Los Angeles

Here's a show-and-tell of my impressions of the walk/bike/transit stuff I experienced, including a few things I'd be glad to see implemented in Chicago.

Los Angeles, with its expanding transit network, is supposed to be in the process of shedding its cocoon of car-centricity and emerging, in the words of a recent Fast Company headline, as America's "next great walkable city." The city's streets, however, didn't change a whole lot under former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. When Eric Garcetti was elected mayor in 2013, advocates thought he could provide the leadership to finally prioritize walking, biking, and transit on LA's streets.

Should Mayor Eric Garcetti have hired someone with more Los Angeles experience to run Los Angeles' Department of Transportation? With San Francisco's Seleta Reynolds chosen as the incoming department head, there's been a small buzz that only someone with direct experience with our region can handle making L.A. a better place to live. It has to be someone with local experience, they say.

For a quick preview of what Seleta Reynolds has to offer Los Angeles as the new chief of its Department of Transportation, watch this video of her commendation appearance before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week. Reynolds' item begins at 00:43.

Earlier today, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti nominated Seleta Reynolds to be the new general manager for LADOT. Streetsblog announced the nomination earlier today via this brief article, which includes the mayor's press release.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has nominated Seleta Reynolds to be the new general manager for the city’s Transportation Department (LADOT.) From preliminary research on Reynolds’s background, this looks like great news. Reynolds currently works for San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) where her focus had been livable streets, with a focus on building more equitable streets.

"The Browndoggle."

Leah Missbach Day, co-founder of World Bicycle Relief and keynote speaker at last week's National Women's Bicycling Summit, in Long Beach, California, was very succinct with her main point about a bike:

If cities needed any more reason to curb handicap placard abuse, here it is. The authors of a new study out of Los Angeles point out that rampant placard abuse threatens to undermine performance parking programs like SFPark by skewing the data and the price of parking, the Atlantic Cities explains: