On January 7, 1963, local business and political leaders gathered at the Statler-Hilton Hotel in downtown LA to hear the executive director of the LA Metropolitan Transit Authority outline a plan for a rapid transit system and a prescient vision of a "smart card technology" not unlike Metro's TAP program. C.M. Gilliss advocated building a subway to Westwood by 1968, and described the smart card this way:

"[The rider] shows his individually coded credit card to the magic-eye fare computer, is admitted through the turnstile concourse and is taken by escalator quickly to the train platform. A computer-tabulating device will automatically record his entrance and his exit and he will be billed automatically for his total mileage at the end of the month."

Alas, it was determined that the agency had no power to levy taxes or buy property and didn't wield sufficient political influence to build broad support for a transit system. So the following year the state Legislature approved a bill by a senator from Beverly Hills to create the Southern California Rapid Transit District to find revenues to build a mass transit system.

These photos have been passed around several times over the years but become relevant again as we embark on construction of the Westside Subway Extension. This 1-mile subway line was built in 1925 from the downtown LA Subway Terminal Building at 4th and Hill, where you could board a trolley and travel underground-- beneath LA's increasingly congested streets -- to 2nd Street at Beverly and Glendale. It was shut down in 1955 due to the lack of interest in transit, and  the foundations for the Bonaventure Hotel filled up part of the line in the 1970s. Then even the mouth of the tunnel at Beverly and Glendale was obscuredin 2008 by construction of the Belmont Station Apartments.
http://www.gelatobaby.com/2012/05/11/las-original-subway/

The Carmaggedon stats came out again today: There was an 83% improvement in air quality within 10 miles of the 405 freeway closure  in 2011 and a 25% improvement in air quality throughout the region. The 405 is one of the busiest freeways in the world. On an average weekend about 500,000 cars drive the 10-mile stretch of freeway that was shut down.

Said Suzanne Paulson, a co-author of the UCLA study: "The air was amazingly clean that weekend. Our measurements in Santa Monica were almost below what our instruments could detect, and the regional effect was significant. It was an eye-opening glimpse of what the future could be like if we can move away from combustion engines." UCLA did not do a follow-up study this year.

The story was in the newsletter of the Mobile Source Air Pollution Reduction Review Committee. The MSRC is composed of representatives of four Southern California county transportation commissions and other local government officials, and distributes funding from AB 2766 fees collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles for clean air projects.

 

 

Mobile Source

There's $64.3 billlion worth of transit expansion planned for the U.S. by 2013 -- a huge investment no matter how you cut it -- and some cities are investing more than others. Los Angeles stands tall in the list of cities making dramatic investments, a list that also includes Denver, Honolulu, Houston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC. The federal government is picking up half of the tab -- or more -- for many of these projects, and transportation funding will not be effected under the new bipartisan compromise that's pulling us back from the fiscal cliff. At least not in the short term. But an 8% reduction in federal discretionary spending (the "sequester") could reduce funding for New Starts . . .
Read more on Yonah Freemark's The Transport Politic blog.

When Congress reached a deal to avert the "fiscal cliff," the Senate included a provision raising the federal transit benefit to $240 a month, up from $125 and more than the benefit available for parking. The transit benefit had been $230 per month until the beginning of last year, when a provision in the law re-set it to the lower level. Unfortunately, the $240 benefit is also temporary, expiring at the end of 2013. One transportation lobbyist who had been pushing for the transit benefit noted that while Congressional Republicans had been strongly opposed to any tax increases and to letting tax cuts expire, they hadn't extended that passion to the transit benefit.
Read more in Greater, Greater Washington.

 

The aging car rental giant is acquiring Zipcar, the car-sharing service, for $500 million. Upsides: Zipcar gets a bigger budget, more infrastructure, no more weekend rental shortages. But these buy-outs don't always work out that well.
Read more on Atlantic Cities.

For many years transportation experts thought that in order for transit systems to be successful there needed to be a strong central business district -- so workers could commute via transit, boosting ridership. As a result, when cities and job centers began to decentralize and transit ridership began to decline, critics concluded transit was no longer relevant. A new analysis of 82 metro areas in the Journal of Public Transportation, however, finds there is no statistical relationship between central business districts and transit commuting when other variables are considered -- including service frequency, service coverage, car ownership and unemployment. In the meantime multi-centered metro areas like Los Angeles that have been developing "multi-destination" systems that travel to many employment centers, have been seeing ridership increase.
On theatlanticcities.com.

Mexico City's 20 million residents live in neighborhoods built on all kinds of plans -- see these aerial views of neighborhoods developed according to: the colonial center plan built on the foundations of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, geometric plans, Ciudad Neza with greenspace confined within mega-blocks, organic neighborhood plans for the rich, extreme grids for the poor, Modernist plans, etc. Fantastic!
On [polis] a collaborative blog about cities across the globe.

The Bond Buyer published a story today saying that Metro is spearheading a nationwide push to create a tax-credit bond program to finance transportation projects. As Move LA has noted before, Measure J was actually "Plan B" for accelerating Measure R transit projects. "Plan A" was a combination of the federal low-interest loan program called TIFIA (Transportation Infrastructure Financing and Innovation Act), which was included in MAP-21, last year's federal transportation reauthorization, plus qualified transportation investment bonds or QTIBs, which in the end were not included in MAP-21.

These qualified tax credit bonds are taxable bonds issued by state, local or other eligible issuers, with the federal government subsidizing most or all of the interest through granting investors annual tax credits in lieu of interest. These are the bonds that Metro is once again working to build support for, as part of a $45 billion ten-year federal program, estimated to cost the federal government $7.5 billion in lost taxes over ten years. Under the proposal, the US Treasury Department would set the maximum reimbursable rate for the bonds each day, enabling them to be sold at their face amount without interest cost to the issuer.

"The budding coalition behind the effort maintains the program makes sense because Congress has already authorized tax-credit bonds in forestry conservationb, renewable energy projects, energy conservation, qualified ozone academies and new school construction," writes the Bond Buyer.

Considered one of the region's most significant transit projects, the 2-mile-long Regional Connector will provide one seat rides from Azusa to Long Beach and East LA to Santa Monica by connecting the Gold, Blue and Expo lines through downtown LA and adding three new stations downtown. Metro's The Source describes it this way: "This project essentially creates two major light rail lines: A north/south line from Azusa to Long Beach, and an east/west line from East LA to Santa Monica. In doing so it minimizes the need for transfers, reducing one-way trip times by 10-20 minutes or more."

Crews began relocating existing underground telecommunications lines on Friday. Metro is seeking a Full Funding Grant Agreement through the Federal Transit Administration's New Starts program. If fully funded the project could open in 2019.