LA METRO'S BUS FLEET HAS EXPANDED FASTER THAN ANY OTHER IN THE U.S., IS THE CLEANEST IN THE WORLD, AND METRO'S FARES ARE THE LOWEST: LA Metro’s bus fleet, this country’s second-largest, is the largest “clean air fleet” in the world, with every one of the agency’s 2,227 buses running on alternative fuels, all but a few of them on CNG. The mayor, working with the Coalition for Clean Air, started the clean bus program in 1994 while representing LA County Supervisor Gloria Molina on Metro committees. And while Speaker of the California State Assembly he convinced Senate Minority Leader Jim Brulte, a Republican, to co-author legislation creating the Carl Moyer Program, which still provides grants for replacing dirty diesel fleets with clean alternative fueled vehicles. The mayor also, during his tenure on the Metro board, worked under the Consent Decree with the Bus Riders Union to add 500 buses during peak service hours, and he championed, with other board members, the addition of nine Metro Rapid lines -- which speed riders to their destinations in 23% less time than local bus service (because traffic signals hold green lights longer or shorten red lights). The mayor has also helped keep transit fares low by using the 20% of Measure R revenues that are dedicated to bus operations to subsidize fares at a time when other agencies across the U.S. have raised fares and cut back service due to economic difficulties following the 2008 recession. Metro’s fares are the lowest when compared to big city transit systems in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Portland and Atlanta. (It’s hard to make comparisons to all cities since some, such as Washington DC, calculate fares depending on the distance traveled.) Both LA Metro’s base $1.50/trip transit fares and discounted fares for seniors and the disabled (55 cents) are the lowest. Metro also has one of the largest discounted student transit pass programs, and among the lowest daily, weekly and monthly passes.

Mayor Villaraigosa's Top 10 remarkable transportation achievements:
#7: LA Metro's Project Labor Agreement and Construction Careers Policy make tens of thousands of jobs available in low-income communities. Read more.
#8: LA is becoming a better city for walking and biking. Read more.
#9: All 4,398 traffic signals in the city are synchronized. Read more.
#10: The Transit Corridors Cabinet is reorienting the city around public transportation, repairing the urban fabric, and preserving single family neighborhoods. Read more.

The Westside Urban Forum is presenting Move LA with the John Leighton Chase Memorial Award June 7. John Chase, the author and West Hollywood urban planner who championed civic space and vernacular architecture, is perhaps best-known for championing "everyday urbanism."As Christopher Hawthorne wrote in the LA Times upon Chase's death in 2009, Chase found "poetry in stucco-clad apartment buildings, down-market modernism and overlooked corners of the urban realm.”

Move LA is being honored for our transportation advocacy work. In 2007 former Santa Monica Mayor Denny Zane recognized the opportunity created by first term LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's commitment to build out LA's transit system. In January 2008, with the help of the Annenberg Foundation, Zane convened a “transportation conversation” with major stakeholders, and including a pollster and a political consultant. It was the first convening of what would prove to be a powerful coalition of interests, and it was decided on that fateful day to mount a campaign to get a county sales tax measure on the ballot . . .

Friday, June 7, 2013 at Casa del Mar, 1901 Ocean Way, Santa Monica. For sponsorship info or to purchase tickets go to westsideurbanforum.com.

METRO'S PROJECT LABOR AGREEMENT AND CONSTRUCTION CAREERS POLICY MAKE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF JOBS AVAILABLE IN LOW-INCOME COMMUNITIES: Last year LA Metro became the first transit agency in the nation to adopt both a Project Labor Agreement as well as a Construction Careers Policy applicable to all Measure R projects — policies that ensure there will be a union workforce and union working conditions as well as employment and training opportunities for people who live in local low-income communities. While Supervisor Mark Ridley Thomas deserves credit for taking the lead on this issue, Mayor Villaraigosa’s strong support was essential to its success. These remarkable victories by the Los Angeles-Orange Counties Building Trades Council, which championed the PLA, and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and the LA County Federation of Labor, which championed the CCP — both were championed by the mayor — won a unanimous vote by the Metro board across political lines as hundreds of workers looked on. The upshot is that all Measure R projects costing more than $2.5 million will be built using skilled labor trained in joint labor-management apprenticeship programs, and the contracts will be subject to all the protections and benefits associated with a middle-class livelihood. Forty percent of the work hours must be completed by workers living in neighborhoods where the annual median income is less than $40,000. Ten percent of the 40 percent must be struggling with poverty, chronic unemployment, homelessness or other challenges, and 20 percent must be apprentices. The PLA could cover contracts totaling as much as $70 billion if Metro fully implements its long-range transportation plan, which would translate into an estimated 270,000 union jobs. Projects that include federal funding must be open to economically disadvantaged communities nationwide. The PLA includes a no-strike provision and bars Metro contractors from locking employees out. 

Mayor Villaraigosa's Top 10 remarkable transportation achievements:
#8: LA is becoming a better city for walking and biking. Read more.
#9: All 4,398 traffic signals in the city are synchronized. Read more.
#10: The Transit Corridors Cabinet is reorienting the city around public transportation, repairing the urban fabric, and preserving single family neighborhoods. Read more.

LA IS BECOMING A BETTER CITY FOR WALKING AND BIKING:
The mayor began seriously campaigning to make streets safer for bicyclists after a taxi cut him off while he was riding his bike in 2010, and he fell and shattered his elbow. It prompted him to convene a bike summit and begin talking about the need for a 3-foot safe passing law, and he championed CicLAvia and helped fund it, meanwhile accelerating passage of the city’s long-awaited bike plan to build 1680 lane miles over 30 years. He’s remained committed, building 123 miles of bike lanes in 2 years for a total of 431 miles citywide, and he fought for the funding to increase CicLAvia to thrice annually, also extending the route 15 miles to the beach. He reached agreement with the company named Bike Nation to install 400 bike-sharing kiosks in downtown LA, Hollywood, Westwood, and Venice Beach that will be stocked with 4,000 bikes – and requiring no subsidy from the city -- which would make LA’s bike-sharing program the nation’s largest. The mayor is also credited with presiding over a paradigm shift at the city’s Department of Transportation, which has taken new interest in non-motorized transportation. He oversaw the hiring of two LADOT pedestrian coordinators, spearheaded the adoption of “continental crosswalks” that are much more visible than conventional striped crosswalks, and launched a Safe Routes to School master plan. It should also be noted that while Speaker of the Assembly, Villaraigosa co-authored a Safe Routes to School bill that became the model for the national program that funds projects that make it easier and safer for kids to walk and bike to school. (Photo: Ciclavia.)

Mayor Villaraigosa's remarkable transportation achievements:
#9: All 4,398 traffic signals in the city are synchronized. Read more.
#10: The Transit Corridors Cabinet is reorienting the city around public transportation, repairing the urban fabric, and preserving single family neighborhoods. Read more.

Denny Zane has been telling Toronto the story of how it came to be that 67.8% of LA voters agreed to tax themselves in 2008 -- even as the recession was howling down upon us -- in order to build out LA's transit system. Toronto is keenly interested in the success of the Measure R sales tax for transportation in LA and wants to know how we did it, even though Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has said "Hell will freeze over before I support any of these taxes."

Denny told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that a key to winning the support of voters is to make it clear exactly which projects will be funded with taxpayer dollars. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne disagrees with the Toronto mayor and agrees with Denny that the city needs "dedicated funding tied to specific transit projects in a transparent manner."

Read the CBC story here.

Denny Zane spoke with KPCC's Molly Peterson about Mayor Villaraigosa’s environmental legacy on the radio this morning, noting that the mayor created “a new mojo in LA for transit” by using the bully pulpit to advocate for the Measure R sales tax for transportation and an expanded transit system. Denny added that he hopes the next mayor continues Villaraigosa’s high-profile advocacy effort lobbying Congress to help accelerate transit construction not just in LA but also across America.

Click on the "Listen Now" button on right of page. Or read the story below.

Water, Transit and Toxic Hotspots are Among Environmental Issues Awaiting LA's Next Mayor

Besides inheriting the current policy that seeks to end L.A.'s use of coal power by 2025, the winner of Tuesday's mayoral election will face a host of environmental challenges, including the need to increase the local supply of water, maintain momentum on mass transit projects, and fight pollution in toxic hotspots such as Boyle Heights.

Outgoing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made perhaps his biggest mark on the environment by aggressively working to end the Department of Water and Power's reliance on coal power. The big challenge at the DWP for L.A.’s next mayor is water, says former agency General Manager David Nahai.

“The unfinished business is developing local water resources,” he says. That means achieving and even accelerating the DWP’s existing goal, to obtain 37 percent of its water locally by the year 2035.

L.A. gets just about 10 percent of its water locally right now. To more than triple that, the city will have to find ways to store water during dry years, and treat contaminated groundwater for wider use -- and, of course, find money to pay for those big initiatives.

Nahai says that means the next mayor may need to make the case for higher water rates.

“This isn’t just an environmental luxury. It’s an economic necessity,” he says. “Because the cost of that imported water is going to rise, climate change will take its toll on the snowpack on which we have become dependent, and the problems of the Sacramento delta are not going to resolve on their own.” Without a statewide water bond, “someone’s going to have to pay to deal with those issues.”

Mayor Villaraigosa also tried to reduce air pollution – and traffic – by speeding up various mass transit projects. They’re funded by Measure R, the half cent countywide sales tax.

Denny Zane, with the pro-transit group MoveLA, says that work will continue, and should be a priority of the next mayor. “Measure R, alone, is going to be a $36 billion program over the next 30 years,” he points out. “Now we want to try to accelerate that and get it done over the next decade. That’s really a big responsibility. So the next mayor is going to have a significant role.”

Zane says Villaraigosa showed how a mayor can use his bully pulpit to advocate for Measure R-funded projects. He credits the outgoing mayor for recognizing a climate in which L.A. voters strongly support transit initiatives, and nurturing it. Villaraigosa created "a new mojo in L.A.” for transit, he says.

Zane hopes that the next mayor continues Villaraigosa’s high-profile advocacy, such as lobbying Congress to complete the America Fast Forward program. That would enable cities around the country to speed up transit projects.

Zane says he’d like to see an expansion of Metro’s Crenshaw line, which he says would cut pollution and be “an extraordinary investment in that community. How much more if it would go all the way up to Wilshire and thereby create for the Wilshire Corridor direct rail access to LAX?”

Both Eric Garcetti Growing L.A.’s economy while protecting the environment is a perennial ambition for any mayor. In communities dealing with various pollution problems, that kind of talk runs into a lot of skepticism. Leonardo Vilchis is with the community group Union de Vecinos in Boyle Heights. He says his neighborhood has earned its reputation as a toxic hot spot – with several schools and old folks’ homes close to freeways’ thick air pollution.

The city should work more closely with regulators to improve air monitoring, he says – and limit the number of polluting businesses that can open in the community – such as the auto body shops, window tinters, and paint shops that line Boyle Heights’ major streets.

“All the machines, the grinding, the oil and all this,” he says, walking past a transmission repair shop, “and the body shop is the same kind of situation, the grinding, the oil, the hammering, the painting.”

Vilchis says businesses here don’t always dispose of waste oil and chemicals properly, leaving them to flow from gutters into city storm drains. “If these small businesses, are not trained, do not have the resources to dispose of that stuff, that goes into the sea,” he says. “So we need to be very aware that the city needs to address these kind of problems because it’s going to affect everybody.”

Two years ago, L.A. launched a program promising environmental relief for Boyle Heights and other toxic hotspots. Clean Up Green Up was supposed to reduce and prevent pollution through a variety of steps, such as incentives for cleaner businesses. Very little of that has happened.

Vilchis says the next mayor should reignite the project by directing city departments to work together on these goals. “The new mayor could immediately put this stuff in the budget and start addressing these issues and then negotiate with the council,” he says. “And if you have this kind of leadership, things will move faster, and the community will hopefully start feeling the impacts of these kind of changes in policy.”

Vilchis acknowledges that money is tight. But he hopes the next mayor of Los Angeles will show the leadership needed to confront pollution in Boyle Heights and communities like it.

This video of a 45 minute conversation with Mayor Villaraigosa about his transportation achievements, staged as part of USC's "Leading from the West" series, is a delight. The mayor becomes so animated that he can barely stay in his seat. The event was sponsored by USC's Bedrosian Center on Governance, METRANS, and the Sol Price School of Public Policy. The conversation was with Bedrosian Center Director Raphael Bostic and METRANS center Director Gen Giuliano. Watch it here.

ALL 4,398 TRAFFIC SIGNALS IN THE CITY ARE SYNCHRONIZED:

One of Mayor Villaraigosa’s first campaign promises was to finish synchronizing all the city's traffic signals — making LA the first city in the world to do so — in an effort to make traffic run more smoothly. The LA Department of Transportation, which developed the software to do this (and is selling it to other cities), says synchronization has increased traffic speeds by 16%, decreased travel times by 12%, and reduced carbon emissions by 1 metric ton per year. And it raises, The New York Times speculated, “the almost fantastical prospect, in theory, of driving Western Avenue from the Hollywood Hills to the San Pedro waterfront without stopping once.” The system uses magnetic sensors in the road to detect the flow of vehicles, extending green lights, for example, for buses running behind schedule. It’s harder for the system to sense bikes and pedestrians, but it does allow, for example, extending walk lights near the Staples Center or on Saturdays in Jewish neighborhoods. The mayor negotiated with the state legislature to get $150 million from the Proposition 1B bond measure in 2006 to complete synchronization.

Mayor Villaraigosa’s Top 10 remarkable transportation achievements:
#10: The Transit Corridors Cabinet is reorienting the city around public transportation, repairing the urban fabric, and preserving single family neighborhoods. Read more.

THE TRANSIT CORRIDORS CABINET IS REORIENTING THE CITY AROUND PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION, REPAIRING THE URBAN FABRIC, AND PRESERVING SINGLE FAMILY NEIGHBORHOODS:
If LA’s freeway system divided communities with wide roads and fast-moving traffic, the mayor and the Transit Corridors Cabinet intend to knit them back together again. The city's new 6th Street Bridge, for example, will cross the 5 freeway and the LA River to reunite downtown LA with the East Side, and can be traveled by transit, bicycle, car, or on foot — providing neighbors with the best Stairmaster in the city (check out the multiple staircases on the bridge supports!) and greening the river with paths and parks. The mayor created the Transit Corridors Cabinet partnership to facilitate projects like this by improving communication and cooperation among eight key city departments that have authority over planning, policy, design and infrastructure investment around LA's expanding transit system. The goal is to help ensure high transit ridership by providing people with more transportation and housing choices, by making it easier and more pleasant to walk or bike to stations, by ensuring there is housing for people of all incomes, and by enlivening local business districts — and in the meantime preserving nearby single-family neighborhoods.

Join us at Union Station's swell Fred Harvey room for food (by Homegirl and the Nickel Diner), drinks, live music (by Buyepongo and the Doozy), and just a very few speeches, on Wednesday, June 12, from 5-8 p.m. Register here or call 310-310-2390 x 105 and speak to Marisa Garcia for more information.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

Los Angeles has notoriously awful traffic. I know. I live here, and it seems to have gotten worse, as the city tries to fix it with a massive transportation development project aimed at getting commuters to choose the train over jammed freeways.

As Alex Schmidt reports that a change on that level needs to involve more than just laying down tracks.

ALEX SCHMIDT, BYLINE: It's the end of the workday at the La Cienega station on the new Expo Light Rail Line. This route runs half way across the city from downtown, and in the next couple of years, it'll go all the way to the beach.

Mariko Dawson-Zare is proving the L.A. stereotype wrong. She takes the Expo Line to get to and from work. But there's just one catch - to get from the train to her house, she drives.

MARIKO DAWSON-ZARE: I live near here. But first thing in the morning, to walk here, it's a little tricky. So I leave my car here during the day.

SCHMIDT: Dawson-Zare's house is about a mile away from the station, and, with two kids, the time it would take to walk is just too much to spare.

DAWSON-ZARE: I know 15 minutes isn't much, but in my life 15 minutes is a lot - in the mornings anyway.

SCHMIDT: It's that last leg of the trip, between trains and home that city planners are focusing on. How?

PATRICIA DIEFENDERFER: The development around the transit stations, if all goes according to plan, would be very mixed use.

SCHMIDT: Patricia Diefenderfer is one of the planners working on the project to rezone land around several transit stations. Mixed use development is all about fitting more things into a smaller space - apartments, stores, restaurants, people.

DIEFENDERFER: More and more people could walk around the city to basic services, like restaurant, retail, shopping.

SCHMIDT: The magic number planners are looking at around transit stations is 10 minutes - that's the amount of time people will walk to trains or buses before they decide the car is a better option. But if you live in a single family home in the path of that rezoning project, real estate developers may have an eye on your home.

(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)

SCHMIDT: One of those neighborhoods is full of quiet streets and small homes, just around the corner from a future Expo Line stop.

DIANE LAMONT: It is kind of a nice place to live. It's easy access to the freeway, to the beach.

SCHMIDT: Diane Lamont's neat house is right in the target area for potential rezoning, and that has her worried.

LAMONT: But if it's going to be encroaching where you can't see around you, big tall buildings, that could be a problem.

SCHMIDT: Lots of people live in L.A. because they can have a single family home lifestyle in a city. Gen Giuliano is a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California. She says some people may move to preserve that lifestyle, rather than adapt to density.

GEN GIULIANO: People have options. We don't have borders around metropolitan areas to keep people here.

SCHMIDT: L.A. covers a sprawling area, and there's still a lot more space to expand.

But sprawl and long commutes drive other people to dense living. Above this restaurant in the downtown Culver City neighborhood is a stylish, mixed use apartment building. It's about a half mile from an Expo Line stop, and there's a strip of shops just outside the building's front door. This is precisely what city planners hope to create more of in L.A. Jennifer Yee lives here, and enjoys taking the Expo Line.

JENNIFER YEE: Yeah. It's definitely something L.A. is lacking is mass transit that's convenient. So it would be great if, you know, things develop around the Expo Line as it goes farther west.

SCHMIDT: It could take a generation or more for single family home neighborhoods to transform into something like this mixed use area. But the long view is exactly what L.A. planners are taking. Transit constructions projects here could stretch into the middle of the century.

For NPR News, I'm Alex Schmidt.