Latest from Emerald City, my enviro-blog at LAtimes.com

>> Big Blue Bus’ 80th anniversary celebration. Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus celebrated its 80th anniversary with music from Blue Notes and cake for all on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica earlier today.

>> Google Transit coming to L.A.. Soon, it’ll be as easy to get public transit directions as it is to get driving directions via Google. By the summer, Angelenos will likely be using Google Transit, a Google Maps-based application that seamlessly links up walking to various public transit modes, to easily plan their bus and train rides in L.A.

>> L.A.’s Bus Rapid Transit system, explained. Curious about Bus Rapid Transit? We’ve had the BRT system in L.A. for a while now, but I’ve actually never used it because the lines aren’t near me. Now, StreetFilms has put together a short video about the BRT system in L.A.!

And a couple linky posts:

>> A.M. Greenlist: Radioactive coconuts.

>> A.M. Greenlist: New bus solutions

>> A.M. Greenlist: Poetry meets environmentalism

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De-car’d cuz you couldn’t stand the gas prices anymore? Wanna be on TV? Then check out this note I got from Linda of the Big Blue Bus today:

Calling all transit riders: tell your story! CBS Nightly News (the national version) wants to interview a real Los Angeleno who “dumped the pump” and started riding the bus (i.e. someone who got sick of gas prices and converted to bus riding).

If you are available to be interviewed on camera tomorrow, Thursday April 10, 2008, please call Linda Gamberg at Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus, 310-458-2201, ext. 6326 (you do not need to live in Santa Monica or even ride the Big Blue Bus).

Contact Linda directly if you’re interested :)

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Latest from Emerald City, my enviro-blog at LAtimes.com

>> Bringing Google Transit to L.A.. Google Transit — which seamlessly links up walking to various public transit modes — has been helping people from Tokyo to Portland get around. Let’s bring it to LA!

>> Asparagus: Spring’s signature stalky veggie. Katie Ricketts, community / market organizer at Southland Farmers’ Market Association, shares a Shiitake-Asparagus Risotto recipe!

And a linky post:

>> A.M. Greenlist: Carcinogens, citrus fruit, and cootsy

Photo by Liz via Flickr

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Damien Newton of Street Heat LA says carpool lanes don’t work, even though people think they encourage eco-friendly behaviors. In this third post of a guest series (here are the first and the second) on Emerald City, Damien crunches some numbers to show why toll lanes might work better than carpool lanes:

The percentage of people who commute via car pooling in Los Angeles County has remained static. According to the U.S. Census, in 2002 12.8% of commuters in LA County commuted by car, but by 2006 that figure fell to 12%…. In short, despite their popularity, HOV lanes aren’t causing single passenger commuters to switch to a carpool.

Read the entire post here.

Photo by andropolis

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All the somewhat doom-and-gloomy films about environmental collapse were getting me down, so I moved all films with a socio-enviro-conscious message to the bottom of my Netflix queue. Unfortunately, I missed one and over the weekend got treated to this cheerful title: “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream (2004).”

Good times! Actually, once I got over the fact that the DVD wasn’t “House, M.D.,” I enjoyed the film quite a bit — although that sounds a bit masochistic. More accurately, I learned a lot. Did you know that back in the day, suburbs were actually cute, walkable communities, located near train stations just outside the city? Apparently, it wasn’t until after World War II that we got the sprawling, connected-to-nothing gated community-type suburbs that require getting into a car to get anywhere.

And this new suburbia we have’s a subsidized lifestyle that can’t last, according to “The End of Suburbia” (maybe you guessed that from the title) — because it’s so dependent on the car, which is dependent on fossil fuels. Sustaining this unsustainable lifestyle’s caused us huge problems — i.e. war and global warming — but also lowered our quality of life, forcing us to spend hours stuck on gridlocked freeways, making us pay for gas just to go to the grocery store for soy milk, disconnecting us from the community around us.

What’s the solution? Well, there aren’t any easy ones. Even if we’re simply talking about powering cars, neither hydrogen nor ethanol are living up to their hype. One step in the right direction’s applying new urbanist design principles, creating more walkable neighborhoods that — like the first suburbs — are pleasant to live in and are not car-dependent. We’re seeing more of this in LA, with pedestrian and public transit-friendly city planning going on.

Of course, no one knows what’ll happen to the suburbs we have now. Will they become the slums of the future? At least one expert in the film predicts a scarier scenario where we may not even have time to build new ‘hoods with new urbanist design principles; we may just need to salvage what we have left in the face of global climate change.

Do depressing movies make you take action, or sink into apathy? “The End of Suburbia” doesn’t really end there; a sequel, “Escape from Suburbia” came out last year. However, while this film sounds somewhat sunnier, “Escape from Suburbia” doesn’t seem to have enjoyed as much success. Amy Lenzo writes that at Bioneer’s last year, these two films came up for discussion: “The follow up Escape from Suburbia was less successful, in part because solutions are harder to sell than problems, given the drama & challenge that these problems hold.”

Few have blogged about the “Escape from Suburbia”; bonbayel of Sustainable Rays seems to recommend the film — but has watched only the preview. Maybe people really do prefer depressing documentaries to sunny ones….

[crossposted on BlogHer]

Tags: endofsuburbia,, suburbs,, suburbia,, peakoil

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How I’m voting for the environment on Feb. 5, 2008

My vote on Prop 91: No

The no vote on this should be a no brainer, since the people who put the measure on the ballot in the first place are now urging you to vote no.

Why? Prop 1A, which passed in 2006, basically takes care of the issues that this measure tries to achieve — which is to prevent the state from siphoning off transportation money for the state’s general fund. (Incidentally, I voted against Prop 1A because the measure didn’t seem to promise much for public transit. It passed overwhelmingly without me.).

The measure, by and large, appears dead — except for at MetroRiderLA, where calwatch and others are pushing for a yes vote, arguing that Prop 91 will close even more loopholes than Prop 1A. However, what I gather from the analysis is that Prop 91 would close one loophole but open another huge loophole with negative consequences for public transit. I go into more detail on this in my comment on MetroRiderLA. Unless I hear back from the supporters at MetroRiderLA to convince me my current understanding is incorrect, I’m voting no.

Photo by andropolis

Tags: vote, california, prop91

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FredCamino of MetroRiderLA wrote a great gust post on Emerald City about why we need rail in LA:

This past Monday, the LA Times featured an op-ed entitled “The MTA’s Train Wreck” by James Moore and Tom Rubin which made the claim that Metro has made a major mistake by investing in rail instead of buses. Both Mr. Moore and Mr. Rubin are well known transit experts and long time rail critics. I’m a lowly blogger. So why is it that I disagree with their assertion that Metro is making a mistake by investing in rail transit?

The gist of the opinion piece is that transit ridership has fallen even though Metro has invested over $11 billion on rail in the last 20 years. The authors imply that if expensive rail projects were scrapped and the savings were applied to add more bus service and lower the fares, transit ridership would increase. To be honest, I don’t disagree with this conclusion. However, I also don’t think it would solve any of the transportation problems our region faces.

I think rail, more than anything else, has the potential to reorient the city and solve its most notorious problems, most of which stem from what many would consider its number one problem: The Traffic Problem.

That, and much more here.

Tags: metro, losangeles, subway, rail

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Latest from Emerald City, my enviro-blog at LAtimes.com

Last week was de-car-ing week at Emerald City. Here’s how I get around town:

* A nice walk: Santa Monica’s pretty to walk around in –

* Bike me: Travel via bike and you’ll be able to predict your arrival time within five to 10 minutes.

* Bus love: A bus novice? Just get to know one good line around you.

* Green Taxis: For late nights out, Euro Taxi has four biodiesel and four compressed natural gas cabs out of 24 cabs in the fleet.

* Flexcar: I’ve got Flexcar, which is like a regular car rental — except you can rent by the half hour, instantly.

* Rail: Rail is so quiet and calm and clean! Unfortunately, I don’t have any rail lines near me — yet.

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This girl has a lot in common with me — We’re both 28-year-old grad students — except she can swim a helluva lot farther. Sierra Brown swam 11 miles from Ports O’ Call Village to Long Beach, then walked a mile to campus for her art critique class.

The swim’s part of a project for her thesis. Every Monday for 8 weeks, Sierra’ll get to school via a different mode of human-powered transportation.

“I wanted to do this to raise questions about our infrastructure,” said Brown, who would like to see more tax money for bike paths and other forms of public transportation.

Wondering what the 7 other methods’ll be –

(via Bottleneck Blog)

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Did anyone else know it’s Rideshare Week this week?

I found out via an email from USC, urging me to “Join us at Tommy Trojan October 3rd to see alternate ways of commuting to campus” and linking me to a Metro page where, for pledging to rideshare, I could “one of many prizes: Urban Cruiser electric bike, AAA membership, Disneyland tickets, gift cards and many others.”

But the pledge page had no info ’bout this prize thing — or a link to a page with any other info ’bout the week. Plus, I’m signed up to get Metro press releases — and got no notice of the week. Then I checked MetroRiderLA and some other LA-based blogs — No mention of Rideshare Week there either.

I checked back on the Metro homepage a few hours later, and finally, some info ’bout Rideshare Week showed up.

Yes, it’s happening, from Oct. 1 - 5, 2007. Yes, you can pledge to win prizes. You can even write ’bout your rideshare experience to TV Host and Producer Huell Howser; he’ll feature some of them on his show Visiting.

Many commuters, I’m guessing, missed a potential day of ridesharing fun, but at least there’s 4 more days to go. The LA-area universities at least seem to be on top of things. USC, like I said, sent out that mass email; UCLA’s even got a mini event series together for the week!

As for me: It’s tough to rideshare if I’m just walking from my bed to the desk, but I’m carpooling with Jenny to this sustainability event at Antioch on Thursday, and so have signed the pledge! Hopefully I’ll win something good –

Relatedly — If you find yourself so busy you’re considering a personal assistant, you might do better — saving money and stress and time — by just moving closer to work and cutting out the commute altogether.

Tags: rideshareweek, rideshare

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