L.A.’s Revelatory Light Rail for Nerds
My train line is smarter than your train line. I’m a regular rider of “The Brain Train,” officially known as the Gold Line on the L.A. Metro system. The Gold Line is a light rail running from the...
View ArticleWhy Building More Freeways Makes Traffic Worse, Not Better
In 1865, British economist William Stanley Jevons wrote an influential essay entitled “The Coal Question.” Today his insights are interesting to me not as they relate to coal, but rather as they relate...
View ArticleConnect the World? The Bay Area Can’t Even Connect Its Trains
The northern terminus of SMART, the new light rail system officially opening this weekend in the North Bay, is the Sonoma County Airport Station in Santa Rosa. But after my 8-year-old son and I...
View ArticleAn Architect of L.A. Government Looks Forward and Back
Los Angeles has changed, declared Zev Yaroslavsky, a man who has played a major role in shaping the city’s politics in the last 40 years, during a Zócalo Public Square event last night. “We’re finding...
View ArticleDon’t Be Ashamed to Admit It: You Miss California Traffic
Admit it. You miss me, don’t you? No? OK, maybe you’re not ready to recognize how much you need me. I understand. I know you’ve never liked me, and for that I’ve never blamed you. You Californians like...
View ArticleOde to the American Bus
How many of us grow rapturous in the presence of a bus? The number, I’d guess, is relatively small. Hulking metal loaves of the urban landscape, buses do not, when rattling past, draw voices down to a...
View ArticleHow to Imagine a Los Angeles Without Traffic
For the last century, Los Angeles has been expanding its road space far beyond almost any major metropolitan area in history. We have built freeways and roads and parking lots and parking garages. The...
View ArticleWill California Get SMART About Mass Transit?
If this train is so SMART, why can’t I find it? That’s the question I asked myself in Larkspur, in Marin County, after arriving on the ferry from San Francisco one morning earlier this summer. I was on...
View ArticleMy Missed Connection Riding the L.A. Metro
Our eyes met on a Saturday evening in Los Angeles. I wanted to go home. He wanted to take me there. Could we find our way to each other in this lonely city? Sure, we were only 30 yards apart. But we...
View ArticleWhat Will L.A.’s Regional Connector Bring Us?
What will the Regional Connector bring us? A new transformation in California life? Or has it arrived too late to change much of anything? The June 16 opening of a two-mile rail tunnel under downtown...
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