Between the Lines: Parking in Los Angeles
The LA Times gives Donald Shoup and his ideas some much-needed press. Key takeaway: LA wasn’t built around the car, it was built around the parking lot.
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For a concert hall, Los Angeles requires, at a minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as the maximum. This difference in planning helps explain why downtown San Francisco is much more exciting and livable than downtown Los Angeles.
Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking -
The pain that is Los Angeles traffic
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NYC right on top of Houston makes for quite a comparison. Great graphic.
Via Infrastructurist.
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Los Angeles’ Metro is doing something that no transit agency in the country has ever done: it’s marketing its products and services as if it were a private company bent on turning a profit. But for Metro marketing isn’t about increasing the bottom line. It’s about reducing traffic, cleaning the air and making people’s commutes in this auto-clogged city a bit less stressful. (via Transit Agencies Need to Invest in Marketing: A Lesson from Los Angeles | TheCityFix.com)
I would go further than this quote and say that they’re not just marketing, they’re redesigning how people understand the Metro system. They differentiated local and express buses by color, simplified logos, and better organized all the signage associated with the transit system. That’s not just marketing, that’s good transit practice.
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Time-lapse of rail construction in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle. As the title of this video points out, Atlanta has fallen behind.
