Improving Life In the Slowest Lane

The words “public works” usually evoke enormous projects like dams and bridges. But public works can also occur at a very small scale, particularly in designing the pedestrian environment. Angels Walk is a project initiated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to improve the historic heart of Los Angeles for subway riders and pedestrians, adding shade trees, sidewalk lighting and special paving to the streets of Downtown.

Angels Walk will also help link downtown’s wonderfully diverse and historic neighborhoods. Little Tokyo, Chinatown, the Civic Center, the old Pueblo, Bunker Hill and the Broadway Theaters are close to one another. But they can seem far apart because the downtown street grid is confusing.

To help pedestrians navigate, we propose using the blank back sides of existing pedestrian walk/don’t walk signals to mount specially fabricated signs. These colored panels, topped by a trademark “walking angel,” would indicate the direction of key destinations and landmarks and tell how many minutes it will take to walk there. It’s a small public work, but for pedestrians, it’s often the little things that count.