Street Designations and the End of Car Culture

So after listening to Josef Bray-Ali spout off about the most technical of assaults on the DOT's wet-dream come true (AKA North Figueroa St in Highland Park) I decided to actually do my homework, now that I'm a staff member of the LACBC and gearing up for a "four corners of the north east" bike advocacy campaign.

If you look here you can find the designations for pretty much every large street in Los Angeles. You'll notice that this is over at the Department of City Planning's website, which is who sets street designations. I learned from Joe Linton that changes to street designations have to be approved by the City Council, which makes sense, because it would be an ammendment to the Transportation Plan, which is a part of the General Plan. I also learned that DCP, like always, does pretty much whatever the DOT tells it to do.

But the whole reason for looking at this issue is in our attempt to make Figueroa St more bike friendly we've discovered that Fig is designated a Class II highway (south of York that is, North of York it's a Secondary Highway) meaning it is designed to take 30,000-50,000 Vehicle Trips a day. However if you look at the DOT's traffic count Data for York and Fig, probably the most bust intersection along the entire stretch, the count is 26,435--that's 3,565 trips short, or nearly 12% under it's designated capacity.

So what does all this jargony nonsense mean? It means the Figueroa is running under the capacity that its giant car lanes and extra wide medians are built for. To those of us who want to see the road reworked, with more space for bikes and smaller lanes to slow down traffic, we have a great appeal to make. Figueroa doesn't need to be as big as it is because there aren't enough cars driving there to justify it's size. Plus, if we knocked down its car lanes a little, and re-designated the street as a Secondary Highway, we'd still be well within the Secondary highway's prescribed peak hour trips--the DOT prescribes 1400vph in each direction during peak hours, and Figueroa only has a mesely 1087 in the morning, 1085 in the afternoon (and that's only Southbound in Downtown, northbound during peak hours comes in way under at 878 in the morning and 995 at night).

Of course, Josef has a bunch of other attacks but this is just one of them. I'll try to get the rest out of him and line them up in a super article.

Massive Parking Structure Goes Up in Echo Park

I took a few shots of the enormous 6 story parking structure going up next to the Angelus Temple. If I remember correctly the place has a long history of fanaticism, and judging by the size of this parking structure, things haven't changed much. Unfortunately no one got to these guys in time to tell them about how parking costs, near $40,000 per space for multi-level structures, are never recouped and how travel behavior is changing (or about the coming velolucion, when all parking facilities will be commandeered and turned into housing for people, not cars). You have to ask yourself why we have parking requirements but no housing requirements in this city. Though I'm sure being a religious organization, the tax breaks alone were enough to make the venture affordable. Mega churches have always interested me...wonder how much it costs to get into the place. Past objections to the Parking Structure at the Tower of Babel have been against housing demolition yes, but what about unleashing the gates of carmageddon? I guess since Glendale Blvd is already Hell on Earth, no one really minds more of the same. Anyway, no recent news on it, I'll try emailing Jesus Sanches at Eastsider LA to try and get a mention from him.

Bitter Arugala Has Ruined My Day

Today I learned how hard it will be to survive in the post apocolyptic world, when there aren't massive industrial supply chains bringing us all so much food we can throw out nearly a third of that which we produce...the arugula I've been growing for a few weeks now, which I harvested for the first time this morning, is bitter, awfully bitter, unconsumably bitter. This happened to me once before when I tried to grow lettuce last Fall. How it is that I can't grow the two easiest no brainer crops is beyond me, but it's a fact, I'm no good at growing things, I have some retarded Midas touch, where everything I plant turns to bitter. I don't have the patience to learn from these things, look up where I went wrong, correct it, remember it for next year, though because I wrote that, I will now do it. But the whole apocalypse thing came to me when Jim Bledsoe made a sign for some girls shooting a movie at the Kitchen, a sign saying humanity is doomed, we lose...Bledsoe will probably stand a fighting chance in the apocalypse, just cause he's bat shit crazy and good at building shit. How will I fare?

We're not even talking about actual bike lanes here

For some reason I'm actually waiting at a stop light on Glendale Blvd, that hell hole of hell holes, right before the 2 freeway on ramp, al Alesandro, at 2am in the morning, when I begin thinking to myself, "How fucked up must a system be that even when the least amount of people possible are using it, it is totally unable to be functional?" I wait a few more seconds, get back on my bike and make a short u turn to turn into the Food from Spain parking lot, cross a few parking spaces to the parking lot exit that's on Glendale Blvd, literally 10 feet from where I was legally unable to go any further at the Red Light back there, and enter into the street.

A few days later I'm drinking beers at the Echo Park boat house, trying to tell me bretheren bicylcist about how fucked up the city's proposed Draft Bike Plan, but I can't, because the issue is so uncool and bureacratic and the city has done such a great job at just burying the thing that every word coming out of my mouth only confuses and frightens these kids, and they ride bikes! "Essentially it comes down to this, we're fighting for a plan that gives us more bike lanes, and not less" "Well duh" the guy says "you mean the new plan doesn't even do that?" "NO!" I scream, "it actually takes them away!" That he seems to get, so I continue onto one of those tangents my brain goes on when it realizes something it's never thought of "The new plan is such shit that it takes away lanes, and we're not even talking actual lanes, the whole Bike Plan situation is so fucked up that when I say lanes, I actually mean the designation of a street that might one day maybe become a bike lane if bicyclist mobilize and fight real hard for it, because the majority of the bikes lanes the city actually designates on paper will never get built at the rate they've been going..." his eyes are glossed over and I've lost him again but I keep going cause like I said I'd never thought of it like this "The situation is so fucked that the City has actually decided to take away hypothetical bike lanes from us, not even real bike lanes, but weak plans to one day paint bike lanes, and we have to fight to get them back..."

It really is that bad, and for some reason though I feel shitty about it for a second, I really don't care.