With the announced resignation of LADOT General Manager Wayne Tanda, coupled with Los Angeles’ new Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and soon a new director of the Planning Department, our city is poised to redefine how we address transportation / land-use challenges. A new, visionary General Manager of LADOT can play a vital role in guiding the planning needed.
Transportation planning must coordinate with smart land use planning to create quality neighborhoods and communities. Our transportation planning should seek to create sustainable, healthy communities that encourage and facilitate non-motorized transportation, transit and paratransit.
The design of transportation projects largely determine the types of activities that are possible on adjacent land, and the quality of life of those who live or do business there. Streets are places, not just conduits for moving vehicles. They are some of our most important and vital public spaces, commonly used by all. For too long in Los Angeles, transportation planning has been dominated by the limited goal of moving vehicles. We must integrate transportation planning with the following community objectives:
To work towards these objectives, we offer the following approach to the new General Manager of the Department of Transportation.
The General Plan of the City of Los Angeles includes positive guidelines for creating healthy communities, including encouraging transit-oriented-development, mixed-use projects, as well as walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. The LADOT must strive to collaborate with other City departments to ensure that their policies and activities do not undermine efforts to create a healthy and more sustainable city.
The City’s transportation policy needs to integrate with equity, environmental justice and economic objectives as well. A closer relationship with the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Planning Department will help to bring this about along with a departmental philosophy that embraces these values.
People move around Los Angeles in a variety of ways. They may walk, bike, drive, use public transportation or any combination of modes. For too long transportation planning in Los Angeles has focused almost exclusively on moving automobiles. The result is that more efficient modes of transportation are marginalized and automobiles are used for the overwhelming majority of trips. If we are to prepare our city for a vibrant, livable future, we can no longer view transportation solely through an automobile windshield. Transportation infrastructure should follow and serve land use and community planning. We need planning that will help us create places where we can live without having to use cars for most of our activities.
We must reexamine existing policies that typically require street widening with new development. Widening simply accommodates more cars, and only provides short and temporary relief from congestion. It undermines efforts to encourage walking, bicycling and transit use. And, widening degrades the quality of our neighborhoods.
Los Angeles exposes a deep canyon between the halves and have-nots. While some Angelenos live in a world of Lexuses and BMWs traversing through their tony residential neighborhoods to garages in high-rise office towers, many others spend hours each day commuting on crowded buses from their working class neighborhoods to minimum wage jobs. The LADOT needs to focus more attention on lower income neighborhoods through its allocation of funds, DASH services, express buses, and more. Emphasis on walking, bicycling and transit also puts rungs on the ladder of socio-economic mobility. And, Los Angeles should strive to become a model city for removing travel barriers to disabled people. The DOT should also initiate taxi regulatory changes and other incentives to encourage shared-ride taxi services that can be used for people getting groceries and making other trips that don’t lend themselves well to traditional transit.
Our city needs leadership in LADOT that will inspire the agency to expand its thinking about what is possible. The Department of Transportation has some of the smartest, hardest working transportation professionals in the country facing the biggest challenges imaginable. A General Manager is needed who can motivate this huge resource of talent to use their creativity and problem solving skills to find and adapt new solutions. We also need a General Manager who is willing to strongly promote innovative solutions when faced with conventional thinking within LADOT.
The rigid application of design standards and guidelines has increasingly become a barrier to implementing creative solutions. Los Angeles should borrow the solutions being adopted in progressive communities such as Santa Monica, Pasadena, Santa Barbara, and Palo Alto that are yielding benefits. We need to balance concerns about liability issues, which often dictate stiflingly conservative designs, with the real, everyday benefits that can be realized when new, innovative approaches are utilized.
The needs of pedestrians, cyclists and transit users need to be addressed in all aspects of LADOT planning. LADOT needs to institutionalize processes that will prevent repeating a history that has frequently overlooked pedestrians, cyclists and community needs. It needs to integrate accommodation for all travel modes at the earliest design stages. Specifically, this means enhanced pedestrian treatment at intersections with more features such as bulb-outs, effective signals, better road markings, median refuge islands, and perpendicular curb ramps. We need more bikeways, bike-friendly traffic signals, better signage and bike boulevards for cyclists. Transit users need safe stops with benches, shelters, maps and schedules, dedicated bus lanes in highly congested areas, and more transit service. Overall, we need to create a street network that has calmer streets built to human scale. This will mean fewer and narrower lanes for motor vehicles, more places to cross arterial streets, and shorter blocks in new neighborhoods.
We propose that a new position be established that oversees transit stops and their urban design. Presently, LADOT has responsibility over permitting transit stops, and the MTA plans service stops, but no one takes responsibility over their design or maintenance. This new position will enable us to take greater advantage of our transit investments and to ensure that transit integrates with neighborhoods. We need to design and not simply plan.
The LADOT should coordinate its planning of streets, sidewalks, intersections and transit stops with transit lines and transit-oriented development. For example, wide and streetscaped sidewalks, enhanced street crossings and safe, convenient bus stops should correspond with new development along transit lines.
In order to ensure that land use planning and transportation planning integrate with one another, planning functions that now reside in the Department of Transportation should be moved to the Planning Department. Too often transportation policy collides with land use policy and attempts to create sustainable neighborhoods, because these efforts are not well coordinated, and often take place under differing philosophies. Bringing transportation planning functions into the Planning Department should result in policies that work hand-in-hand with land use policies.
Today, transportation projects are created deep inside the department and funding is applied for and granted without stakeholder input. This process makes meaningful changes nearly impossible. The result increasingly stimulates community opposition, which puts projects at risk, wastes time and money and breeds ill will. Early, substantive public participation needs to become an integral part of project planning, not an exception applied to select projects when they run into difficulty. Further, the City’s Bicycle Advisory Committee and the Pedestrian Advisory Committee need to be fully recognized and staffed by LADOT personnel who take advantage of the expertise on these citizen committees.
We need a mission statement embracing the goals of a healthy and sustainable transportation network for the Department and for the City itself.
An electronic version of this letter can be found on the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute's website at: http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/transportationGM. To have your name added to the list of signers, please contact Amanda Shaffer at shaffer@oxy.edu or 323-259-2759.