CP&DR

Coalitions Square Off Over Los Angeles Anti-Growth Measure

by Josh Stephens on Feb 28, 2017

Ballot box zoning, Ballot initiatives, Los Angeles

Will anti-growth forces upend the Los Angeles growth status quo with Measure S? >>read more

California's Nastiest Urban-Rural Rivalry

by Josh Stephens on Jan 2, 2017

Kern County, Los Angeles

Nasty as it sounds, Green Acres 'Farm' in Kern County is an apt symbol of the symbiosis between rural and urban areas. >>read more

Coastal Act Trumps Density Bonus Act

by William Fulton on Oct 3, 2016

Coastal Act, Density Bonus, Housing, Los Angeles

Neighborhood character in Venice was a legitimate coastal issue, appellate court rules. >>read more

Art Review: Ed Ruscha and the Great American West

by Josh Stephens on Sep 17, 2016

Los Angeles

No artist has ever depicted Los Angeles like Ed Ruscha. It's worth a trip to San Francisco to see the de Young's retrospective. >>read more

Los Angeles' Moral Failing

by Josh Stephens on Mar 3, 2016

Bay Area, California, Los Angeles

Whereas a Berkeley resident can cross from exuberance of Telegraph Avenue into the heart of the Cal campus in a few steps, UCLA is an auto-oriented campus surrounded by a moat of driveways, green space, and city streets. Its neighbors are some of the wealthiest and orneriest an institution could ever have the misfortune to live next to. The university, for all its academic heft, retreats from the city, and the city from it.

UCLA was an ironically illustrative venue for a talk by Michael Storper, lead author of "The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies," that I attended recently. Contrary to its expansive title, Storper's study concerns only Los Angeles and San Francisco. Given that both are booming Pacific Rim metropolises, it may be hard to figure out which is the "rise" and which is the "fall." >>read more

A Plan with 'Zero' Chance of Success

by Josh Stephens on Oct 22, 2015

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, Mobility Plan, Vision Zero

In 2013, 34 pedestrians died on the streets of Denmark. The city of Copenhagen, roundly hailed as the world's pleasantest city for walking and biking, has about 10 percent of Denmark's population of 5.6 million. We can extrapolate that exactly three pedestrians died in Copenhagen in 2013, for a rate of about 0.5 per 100,000.

To be sure, those three deaths deserve due lamentation, scrutiny, and sympathy. On the other hand, they deserve celebration. Copenhagen's pedestrian fatality rate is about as low as it gets. The lowest pedestrian fatality rate of any major American city is 0.76. Copenhagen's rate is a full five times lower than that of the City of Los Angeles, which, at 2.57 (pdf) is towards the high end.

If you divide Copenhagen's fatality rate by Los Angeles', you get 19 percent. The question that some in Los Angeles are now asking is, what happens when you divide by zero?

Mobility Plan Nudges Los Angeles Towards New Transportation Modes

by Josh Stephens on Oct 19, 2015

Los Angeles, Transportation, Vol. 30 No. 10 October 2015

There's a scene in "X Men Origins: Wolverine" in which a government scientist infuses every bone in the title mutant's body with an inviolable metal called adamantium. The process is excruciating, but it leaves Wolverine with the distinct benefit of near-indestructibility. And claws.

That's kind of like what the city of Los Angeles is doing to its transportation network. With the adoption of Mobility Plan 2035 , the world's first great automobile-oriented city could become the first city to de-orient itself from the automobile. The city will not merely cease adding lane-miles; it will, in fact, take space away from personal automobiles. >>read more

Let the Sun Set on Ballot Measures

by Josh Stephens on Jun 12, 2015

Ballot Measures, California, Los Angeles, Prop 13, Proposition 13, Proposition U

Allow me to laud something about California's state and local ballot initiative system. No, really.

Voting schemes for electing human beings to office are inevitably flawed. Whether a jurisdiction uses party primaries, open primaries, ranked choices, multiple votes, pluralities, majorities, voice votes, or anything else, no system can capture the true passions and preferences of all voters as they relate to all candidates.

Complete Streets Movement Gains Momentum in California

by Josh Stephens on May 1, 2015

California, Compete Streets, Los Angeles, transportation, UCLA

Back in the early days of email, before Facebook and Buzzfeed, people used to send jokes around as chain messages. "Forwards" we sometimes called them. My favorite of these forwards was "Ways to Confuse Your Roommate" (here's a version of it). My favorite way: "Go to the gym. Use the multipurpose room. For just one purpose."

I've often thought about streets the same way. We usually use them for just one purpose, especially in California. And yet, no one is ever baffled.

The complete streets movement is changing this attitude. As most planners know, complete streets have been gaining popularity for the past few years, as the infrastructural equivalent of smart growth. Inspired by the Dutch woonerf and, before that, by the simple reality of multi-use, pre-automobile streets, complete streets seek to accommodate a diverse array of transportation modes all in the same space. The movement contends that feet and cars can peacefully coexist, and that streets can be places that people inhabit rather than pass through.

Actors Guild Lowers Curtain on Piece of L.A. Civic Culture

by Josh Stephens on Apr 22, 2015

Culture, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, Theater

By most accounts, planners don't need to pay much mind to the policies of stage actors unions. It's the rare city in which theaters have much of an impact on the built environment. And yet, planners have every reason to care about the culture of the cities that they build and administer, and cities can profit mightily from their theater scenes — especially when the the city in question is Los Angeles.

That's why everyone in Los Angeles, actor and non-actor alike, should care about the recent vote by the leadership of Actors Equity. Actors Equity is the guild to which most professional and aspiring stage actors belong. After a bitter dispute over questions of professionalism and exploitation, the 100 members of the guild's National Council voted to require union actors to accept no less than $9 per hour to work on professional stage productions. Formerly, actors could essentially volunteer to perform in "equity waiver" productions, which were limited to theaters of fewer than 100 seats. This opportunity goes away June 1, 2016.

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