Here’s a website worth checking out if you own a good pair of shoes and don’t mind using them once in a while. It’s called Walk Score and it gauges the pedestrian-friendliness of locations. Type in any address or pair of cross streets in the U.S. (or Europe for that matter), and the site maps the area and plots the nearby recreational, commercial, cultural, and social amenities. Even better, for the quantitatively inclined, it assigns each location a walk score on a 0 to 100 scale.
Time to bring the quiz to a close. We’ve seen in past posts that, by the standards of U.S. cities, Los Angeles is not sprawling, has a fairly extensive transit system, and is decidedly light on freeways. The smog situation has vastly improved. The final two stereotypes await.
Photo: ceeb Inside a Los Angeles bus. In the last posts, we learned that Los Angeles is not a poster child for sprawl, that the air has gotten a lot cleaner, and that the freeway network is surprisingly small given the region’s enormous population. What about the charge that Los Angeles’s mass-transit system is underdeveloped and inadequate? By U.S. standards, . . .
We’ve been running a quiz about stereotypical views of transportation and urbanization in Los Angeles. Consider a headline that ran in The New York Times in 2006: “In Land of Freeways, Mass Transit Makes Nary a Dent.” I’ll soon address the issue of Los Angeles transit. In the meantime, did you, like The Times‘s headline writer, guess that Los Angeles . . .
As part of an ongoing quiz about transportation in Los Angeles, in the last post I challenged the notion that the city is sprawling. But sprawl or no, Los Angeles’s air is choked with its world-famous smog. Isn’t it?
Answer: A half-truth.
In a previous post I challenged you to identify which of six common stereotypes about transportation and land use in Los Angeles is actually true. The first is that Los Angeles has developed in a low-density, sprawling pattern. Answer: False. As of the 2000 census, the Los Angeles region’s urbanized area had the highest population density in the nation. Yes, . . .
We at U.C.L.A. hear from reporters a lot, and they are often looking for a few quotes to help write a familiar script. In it, Los Angeles is cast in the role of the nation’s transportation dystopia: a sprawling, smog-choked, auto-obsessed spaghetti bowl of freeways which meander from one bland suburban destination to the next. The heroes of the picture are cities like San Francisco, or especially New York, which are said to have created vastly more livable urban forms based on density and mass transit.
In my last post, I blogged about my (mostly) favorable reaction to California’s program to increase fuel economy. But for the record, I should mention a few petty details — like the fact that these regulations will increase congestion, damage our roads, cut tax revenues, promote (for better or worse) low-density suburban development, and reduce pollution less than advertised. Oh, . . .
As you may have read, the Obama administration is moving toward giving California approval to cut greenhouse gas emissions by mandating better fuel economy. The California regulations should mean 40 percent more miles per gallon for new cars starting in 2016. The good thing is that the innovations that can make this happen are not in the realm of science . . .
I can’t help but wonder how many urban planners were inspired to enter the profession by computer games like SimCity or Railroad Tycoon. I can’t help but admit to spending a few hours (O.K., more than a few) blasting virtual tunnels through the Rockies and rebuilding Tokyo after those annoying SimCity Godzilla attacks.
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