culvert ends by a beat-up old RV festooned with old water jugs, three spare tires, a Dutch-style bicycle, and several Colorado license plates. On the back of the rig, in what looks like Sharpie, someone has written "Honey." I rejoin Sepulveda Boulevard until I reach Westfield Fox Hills Mall, where it merges into Jefferson. I take it. Chop shop, pawn shop, liquor shop, cruiser bike shop; Jefferson to Overland to Culver, past the Sony Studios and into downtown Culver City, which was not very nice but now is. Later someone tells me that this is because after Sony signed Will Smith in 1997, he complained about having to spend so much time here, so Sony started pouring money into developing Culver's downtown. That's not so far from the truth.

When Sony relocated to Culver in 1996 the influx of jobs and cash worked wonders. A new police station was built the following year, the historic Culver Hotel re-opened, and a new transportation facility broke ground. Today, Culver's transportation system is gloriously enlightened—there's a comprehensive local bus system and it works in concert with some of the larger citywide lines. In fact, the only place in Los Angeles where you can purchase a card that works on all transit throughout Los Angeles County is the Culver City Hall. I met a few east-siders who trek all the way out here just for that.

Culver City is a part of Los Angeles while being apart, because Culver, like Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, is its own incorporated city. But try taking the transit around Los Angeles and you will soon experience what one seasoned rider described to me as "urban moats": cities within Los Angeles County that aren't as progressive as Culver and fight large-scale public transit tooth-and-nail. Transferring from rail to bus to bus to rail is often the only way to get from here to there. And it's a bitch.

Culver City is a company town, like Universal City or Century City (though unlike Culver, Universal City and Century City aren't incorporated—they're part of the City of Los Angeles) and the films they've been producing have often reflected the fraught role of mobility in people's lives here.

"The best films about Los Angeles are, at least partly, about modes of transportation," Encke King says. King is narrating Thom Andersen's film, Los Angeles Plays Itself. Made up of more than 200 film clips, many of the movies Anderson highlights deal with the frustrations of transit in Los Angeles. If not for that hellish traffic jam that begins Falling Down, would Michael Douglas's character have gone postal and marched across the city with an uzi? If Joe Gillis' car hadn't busted a flat, would he ever have ended up in Norma Desmond's driveway in Sunset Boulevard? Perhaps the best example Anderson uses is Chinatown:

What gives Chinatown its special significance is its subsidiary theme: the struggle to get around Los Angeles without a car. Jack Giddes [played by Jack Nicholson] loses his wheels halfway through the film... and for the second half of the movie, he's dependent on others. His sense of mastery disappears. He's always one or two steps behind and he never catches up...The loss of the car is a form of symbolic castration, both in the movies, and in life.

Two ironies here: The first is that this great film about the city, Los Angeles Plays Itself, can only be seen in festivals (or illegally on the internet) because it's impossible to clear all the rights for those 200-plus movies. The second is that the film industry, like the city itself, has recently turned a significant corner on its portrayal of walking in Los Angeles.

In Greenberg, the title character (Ben Stiller) doesn't have a car and doesn't drive—he walks. Greenberg is notable for being a movie that's true to Los Angeles without showing any of its notable features. Not Downtown, not the Hollywood sign, not even the beach makes an appearance. Though Greenberg isn't a very likable character, the film is about him, and we have to deal with the fact that he's walking almost everywhere. Even though he's so easily aggravated, walking never seems all that bad. Except for when a car nearly runs him over, walking in Los Angeles actually looks pretty nice. When the film played at the storied Arclight theater in Hollywood, there was a large printed map of the city showing where it had been filmed: a bus stop on La Cienega Boulevard, the Highland Gardens Hotel, the Silver Lake Lounge. It seemed, in part, a challenge to the public to go out and find these pieces of the city. This may seem trivial, but Greenberg marks an important cultural shift in how audiences look at walking in Los Angeles. It's normalizing the idea.

In Culver's case, the Sony studio's presence has had a tangible effect on city planning. Up on the other side of the hill that separates Hollywood and the rest of Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley, Universal City's Evolution development is upping the ante. Universal City is 391 acres of Los Angeles owned by NBC Universal. "Evolution" is NBC Universal's gargantuan, $3 billion dollar, 20-year long development project for their "city." Along with 2,900 new apartments and 35-acres of open space, NBC Universal plans to pour in $100 million to improve traffic flow, which will, according to a company spokesperson, "serve as a catalyst to accelerate local ... improvements in the Valley."

Things are changing in American cities today. Ten years ago, people wanted to live in large-lot suburbs. Now, walkable urban neighborhoods typically have the highest property values, and keep them. High-density homes and apartments with access to good public transit have proven themselves recession-proof, while many of the McMansions in America's suburban sprawl are now worth less than their raw materials. So NBC Universal isn't putting a lot of money into urban renewal because it's the right thing to do. NBC Universal is putting a lot of money down because, through walking-friendly redevelopment, it stands to make even more. On the blog LAist, a commenter with the handle "LABornAndRaised" explains what a high-density, walking friendly urban center like Evolution might mean: "...it will be a huge plus for my property values."

Out of Culver City Jefferson Boulevard zig-zags before it heads east off of National Boulevard and Exposition Boulevard. I hang on a chain link fence on Exposition and stare down two lines of railroad tracks, east to west, heading from downtown Culver City all the way into downtown Los Angeles.

I've lingered here too long, but the promise of this railway's completion hangs heavy in the afternoon air. This new Expo-line will only improve Culver's booming downtown, and much of the city's plans for 2010 center around its completion. Culver must know by now, as well as anyplace in Los Angeles, that transportation drives development.

Next up: Downtown is a petri dish.

Photos by Ryan Bradley.
 

]]> Ryan Bradley Wed, 19 May 2010 16:31:00 PDT <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: Trees as Sidewalk Vandals]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-trees-as-sidewalk-vandals/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-trees-as-sidewalk-vandals/

Part two in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

From LAX, I head north on Sepulveda Boulevard. It's just after 1 p.m. To my right, eight lanes of traffic hum by. Sepulveda is one of the main arteries of Los Angeles—running from Hermosa Beach, south of Los Angeles proper, across the entire basin, all the way north into the San Fernando Valley. At nearly 43 miles, it's the longest street in Los Angeles, more than twice the length of Broadway in New York.

After skirting the rental car lots and parking structures and an airport runway, Sepulveda slices through residential development. Up ahead there are trees lining the street. I'm not sure how much of Sepulveda is tree-lined but I'm guessing a lot of it.

There are 6,500 miles of streets in Los Angeles; 10,000 miles of sidewalks. Planted along them are 670,000 city-managed trees—crape myrtles, fan palms, American sweetgums, Southern magnolias, Indian laurel figs. All the trees here, except for the palms, seem to grow outward rather than upward—a nice metaphor for a city synonymous with sprawl, sure, but it's hell on the sidewalks. Los Angeles spends $3 to $5 million a year getting sued for trips and falls on street cracks, and 90 percent of sidewalk damage is caused by tree roots.

In "Street Trees of Los Angeles," a boringly titled but fascinating paper put out by researchers from the UC Davis School of Urban Forestry and Los Angeles's public works department, the authors suggest this solution: root pruning. It is, basically, lifting the sidewalk and going at the delinquent roots with a chainsaw. Los Angeles still plants about 16,500 trees a year, and the paper suggests that "selecting tree species that are well-suited to their sites" will cause a lot less damage. Will this mean only palm trees? Will everywhere look a little like Beverly Hills? (Later I learn that this is impossible, that even though Beverly Hills is lined with palms it doesn't have many sidewalks.)

I turn left on 79th and Alverstone Avenue towards homes with yards and parking garages. The hum of the cars and the air-traffic disappears. It gets really, really quiet. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the sound from the street is so constant it's become a comfort. Now, the silence feels strange and I get it wrong: I assume it's a work day—that's why no one's around. But it's Saturday. Time and distance and quietude can disorient you that way.

When they first glimpsed Los Angeles, early Spanish explores were baffled too. When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's ships first arrived the wind and chaparral and fires from the natives conspired to create what would later be called smog. Cabrillo named the place "Bay of Smoke." There weren't many trees then except oaks along the coast and in the valleys, and sycamores and bays by the creeks. Every tree I've been walking by, just about every tree in Los Angeles, has been introduced—like the pavement. Even if these trees weren't here first, I'm all for them. Better still to have some more oaks, sycamores, and bays to hike around. Still, some of the cracks are, as "Street Trees of Los Angeles" puts it, "significant." For the semi-adventurous walker, they're not a big deal. But for the infirm or bikers (just about everyone—police included—uses the sidewalk for biking) or just the especially litigious, these cracks present a real problem.

Los Angeles spent about $22 million a year on sidewalk repair until last week, when it announced it might not pay anymore. Councilman Bernanrd C. Parks was quoted as saying, "We have no ability to perform these repairs. The money ran out in the mid-1970s." The trees along a street like Sepulveda are lovely and ungovernable, nice to walk under but a financial burden on the city.

Just a few weeks ago Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stopped by a high school to help plant 53 Australian willows as part of the multi-year, Million Trees L.A. project. The trees are fairly tall, but also wide. They can be expected to grow 30 feet high and about 25 feet out. Planting a bunch of trees all at once is a great stunt, but better still to plant the right trees the right way. I think here the authors of "Street Trees of Los Angeles" and I agree: Go with native species, and give them plenty of room. After all, the trees were here first.

I don't see another car drive by, or anyone in their yard or on the sidewalk, until Alverson dead ends into a cement catch-basin surrounded by wildflowers. The path cuts downhill until it runs into a culvert that leads to Culver City. I think this is kind of poetic, finding a yellow-ish road like this to follow to where they filmed The Wizard of Oz in Technicolor.

Next up: Los Angeles plays itself.

Photos by Ryan Bradley
 

]]>

Part two in Walking in L.A., a GOOD miniseries by Ryan Bradley on transportation in Los Angeles and what it's like to get across the entire city on foot.

From LAX, I head north on Sepulveda Boulevard. It's just after 1 p.m. To my right, eight lanes of traffic hum by. Sepulveda is one of the main arteries of Los Angeles—running from Hermosa Beach, south of Los Angeles proper, across the entire basin, all the way north into the San Fernando Valley. At nearly 43 miles, it's the longest street in Los Angeles, more than twice the length of Broadway in New York.

After skirting the rental car lots and parking structures and an airport runway, Sepulveda slices through residential development. Up ahead there are trees lining the street. I'm not sure how much of Sepulveda is tree-lined but I'm guessing a lot of it.

There are 6,500 miles of streets in Los Angeles; 10,000 miles of sidewalks. Planted along them are 670,000 city-managed trees—crape myrtles, fan palms, American sweetgums, Southern magnolias, Indian laurel figs. All the trees here, except for the palms, seem to grow outward rather than upward—a nice metaphor for a city synonymous with sprawl, sure, but it's hell on the sidewalks. Los Angeles spends $3 to $5 million a year getting sued for trips and falls on street cracks, and 90 percent of sidewalk damage is caused by tree roots.

In "Street Trees of Los Angeles," a boringly titled but fascinating paper put out by researchers from the UC Davis School of Urban Forestry and Los Angeles's public works department, the authors suggest this solution: root pruning. It is, basically, lifting the sidewalk and going at the delinquent roots with a chainsaw. Los Angeles still plants about 16,500 trees a year, and the paper suggests that "selecting tree species that are well-suited to their sites" will cause a lot less damage. Will this mean only palm trees? Will everywhere look a little like Beverly Hills? (Later I learn that this is impossible, that even though Beverly Hills is lined with palms it doesn't have many sidewalks.)

I turn left on 79th and Alverstone Avenue towards homes with yards and parking garages. The hum of the cars and the air-traffic disappears. It gets really, really quiet. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the sound from the street is so constant it's become a comfort. Now, the silence feels strange and I get it wrong: I assume it's a work day—that's why no one's around. But it's Saturday. Time and distance and quietude can disorient you that way.

When they first glimpsed Los Angeles, early Spanish explores were baffled too. When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's ships first arrived the wind and chaparral and fires from the natives conspired to create what would later be called smog. Cabrillo named the place "Bay of Smoke." There weren't many trees then except oaks along the coast and in the valleys, and sycamores and bays by the creeks. Every tree I've been walking by, just about every tree in Los Angeles, has been introduced—like the pavement. Even if these trees weren't here first, I'm all for them. Better still to have some more oaks, sycamores, and bays to hike around. Still, some of the cracks are, as "Street Trees of Los Angeles" puts it, "significant." For the semi-adventurous walker, they're not a big deal. But for the infirm or bikers (just about everyone—police included—uses the sidewalk for biking) or just the especially litigious, these cracks present a real problem.

Los Angeles spent about $22 million a year on sidewalk repair until last week, when it announced it might not pay anymore. Councilman Bernanrd C. Parks was quoted as saying, "We have no ability to perform these repairs. The money ran out in the mid-1970s." The trees along a street like Sepulveda are lovely and ungovernable, nice to walk under but a financial burden on the city.

Just a few weeks ago Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stopped by a high school to help plant 53 Australian willows as part of the multi-year, Million Trees L.A. project. The trees are fairly tall, but also wide. They can be expected to grow 30 feet high and about 25 feet out. Planting a bunch of trees all at once is a great stunt, but better still to plant the right trees the right way. I think here the authors of "Street Trees of Los Angeles" and I agree: Go with native species, and give them plenty of room. After all, the trees were here first.

I don't see another car drive by, or anyone in their yard or on the sidewalk, until Alverson dead ends into a cement catch-basin surrounded by wildflowers. The path cuts downhill until it runs into a culvert that leads to Culver City. I think this is kind of poetic, finding a yellow-ish road like this to follow to where they filmed The Wizard of Oz in Technicolor.

Next up: Los Angeles plays itself.

Photos by Ryan Bradley
 

]]> Ryan Bradley Tue, 18 May 2010 14:03:00 PDT <![CDATA[Walking in L.A.: An Introduction]]> http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-an-introduction/ http://www.good.is/post/walking-in-l-a-an-introduction/


Ryan Bradley heads out on foot to find out what's wrong (and right) with transportation in Los Angeles.

I step off the plane. The basin up ahead is so arid it's practically a desert. Not all that long ago it was a miserably violent little cattle town way out West. One early visitor described the place as "new and unformed," full of "dangers, vices, self-sacrifices and cold-blooded crimes."

I've measured my step: 3-and-a-half feet from heel-to-toe. Multiply this by 52,800 and you get 35 miles—the length of this basin I'm about to walk across, shore to mountain and back: 70 miles, round trip.

This basin is prone to fires and earthquakes and hot desert winds. Most days are hazy. When rains do come it's all at once—before everything was paved, even the river, there were terrible floods. But there was oil, and a coastline for trade, and soon enough El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula was called Los Angeles. And, eventually, just L.A.

Everyone thinks they know L.A., even if they've never been west of St. Louis. Nobody walks in L.A., right? There's that Missing Persons song, or that line from Steve Martin's L.A. Story: "...it's not like New York, where you can meet someone walking down the street. In L.A. you practically have to hit someone with your car. In fact, I know girls who speed just to meet cops."

But the truth is people do walk in L.A. And bike. Fully 12 percent of all trips in Los Angeles are by bicycle or on foot—that's more than Austin or Portland. In sheer numbers, L.A. has more bikers and walkers than Washington, D.C., or Chicago, or even San Francisco. And it happens to be far safer for biking and walking than all three, according to a 2010 Benchmarking Report by the Alliance for Biking and Walking. I lump walking and biking together only because, until very recently, so did everyone else. In the 1990s biking and walking were "alternative," like rock music. Fifteen years ago, Los Angeles spent "about $1 million" a year on pedestrians and bike services. This year Los Angeles has earmarked $36 million on walking alone. Could it be that this western cow-town, this place that's synonymous with self-reinvention, is reinventing itself?

Writers tend to make sweeping proclamations about this place. Yeats did ("Los Angeles has everything in the future") and so did Didion ("Things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent") and so has every historian and academic who's ever taken a sideways glance at this basin. Here's my go: Los Angeles is the future of transportation in America. And it's always been.

Start with one J. Philip Erie and a four-cylinder, gasoline powered horseless carriage he assembled and rode through downtown on Sunday, May 30, 1897. It was the first automobile in L.A.—the beginning of a beautiful and terrible relationship. "This innocent-looking black tally-ho has about twenty-five miles an hour concealed in its vitals," wrote the Los Angeles Times in wonder. By 1915, there were 55,217 cars on the dirt roads and Los Angeles County led the world in auto-ownership. In 1910, the Times had replaced wonder with grief: "The traffic question has become a problem," wrote its editors.

All the while, as L.A. was becoming the city of the automobile, it was constructing the world's most extensive street-railway network. Not for nothing did Eddie Valiant, the detective in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, ask, "Why own a car? We've got the best public transportation system in the world!" But this nostalgic vision of L.A. as onetime transportation paradise is all wrong, too.

In 1949, rail-cars were overcrowded and unfairly priced and privately owned. General Electric, Pacific Electric, and National City Lines controlled nearly all of L.A.'s "public" transportation, and furor over the rails was such that the city council voted down a new light-rail line in 1949. That same year the city began building the freeway system. It was, and still is, among the largest public transportation projects ever undertaken by any American city, and it promised liberation (just look at the name: freeway). Soon other cities followed suit—Dallas and Houston and Phoenix and Tampa and Atlanta and Denver were developing in the image of Los Angeles, the image of Mr. Erie's black tally-ho.

Here's one assumption that's dead on: Today, L.A. has arguably the worst traffic congestion in the United States. Rail-cars may have made a slight comeback, but they're a disaster, too. Of the 3.8 million people living within city limits, just 4 percent use the subway (in Chicago, it's more than half: 1.7 million; in New York, it's almost two-thirds: 5.8 million). A 2008 RAND report titled "Moving Los Angeles" suggests adding tolls to the freeway system to pay for increased bus service and bus-only-lanes. The freeway may no longer be free.

Maybe, then, everyone's walking and biking because L.A.'s transportation system is broken. Or maybe Los Angeles is actually a pleasant place to walk.

I'm out of the terminal now and into the shade of the arrivals curb at LAX. I march due east toward Sepulveda, where I'll jog north until Culver and then east again. I have to make downtown by nightfall—17 miles from here. Seventeen miles, that's 25,645 steps.

"Young man," someone says and I stop. He's smiling and wearing a blue airport shuttle uniform; by now I've nearly reached the end of the shade, the end of the airport.  "Do you know what you're doing?" he asks.

"Walking across Los Angeles," I say. The man in blue says something back but I'm already past him, into the sunlight.

Next up: Trees are sidewalk vandals.

CORRECTION: This piece has been updated with the correct original name of Los Angeles.

Photos by Ryan Bradley

 

]]>


Ryan Bradley heads out on foot to find out what's wrong (and right) with transportation in Los Angeles.

I step off the plane. The basin up ahead is so arid it's practically a desert. Not all that long ago it was a miserably violent little cattle town way out West. One early visitor described the place as "new and unformed," full of "dangers, vices, self-sacrifices and cold-blooded crimes."

I've measured my step: 3-and-a-half feet from heel-to-toe. Multiply this by 52,800 and you get 35 miles—the length of this basin I'm about to walk across, shore to mountain and back: 70 miles, round trip.

This basin is prone to fires and earthquakes and hot desert winds. Most days are hazy. When rains do come it's all at once—before everything was paved, even the river, there were terrible floods. But there was oil, and a coastline for trade, and soon enough El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula was called Los Angeles. And, eventually, just L.A.

Everyone thinks they know L.A., even if they've never been west of St. Louis. Nobody walks in L.A., right? There's that Missing Persons song, or that line from Steve Martin's L.A. Story: "...it's not like New York, where you can meet someone walking down the street. In L.A. you practically have to hit someone with your car. In fact, I know girls who speed just to meet cops."

But the truth is people do walk in L.A. And bike. Fully 12 percent of all trips in Los Angeles are by bicycle or on foot—that's more than Austin or Portland. In sheer numbers, L.A. has more bikers and walkers than Washington, D.C., or Chicago, or even San Francisco. And it happens to be far safer for biking and walking than all three, according to a 2010 Benchmarking Report by the Alliance for Biking and Walking. I lump walking and biking together only because, until very recently, so did everyone else. In the 1990s biking and walking were "alternative," like rock music. Fifteen years ago, Los Angeles spent "about $1 million" a year on pedestrians and bike services. This year Los Angeles has earmarked $36 million on walking alone. Could it be that this western cow-town, this place that's synonymous with self-reinvention, is reinventing itself?

Writers tend to make sweeping proclamations about this place. Yeats did ("Los Angeles has everything in the future") and so did Didion ("Things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent") and so has every historian and academic who's ever taken a sideways glance at this basin. Here's my go: Los Angeles is the future of transportation in America. And it's always been.

Start with one J. Philip Erie and a four-cylinder, gasoline powered horseless carriage he assembled and rode through downtown on Sunday, May 30, 1897. It was the first automobile in L.A.—the beginning of a beautiful and terrible relationship. "This innocent-looking black tally-ho has about twenty-five miles an hour concealed in its vitals," wrote the Los Angeles Times in wonder. By 1915, there were 55,217 cars on the dirt roads and Los Angeles County led the world in auto-ownership. In 1910, the Times had replaced wonder with grief: "The traffic question has become a problem," wrote its editors.

All the while, as L.A. was becoming the city of the automobile, it was constructing the world's most extensive street-railway network. Not for nothing did Eddie Valiant, the detective in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, ask, "Why own a car? We've got the best public transportation system in the world!" But this nostalgic vision of L.A. as onetime transportation paradise is all wrong, too.

In 1949, rail-cars were overcrowded and unfairly priced and privately owned. General Electric, Pacific Electric, and National City Lines controlled nearly all of L.A.'s "public" transportation, and furor over the rails was such that the city council voted down a new light-rail line in 1949. That same year the city began building the freeway system. It was, and still is, among the largest public transportation projects ever undertaken by any American city, and it promised liberation (just look at the name: freeway). Soon other cities followed suit—Dallas and Houston and Phoenix and Tampa and Atlanta and Denver were developing in the image of Los Angeles, the image of Mr. Erie's black tally-ho.

Here's one assumption that's dead on: Today, L.A. has arguably the worst traffic congestion in the United States. Rail-cars may have made a slight comeback, but they're a disaster, too. Of the 3.8 million people living within city limits, just 4 percent use the subway (in Chicago, it's more than half: 1.7 million; in New York, it's almost two-thirds: 5.8 million). A 2008 RAND report titled "Moving Los Angeles" suggests adding tolls to the freeway system to pay for increased bus service and bus-only-lanes. The freeway may no longer be free.

Maybe, then, everyone's walking and biking because L.A.'s transportation system is broken. Or maybe Los Angeles is actually a pleasant place to walk.

I'm out of the terminal now and into the shade of the arrivals curb at LAX. I march due east toward Sepulveda, where I'll jog north until Culver and then east again. I have to make downtown by nightfall—17 miles from here. Seventeen miles, that's 25,645 steps.

"Young man," someone says and I stop. He's smiling and wearing a blue airport shuttle uniform; by now I've nearly reached the end of the shade, the end of the airport.  "Do you know what you're doing?" he asks.

"Walking across Los Angeles," I say. The man in blue says something back but I'm already past him, into the sunlight.

Next up: Trees are sidewalk vandals.

CORRECTION: This piece has been updated with the correct original name of Los Angeles.

Photos by Ryan Bradley

 

]]> Ryan Bradley Mon, 17 May 2010 13:33:00 PDT