L.A. Looking At 'Inland Port' Idea
With high amounts of truck traffic congesting freeways near the county's busy ports, County officials in L.A. are considering creating an 'inland port', where goods travel from the port by rail to be picked up by trucks far from the port complex.
"Seeking a solution to L.A.'s congested freeways, a county official has proposed creating an 'inland port' in the Antelope Valley where big-rigs would pick up goods transported there by rail instead of driving to seaside ports."
"The idea by Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich aims to shift a big chunk of the 22,000 truck trips made each day in and out of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to the county's rural outskirts."
"Goods would be hauled from the L.A. and Long Beach ports on existing train tracks to the Antelope Valley, where they would be loaded onto trucks bound for markets nationwide."
"About half the goods coming into the L.A. and Long Beach ports stay in Southern California, said Theresa Adams Lopez, spokeswoman for the Port of Los Angeles. The rest is hauled back to stores and warehouses across the country -- leaving the state to pick up the tab for the wear and tear 18-wheelers do to roadways and commuters sitting in gridlock."
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Good for LA
After living in Los Angeles for a summer and looking forward to returning this summer I am amazed by the amount of innovation occurring in this historically labeled "sprawl poster child." From a freeway cap over the 101 freeway in Hollywood as a public park to the restoration of the 32 mile LA river this city is not short on grand ideas or visions! I only wish that our current federal government could have this level of vision, audacity and most importantly action.
Other interesting LA projects on the table:
-LA Live/Staples Center in South Park (Times Square West)
http://www.aegworldwide.com/04_future/losangeles.html
-Grand Avenue Project
*16 acre "central park"
*grand streetscape improvements (no pun intended l0l)
*infill
http://www.grandavenuecommittee.org/overview.html
-Hollywood/Highland Renaissance
-Hollywood/Vine massive TOD in the works
-Metro Expansion
*gold line extension to East LA (2009)
*Exposition Line to Culver City (2010)
*Orange Line extension to Chatsworth Metrolink (2011)
*Proposed extension of gold line to inland empire
*Proposed Extension of exposition line to Santa Monica
*Proposed Extension of purple line to Santa Monica
*Proposed Extension of green line to LAX airport and Redondo Beach
*Downtown streetcars
-Selling of Convention Air Rights to allow for more development in up and coming downtown
-North Hollywood Revitalization around red line metro stop
&
-Inland Port!!
That's because
L.A. is flush with revenue, always has, always will have. You won't EVER see a massive "Robert Moses" scale urban reconstruction like has occurred in L.A. or New York in our 2nd-tiered cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc. Even the "Big Dig" in Boston pales in comparison to this massive a scale of retransformation.
It really has nothing to do with vision (every city has "vision") and EVERYTHING to do with an enormous tax base, corporate-funded support, and being recently ranked in the 1st-tier of world cities.
Ever since William Mullholland brought water down from the Owens River, L.A has been a wet dream (pardon the pun) for civil engineers, land surveyors, real estate developers, and general contractors, looking to get on the bandwagon and transform Southern California into something on an American, wild west, grandiose, herculean scale.
L.A. always does things BIG. First they had the biggest water system in the world, the biggest streetcar system, the biggest freeway system, and now the biggest infrastructure and redevelopment makeover in the world.
Seems like just another logical chapter in L.A.'s conspicuous-consuptive, breakneck-speed, chameleon-like transformation.
15 years ago you would never had seen positive articles this glossy about L.A., it was all about the earthquakes, riots, gangs, landslides, wildfires, etc etc.
My how short a memory the media has...
Good metaphors
I really like the adjective chameleon. It shows that LA is able to adapt to any situation it is affronted with, which is more than I can say about my home state.