In Los Angeles, it is very easy for pedestrians to feel like second-class citizens. Granted, we have inherited an infrastructure expressly built for cars, but the enormous width of our streets is further exacerbated by poor crosswalk design and signal coordination. Case in point: this intersection in Brentwood, where San Vicente Boulevard and Montana Avenue [...]
Category Archives: Street Talk
A Tale of Two Crosswalks
Posted in Street Talk Tagged brentwood, diagonal crosswalks, los angeles, pedestrian, transportation, urban design, westside Leave a comment
Congestion Pricing: Will Southern Californians Warm Up to HOT Lanes?
At the November meeting of SCAG’s newly-formed Steering Committee* on Regional Congestion Pricing, transportation firm HNTB outlined its preliminary research for a crowd of planners, businesspeople, and community advocates, mainly summarizing existing practices in other cities around the globe. Against the resistance of some local politicians and even its own Board members, SCAG recently committed [...]
Posted in Street Talk Tagged congestion pricing, freeways, hot lanes, los angeles, public opinion, scag 1 Comment
The New Westfield Culver City: Off Target
Shopping centers in Southern California have become a pretty fascinating bellwether of contemporary trends in architecture and urbanism. Developer Rick Caruso’s The Grove, for instance, made a splash when it opened in 2000 by modeling itself after a traditional European village with a purely ornamental trolley line, in many ways echoing the New Urbanist call [...]
Posted in Street Talk Tagged culver city, los angeles, mall architecture, retail design, target, urbanism, westfield 1 Comment
L.A.’s TOD Fiction
Towering above a Metro Station in Koreatown, Solair is the embodiment of transit-oriented development. But the illusion of walkability and urbanity that it creates along Wilshire Boulevard extends for less than a block, and its design is heavily compromised by parking requirements, despite the best intentions of developers and planners.
Posted in Street Talk Tagged density, koreatown, mixed-use, mta, red line, solair, transit, transit oriented development, urban design, wilshire 1 Comment
Street Talk: A Design Review
As the city installs Pay Here stations in favor of individual parking meters along busy commercial corridors, any good urbanist might wonder to do with the vestigial metal “stumps” left embedded in the sidewalk as the old-style meters are decommissioned. The Dept. of Transportation has come up with a remarkably elegant and logical solution by [...]
Posted in Street Talk Tagged bicycle, parking, recycle bins, smart meters, street furniture, transportation, venice 3 Comments
The Taco Truck Reinvented
While gourmet food trucks have already hit the streets of Los Angeles with a vengeance, enabling every aspiring chef to build a culinary presence without the overhead cost of a fancy sitdown restaurant, yesterday I noticed a truck parked at the intersection of Rose and Speedway in Venice, selling what appeared to be fresh fruits and [...]
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