Why Don't Elected Officials Take The Bus?
Los Angeles' mayor has been a tireless advocate for mass transit, but some wonder why the mayor doesn't make use of the system himself.
"From the moment he took office nearly 18 months ago, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa made traffic gridlock a cause celebre —- exhorting Angelenos to help solve the problem by forsaking their cars whenever possible. 'You've got to use public transit,' Villaraigosa said just last week while unveiling an automated signal system to help unclog busy intersections. 'You can't keep on pointing to someone else and saying it's their responsibility.'
But Villaraigosa's own travel habits don't match his public pronouncements.
The mayor rarely, if ever, takes the bus or the train to work. Instead, he rides around town in a GMC Yukon chauffeured by a Los Angeles police officer who doubles as a bodyguard.
Unlike many others in Los Angeles, Villaraigosa has easy access to public transportation."
A reporter from the LA Times clocked the trip from the Mayor's home to City Hall at 44 minutes.
Villaraigosa counters that his schedule is too hectic to use transit. While a few other LA City Hall officials make more of an effort, they agree that being a citywide public servant makes it difficult to take the bus or train.
Villaraigosa's counterpart in New York, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has made it a point to ride the subway to work everyday.
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Could it be CNU's influence on LA politics?
After attending the 2005 Annual Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Pasadena, one thing became glaringly obvious to me. The rhetoric espoused by Stephanos Polyzoides, Elizabeth Moule, and their west coast new urbanist followers were proposing the impossible: to literally remake Los Angeles into a conflagration of dense urban centers all neatly linked by transit and all walkable. While this "vision" would be held near and dear to Peter Calthorpe's heart and could be used in a new chapter of "The Next American Metropolis", something else was going on behind the scenes. In all actuality, the CNU camp (just like Louisiana Speaks with Calthorpe and Mississippi Renewal Forum with Duany et al), was attempting to establish a presence in the evolving and dynamic Los Angeles political scene. With Villaraigosa newly elected as mayor, CNU jumped on the chamce to have him speak in their keynote address to the conference. This would now give CNU/Connecting America/etc etc a key position in deciding what direction Los Angeles would be molded into. The only problem with this is that the TOD advocates in LA are attempting the near impossible, to take a polyglot, dispersed, auto-oriented megapolitan region and literally "form it" into what they personally feel is an ideal physical and spatial morphology. This can also be seen on the part of the efforts by Fregonese Calthorpe Associates and their attempt though the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) to utilize a 2% approach to handle the projected future growth of the region. Mayor Villaraigosa is a great speaker and advocate, but just like Peter Calthorpe himself (who doesn't even know how to navigate the BART system), neither of them practice what they preach for the masses.
Why the Venom Against CNU in LA?
I don't understand this venomous attack against what the CNU is doing in Los Angeles.
You attack them for trying to influence politicians to accept their ideas -- as if there were something wrong with that.
And you attack them for trying to reform Los Angeles into "what they personally feel is an ideal physical and spatial morphology," though your comment is clearly based on your own personal feelings.
It clearly is possible to build more public transportation and to build walkable neighborhoods around the stations.
Many people believe that auto-oriented urban forms are not sustainable and that we have to move toward a more pedestrian and transit-oriented urban form. This is not just a "personal feeling": it is an idea about what sort of city is most environmentally sustainable and most convenient and pleasant to live in.
We use the political process to decide what sort of cities we want to live in. If people have ideas about how to build better cities, how can you blame them for trying to implement those ideas politically?
Charles Siegel
Brutally Honest
The real point is that CNU has a track record of working in locations which lend themselves well to implementing their experiments in sustainable planning and social engineering. Los Angeles is the pet project of Moule and Polyzoides, in their "Polycentric City", Utah and San Diego were the pet projects of Calthorpe Associates, and now the entire State of Louisiana, the emirate of Dubai, and the Mississippi Coast are being experimented with by the CNU camp.
We will never see CNU exerting much political influence on the built environment in places such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Boston. This is partly due to these cities happen to be examples which the organization holds as models for their own schemes, but more importantly, it would be much harder for CNU to make political in-roads with the eastern political machines than it is to get chummy with the good old boy networks in the south and in Southern California.
The impact which public transportation and TODs will most likely make in reversing trends in auto-oriented mobility within the Los Angeles basin is such a grandiose, far-fetched, arrogant proposal on the part of firms such as Calthorpe and Moule/Polyzoides that it makes us wonder if anyone calling the shots in Los Angeles such as Planning Director Gail Goldberg or Mayor Villaraigosa really understand the true dynamics of the city they work in or the people they actually serve.
The clue to the venom.
CNU has a track record of working in locations which lend themselves well to implementing their experiments in sustainable planning and social engineering.
Ah. I see. Still afraid of th' commanists.
We will never see CNU exerting much political influence on the built environment in places such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Boston.
Correct. They're practically built out.
Oh, and a large fraction of the land in the cities you name is built on principles the CNU has adopted for their vision, BTW.
The impact which public transportation and TODs will most likely make in reversing trends in auto-oriented mobility within the Los Angeles basin is such a grandiose, far-fetched, arrogant proposal...
zzzzzzzzzz.
Oh, sorry: you're right. Can't do anything about SOVs, might as well not try. Don't want to impinge upon anyone's freedom to sit in gridlock, that's un-Murrican. Offering choices is social engineering. No one look at Denver to see how that's going, either.
Sure.
Best,
D
Clue to the simplistic political stereotypes
You have it all wrong Dano if you think I'm a conservative, Joel Kotkin-style, Libertarian disciple. In fact, I am a Green Party member, not sure how much closer to communism and progressive politics it really gets than that! All political leanings aside, what you have called "venom", is in reality just exposing one of the grandest sacred cow/taboos known to contemporary urban design, that is, I actually criticzed the almight Peter Calthorpe, that most seemingly benign west coast foil to the dastardly Duany and the white picket fence coalition based in Litte Havana, Miami (DPZ).
This "sacred cow", for those who have not already noticed by reading the rhetoric of Calthorpe supporters and of the west coast TOD/BRT advocates, is that of a black or white dilemma, no gray area. Either one is a red-blodded, flag-waving, Joel Kotkin-style, Milton Friedman (Chicago School of Economics) free market freak, or you are a whole-hearted, blind follower of CNU manifesto and rhetoric. It seems as in today's forum on the discussion of the built environment and political influence, what I have proven (especially from Dano's comments) is how partisan and divided our nation has become, especially in the seemingly utopian and happy world of urban design.
This is why we see the typical "one-size-fits-all" grand schemes and master plans for reengineering our urban cores, suburbs, and even greenfields into utopian visions for the future. Unfortunately, what we REALLY end up with is a mediocre, middle ground between low density sprawl and mid-to-high density urbanity, almost always catered to the needs of todays upwardly mobile and financially successful. And now that the Bush Administration has completely dismantled the Hope VI program, you can bet that's all we are going to see. The City of San Diego even went as far as to make their inclusionary housing policy illegal, thanks to the local BIA chapter.
If you don't believe me, take a look at what has resulted from 99.9% of most new urbanist plans, whether they be of the friendly west coast Calthorpe camp, or the diabolical east coast Duany camp. What you get is a hodge podge of auto-oriented suburban crap, such as Laguna West, Kentlands, Stapleton, Playa Vista, Rio Vista West, Otay Ranch, Bressi Ranch, and San Elijo Hills. I mean come on, who's fooling who here? Even a bleeding heart liberal such as myself doesn't buy into all the pretty pictures and fanciful publications from Rizzoli.
I'm not saying that CNU or Calthorpe have a Robert Moses complex, but it is a bit disconcerting to see how broad brush much of their regional planning efforts have turned out to be, or as Douglas Kelbaugh from the University of Michigan puts it, "Peter's lightning-fast comprehension and speedy decisiveness gives him a confident, persuasive voice". This pretty much sums up his entire approach to urban design, basically QUICKLY looking at a site or region, and coming up with "big plans" for how he feels the place should look like, without really understanding all the complexities which he claims to address in all of his speeches and publications. This can be seen especially in Envision Utah, which includes plans to build thousands of new homes in the proposed Daybreak project, on land owned by the Kennecott Mining Company, one of the most staunch supporters of the Bush Administration. You mean to tell me that Daybreak, which is located on the urban fringe of Salt Lake City, won't be auto-oriented to the rest of the Wasatch Front Region? Gimme a break!
On a personal level, what did in CNU for me, especially the west coast faction, were the events which transpired after Peter Calthorpe won the J.C. Nichols Prize from ULI (an unholy alliance from the start), which definitely signifies a change in his tack from his good old days with Sim Van Der Ryn and Jerry Brown. After hearing him speak several times at CNU conferences and then reading his most recent article by John King in the San Francisco Chronicle, where he bashes the Sierra Club, the public sector, the public participation process, and CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act), and has the audacity to say that developers and even the Emir of Dubai "get it", I pretty much wrote him off in terms of the supposed contributions he has made to that nebulous pseudo-profession of urban design.
Unfortunately, neither Peter Calthorpe, nor Antonio Villaraigosa, really seem to understand the social, historical, cultural, or economic complexity in which our urban areas are comprised of, as Jane Jacobs urged us all to take notice of in her seminal classic, "Death and Life of Great American Cities".
All I have been attempting to convey in this diatribe is that things are not always what they appear to be and if one has half a mind of their own, they will delve beneath the surface to see the actual forces and motivations behind our politcal leaders and why they most definitely do not "practice what they preach".
Viable alternatives.
Apologies for the Dano character accusing your comments being of simplistic political stereotype variety.
See, my experience is that folk who use as many FUD phrases as found in the above comments, and folk who write long diatribes without offering solutions/alternatives/scholarship usually are simplistic political sterotypes.
I'm happy, of course, to be proven wrong.
How to do this? What is a better pattern, what is more pleasing, what is the better built environment than a CNU development [note that nowhere am I defending a practice/pattern, rather I'm poking at certain motives for comment creation]? That is: what is the incarnation of the better alternative?
Best,
D
A Little Humility Would Be Nice...
I'm not here to prove you wrong in your impression of me, in fact this has nothing to do with me whatsoever. How you ever came up with that conclusion boggles my mind. I have not attempted to criticize your personal or political beliefs, have I? If I did my sincere apologies Dano.
This long diatribe without offering "offering solutions/alternatives/scholarship" is not meant to give us a pill to solve our problems, or a panacaea to cure our urban ills. That IS the core issue here my friend. There is NO simple solution to providing for sustainable, equitable, viable urban settlements.
I feel CNU and Calthorpe (as well as the post-modernists) should humble themselves in admiting to the rest of us that they don't have all the answers to our current state of "suburban disillusionment" and take each project one by one, site by site, city by city.
Enough of the "Suburban Nation", Next American Metropolis", "Geography of Nowhere", Regional City" crap. Calthorpe, Duany, and Villaraigosa should stop acting like a know-it-alls and start listening to the people. A place like the Lower 9th Ward might be a good place to start...
Fair enough.
I apologize as well sir. One must have templates upon which to develop, and the successful models of the past are merely being replicated here. I look forward to reading about your work in alternative development models.
Best,
D
Don't Worry My Friend...
You won't be reading about any work from me, especially not in hyped-up real estate publications such as "Urban Land".
And I certainly won't cut and paste previous and outdated articles I have written on "pedestrian pockets" with prototypical renderings, and regurgitate them in articles entitled "From New Regionalism to the Urban Network: Changing the Paradigm of Growth", as was pathetically done last year in Harvard Design Magazine.
I don't have any development alternatives, and never would be so arrogant or full of myself as to professing to have "the answer".
Killing the messenger.
The important thing to note here is you have an issue with the folks with a personality that clashes with your sensitivities.
You apparently have no issue with the development pattern on the ground.
Most planners on the ground get it done without their name in the paper, as their egos don't need to be fed by a fawning article in print. It's perfectly fine to reject the methods a particular person uses.
My point in using the same tactic you did above** was to illustrate that there is a difference between not liking the person selling the product and not liking the product.
Best,
D
** Sometimes the tactic works, sometimes not.
There is no "message", only good old-fashioned boosterism...
The real issue again is that of not practicing what one is preaching, and more importantly, not having hardly any positive tangible evidence in terms of "neo-traditional" physical development patterns to back up what it is you are fervently spoon-feeding to "the masses"...
This is especially aparent when you attempt to judge the quality of developments which have been conceptualized by Calthorpe and Polyzoides, et. al. and realize their utter lack of adherence to the very guidelines which they drafted in the "Ahwahnee Principles", and subsequently dovetailed into the "Charter of the New Urbanism" back in 1991 at their priviledged Ivy League/Disciples of Vincent Scully/Yale School of Architecture Alumni/Gifted and Talented "retreat" at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.
Believe me Dano, I feel just as strongly about the misguided post-modernists who think they understand the dynamics of cities and preach their twisted theories of urbanism and boosterism to the rest of us, such as: Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Reed Kroloff, Moshe Safdie, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, David Childs, Ken Smith, Peter Walker, Rem Koolhaas, and Richard Meier. They even reeled in Brad Pitt to be their celebrity "talking head" in the recent PBS series, Design e2.
It goes well beyond my personal agreement with the method or style in which a practicioner implements, or my opinion of their personality. It just boils down to solid results (or lack thereof).
One size fits all...
Last spring, Andres Duany, another high-profile planner who also doesn't practice what he preaches, took his road show all around Louisiana, including to Lake Charles (pop. 75,000), close to where I happened to working at the time. As a Louisiana Speaks Recovery Project, he was proposing the usual New Urbanist one-size-fits-all mix of upmarket shops, condos, and townhouses to replace an existing, rather down-at-the-heels city center.
Like many others around the country, Lake Charles' downtown is full of parking lots and aging, vacant storefronts. In this largely working-class town (oil refineries and gambling casinos are the main businesses here), most retail activity has long since moved a couple miles southward to Prien Lake Road and the I-210 corridor, to be closer to the more prosperous suburbs on the south side of town. It is also a town where virtually the only form of transit is the private car and, being realistic, probably always will be.
All the lovely rendings showing cute-looking shops, beneath stylish condos and apartments overlooking tree-lined waterways and pedestrian-filled sidewalks, might as well have been in South Florida, Southern California, or the South of France. Even a prominent local development official (whom I won't name here) shook his head and just said "pie-in-the-sky".
Let's face it, the leading CNU practitioners are promoting a lifestyle which is good for their firms' bottom-line. In Louisiana, the aftermath of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, attracted these and other planning consultants like flies to rotting garbage in New Orleans. "Pie-in-the-Sky" is not off the mark... most of these consultants, from what I have seen of their work so far, are way out of touch with the immediate, and even long-range, needs of south Louisiana and its citizens.
Like Flies on Rotting Garbage
I couldn't have said it better myself!
I feel as during pre and post Katrina, the CNU camp has been looking for their golden opportunity to get their foot into the door of the design establishment. What we ended up with was a bunch of opportunistic "planners" such as Calthorpe, Duany, UDA, Polyzoides, etc jumping on the chance to make in-roads with the political scene whevever they work. In Los Angeles (especially during the CNU conference), it was joining forces with Villaraigosa, in Mississippi, it was joining forces with Haley Barbour, in Louisia, it was Calthorpe joining forces with Mary Landrieu, and in New Orleans it was ULI with Ray Nagin.
All that these CNU political alliances have resulted in is greater exposure for their firms (expecially Calthorpe, take a look at his website), more useless interviews, and tax dollars being wasted on grand plans which could be better spent actually providing real homes for people, especially in the Lower 9th Ward.
You do all realize ULI was proposing through eminent domain to condemn a large portion of the lower income black residents' home in New Orleans to allow for addtional green space through their now- infamous "green dots charrette". This is another example of the shady back room style political deals being made by CN, ULI, and local politicans to better their own political and professional standings, at the expense of others, whether it be in New Orleans, or Los Angeles.
Don't vote with your feet for Calthorpe designs.
In all actuality, the CNU camp...was attempting to establish a presence in the evolving and dynamic Los Angeles political scene.
So what.
...[T]he TOD advocates in LA are attempting the near impossible, to take a polyglot, dispersed, auto-oriented megapolitan region and literally "form it" into what they personally feel is an ideal physical and spatial morphology.
Zzzzzzzz.
The 2% number you give is the average amount of reconstruction the average municipality expects every year.
That is: it's not impossible at all.
It's perfectly fine that you personally don't like the pattern they espouse, and here's a simple remedy to help you accept it: don't live there.
Best,
D
Ok, Improbable
The 2% Compass Solution (looks like a cut and paste from Envision Utah and 1993 TOD Guidlines for San Diego) for the SCAG region may not be impossible, but it sure is improbable. Give the 200+ jurisdictions in the planning area, the fragmentary, polarized politics, and the dispersed nature of settlement patterns, this is just another of CNU's attempts to harness social engineering on a locale which will most likely never embrace a sceme of these sorts. Have you ever read the book "Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design" by Kenneth Kolson? It would provide much insight into the menifesto-like rhetoric which is being proposed by the CNU camp for the Los Angeles region.
In actuality, the same is being done now on an even grander scale for the entire state of Louisiana (at the taxpayers expense) in the "Louisiana Speaks" farce. Take a look at the transcripts of the so-called "public design charettes" if you don't believe me to see how people in Louisiana think the process is smoke and mirrors (with some cool GIS maps).
It really doesn't matter if I live in LA or not, which I do, the point is what Villaraigosa, Calthorpe, Polyzoides, Moule, Ohland, etc etc are attempting to do is fit a square peg in a round hole with regards to their personal view for how Southern California should look like.
Perhaps they should take a cue from the 1994 case in which the the Labor/Community Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union filed a lawsuit and won against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles on the grounds that MTA was by spending lavishly on suburban rail systems at the expense of the extensive bus system.
Seems that the CNU camp and Villariagosa do not really seem to take that landmark civil rights case, nor do they seem to acknowldge that the Red Line under Wilshire Blvd. is pure pork barrel politics and a waste of taxpayer dollars. Because he had the support of a professional organization (CNU) which prides itself on social engineering, this was the perfect platform for Mayor Villaraigosa to make his mark on the built environment in LA and rise up the political ladder.
You do realize the mayor wasn't even going to support Angelides (of Calthorpe/Laguna West fame) for governor at first, he was holding out for the bigger bucks from Schwarzennegger. In fact only at the last minute did Villaraigosa actually join forces with Angelides, the outspoken candidate "advocate" for smart growth and TODs.