Results for “taliesin west”

As anyone who has lived in Santa Monica knows, the cooling effect of ocean breezes only applies if your unit/home faces west.

Since the vast bulk of these hellaciously overpriced apartments will be facing in other directions, good luck enjoying the breeze.

You have both Zev and Waxman to thank for the delay in getting this subway built. It costs us about 25 years!!! Had Waxman and Zev actually done the right thing instead of politicizing the subway for their own political gain, we would currently have a subway to the sea. In fact, it probably would have been in operating about 10 years now and would have cost millions less. See below from wiki:

"Following a methane explosion in 1985 at a Ross Dress for Less clothing store near Fairfax and Third Street, Congressman Henry Waxman worked to legally designate a large part of Mid-Wilshire as a "methane zone". This zone stretched on either side of Wilshire Boulevard from Hancock Park to west of Fairfax (through areas of his district where subway opposition was strongest). Congress passed the ban in 1986.

In 1998, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky introduced a Los Angeles County initiative called the MTA Reform and Accountability Act of 1998 (Los Angeles County Proposition A). This initiative, passed by voters in 1998, bans the use of Los Angeles County revenue from existing sales taxes for subway tunneling."

Creating a bottleneck on Venice Blvd in Mar Vista is short sighted and counter productive. Venice Blvd is the most direct major road that connects Venice proper (and all the communities from Venice to Culver City west) to the Expo Line Station (specifically the Culver City Station). Getting people out of their cars and into public transportation is fine (I use public transportation whenever I can), but don’t make it even HARDER to get to the public transit.

You are a fool if you think 98% of LA commutes by car. It is more like 80%. What is your traffic solution if you think everyone must drive? I hear you go on and on about road diets, but there aren’t any where I live in West LA and our congestion is worse than anywhere in North America.

Here’s a solution to West Side gridlock. Use eminent domain to possess those Prop 13 tax subsidized properties (you know who you are) to build denser.

OR just stop being so damn selfish and accept that the streets are subsidized for YOU.

Keep West LA streets ugly!

That stretch of Venice on the road diet is insane now. Drove through there two days ago and traffic was at a crawl. Traffic used to move through there quite well (I know, I worked nearby for years).

Have none of the wizards who came up with this plan driven on the westside? You need all the east/west lanes you can get on Sunset, Wilshire, SM Blvd, Olympic, Pico and Venice to move an enormous volume of traffic every weekday. This central-planning mentality that we’re gonna force people to use bikes and public transit is madness.

Sad fact: many people have to drive cars to work. Deal with it.

Road diets are complex instruments that were designed to solve / address numerous conditions. There is no one right way to create a "road diet." There is no way around the fact that LA needs to 1) improve safety and 2) get people using alternate forms of transportation but a road diet is just one of many ways to address safety and offer multi-modal options. Ultimately Los Angeles has three major problems: money, location and timing.

Money: Los Angeles’ efforts have been limited to the liberal use of white paint. The roll-out of the road diets on the Westside have not been linked to transit improvements, or even information campaigns promoting alternatives. The opponents point out that pedestrian crosswalks, speed bumps/tables, better lighting at night, enforcement and the like can also address safety. While I strongly support bike lanes and better sidewalks, the bike lanes part of these road diets generally do not link to any larger network.

Location: The Westside is high-income, surprisingly low density and will always have a lower transit / bike modal share than the rest of the city. The road network has much less resilience than in the rest of the city, given its dependence on the 405 and the way the LA grid is more interrupted here than in Central LA, Hollywood Koreatown, Downtown etc.. While Westside roads could be safer, they are generally less dangerous that those further east, especially as regards pedestrians. Efforts should be focused on building a mass of bike enthusiasts and transit riders in those areas. Once there is an existing and useful network, expansions west will see much less opposition.

Timing: A good economy and cheaper gas means that these diets have been happening in the midst of already worsening traffic congestion.

What about West Adams?? They are building the 1.5 billion dollar 30 story residential tower at La Cienega & Jefferson. There are plenty of sights near there. You also have the metro rail right there and a strait 10min drive to LAX. What more could you ask for? It’s so good it looks like Apple is planning on having it’s studio productions located half a block from there.

The second two sentences of your comment exemplify why the road diets do not work for Los Angeles (except downtown) and why road diets do work in places like Olso, Amsterdam and Seville. Adjacent land use and access to public transportation.

Most areas of Los Angeles are residential neighborhoods where the only reasonable means of transportation to get to the rest of the City is the car. In downtown everything is within a few square miles, it is extremely inconvenient to have a car and there is a convergence of 6 different metro lines that go to Long Beach, West LA, Hollywood, Pasadena and East Los Angeles. Thank you for pointing out why road diets do not work in Los Angeles.