Matthew Yglesias reports on how Los Angeles is embracing its natural advantages to become an "ideal transit city," matching its transit investments with improvements to the built environment.
According to Yglesias, LA's investments are paying off, with a dramatic increase in transit use, and a coordinated effort to match its planning functions with transit goals:
"[Los Angeles] is acting to transform the built environment to match the [transit] infrastructure. A controversial plan to rezone the Hollywood area for more density has passed. The city has also moved to reduce the number of parking spaces developers need to provide with new projects, following the lead of the smaller adjacent cities of Santa Monica and West Hollywood. A project to reconfigure Figueroa Boulevard running south from downtown toward Exposition Park as a bike-and-pedestrian friendly byway is in the works, and pending the outcome of a November ballot initiative, a streetcar may be added to the mix. At the northern end is the of movie theaters, restaurants, arenas, hotels, condos, and apartments-the biggest downtown investment the city had seen in decades, constructed between 2005 and 2010. At the southern end of the corridor is the University of Southern California, which is planning to redevelop its own backyard to look a bit more like a traditional urban university village.
Los Angeles continues, like almost all American cities, to be primarily automobile oriented. But the policy shift is having a real impact on the ground."
Read the full story: L.A.’s Transit Revolution
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