slightlyslack

I must say, louisville327, that your Kunstlerian invective is getting wearisome. JHK's incredibly arrogant writing style has done more harm to New Urbanism than a thousand pages of screeds in Reason.

Date: 10/17/2005 3:51:20 PM Author: The Terminator actually if you take HBLR or the Newark City Subway, they go pretty fast. Inbetween Washington Street and Military park on the Newark Subway, i swear they go 60 MPH! quote> Yeah, there are some really fast light rail lines out there. The aforementioned Exposition Boulevard light rail line will be doing 50+ in some stretches. However, LRT has been marketed in many places as a revived streetcar, and in street-running mode it can't go any faster than the speed of traffic--which, if it's sufficiently congested, is slower than walking.

You haven't lived until you've driven up the Harbor Freeway on a smog-free day and seen the San Gabriels rising behind downtown Los Angeles. On its own, it cannot compete with Chicago (let alone Hong Kong), but I can't think of too many cities in the world that are more geographically dramatic. http://rlux.com/LA_Skyline_B2.jpg align=baseline>

kmannkoopa: Monorail advocates are notoriously fast-and-loose with the numbers, much more than highway or conventional rail advocates. I have no idea why; perhaps it's the curious science fiction obsession so many of them share.

Date: 10/16/2005 5:37:01 PM Author: danielanzaldua BLUE LINE TRAM IN Los Angeles Also known as...the busiest light rail line in the United States. None of the lines in Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, or Dallas can come close to competing with it. I don't have passenger-miles traveled statistics readily at hand, but I do know that the Blue Line has over 70,000 daily boardings. Unlike the idiotically conceived nowhere-to-nowhere Green Line and the pointlessly slow Gold Line, the Blue Line has been a massive success from its first day of operation. It is one of the key factors in the revitalization of downtown Long Beach, which is now a very cool place (as long as you don't mind breathing sulfurous diesel smoke from all the ships docked at the Port of Long Beach). On a related MTA note, the Exposition Boulevard light rail line (Expo Line) is in the advanced planning stages. The environmental reports have been released to the public, and almost all necessary construction funds have been procured; the MTA board will vote on it in December. Mayor Villaraigosa, who also chairs the MTA, has gone on record as a big supporter of the Expo Line, so I have little doubt that it will go through. I predict that it will be a huge success, since it--like the Blue Line--will run through a very densely populated and heavily transit-dependent area on its way to the Metro Center station downtown. (It will also allow me to get to USC from my home in the Palms district in under a half-hour. ) I just wish that MTA could get the money together to do one of these three things: A) Build a new light rail tunnel directly from Metro Center (the northern terminus of the Blue Line and the planned eastern terminus of the Expo Line) to Union Station; B) Modify the existing Red Line subway tunnel so that catenary-powered light rail vehicles could run on tracks that presently can only carry third-rail-powered subway cars; or C) replace its current catenary-only light rail vehicle fleet with dual-power ones like those used in Bordeaux. Doing any of these would allow the Expo Line and the Blue Line to go to Union Station, where Metrolink trains and the two Gold Lines terminate. (The Pasadena leg of the Gold Line was originally called the Pasadena Blue Line, but the connector was never built.) By then increasing service on Metrolink commuter trains, the need for seat-hopping would be eliminated, making the rail system a much more attractive alternative to driving than it currently is. I eagerly await the day when someone from even the furthest-out suburbs could take a fast, comfortable Metrolink train to Union Station and then hop the Blue Line to Staples Center for a Lakers game or the Expo Line to the Coliseum for a USC football game, and be able to take a train back even after midnight. It might be a decade or more off, but I am trying to do my part to bring it to fruition.

Davis is insightful on a lot of things, especially on race relations, but his characterization of downtown Los Angeles as some sort of fortress is faintly ridiculous. If Bunker Hill business interests wanted so badly to keep out black and brown undesirables, why did they get behind a rail system that funnels tens of thousands of them into the CBD every day? Now, the residential towers in the area and the Westin Bonaventure hotel can accurately be categorized as impenetrable, but those were never more than a footnote in the grand scheme of things. Still, once you get outside of downtown it is clear that this is a security-obsessed city, which has led to some absurdities. You will not find any other American city with so many private security cars on the streets, representing tens of millions of dollars a year in expenditures--money out of the pockets of people whose property tax-fuelled temper tantrum in 1978 led to a 20% reduction in the size of the intentionally skeleton-crewed LAPD. It would not be a stretch to say that Prop 13 and its after-effects returned Los Angeles to its roots as a Latin American city--one in which the language of the elite is English and not high castellano, but a Latin American city nonetheless, with all that implies.