Livable City: Building a better Los Angeles

Uber has worsened traffic. Airbnb the housing crisis. What unintended consequences will result from allowing scooters to monetize sidewalks and public spaces?

One year ago this week, Los Angeles took what appeared to be a significant step towards combating its housing affordability crisis.

In the movie “Speed,” the inconceivable happens: Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves operate a bus during morning rush hour in Los Angeles maintaining a minimum speed of 50 mph.

For a while there, it looked like California lawmakers were ready to support the kind of dramatic change needed to finally ease the state’s crushing housing crisis.

L.A. Metro has a lot going for it.

California may be on the verge of eliminating single-family zoning statewide. This is huge.

After decades of legal battles, Santa Monica Airport will cease operations for good in 2028.

A little over a year ago, I took a bike ride on a cool, pleasant evening in downtown Los Angeles.

THE GOODNew sections of protected bike lanes along Figueroa Street keep cyclists segregated from vehicle traffic — making portions of the street far safer and more pleasant for riders than traditional striped lanes.An exclusive bus lane on Figueroa helps buses speed past traffic and stay on schedule, even during rush hour.

When it comes to climate change, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti talks the talk.

Two years ago, four tenants living on New Hampshire Avenue almost lost their apartments when a new landlord tried to evict them.

Concerns about gentrification in Los Angeles have reached the point where it’s not just art galleries and coffee shops that trigger alarm bells — parks and bicycle paths are in the crosshairs.

If you want to make money in California, stake out a foreclosure sale.

Since Uber and Lyft arrived in Los Angeles in 2012, taxi trips have fallen by more than 30%.

As a Los Angeles pedestrian, I never take it for granted that my life won’t suddenly end at the hands of a careless motorist.

“Dowajuseyo.” In Korean, it means “help me.” A few months ago, I received a call from an L.A.

Real estate speculation and price-gouging are driving Californians to impossible commutes, overcrowded housing, and into the streets.

When it comes to standing up to the gun lobby, Los Angeles’ leaders are rightly all-in.

Like many pedestrians, I’ve learned to treat Los Angeles streets as an obstacle course of distracted drivers.

Like many people in Los Angeles, I like detached houses.

Disdain for street people is nothing new.

Every weekday, poor people in Los Angeles are herded by the dozens into a downtown courtroom so they can be evicted.

Despite another hot and dry year with less than four inches of rain in the Los Angeles area, we are back to our water-wasting ways.

For a city suffering from a housing crisis, the subject of real estate development has somewhat oddly become a wedge issue in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is in the grip of a housing crisis.

The shape and soul of the Los Angeles River will change in the coming years and decades.

Last month, I was nearly responsible for the death of three small children.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s ridership has been falling steadily since 2014, losing on average 69,000 daily riders each month.

With each passing year, Los Angeles’ transportation system seems to bear an increasing resemblance to the dystopian film series “The Hunger Games.”

Santa Monica has long strived to be one of the most walkable places in Southern California.

For all the talk in California about leading the world on climate change and resisting President Trump’s anti-environment agenda, the state has a third rail of environmental policy.

Los Angeles is woefully park poor. Less than half of L.A.

All hell has broken out in my adopted hometown of Manhattan Beach.

For more than five decades, local leaders throughout Los Angeles County have been trying to manage parking by managing development.

There’s a big lie about plastic — that you can throw it away.

Mayor Eric Garcetti has revived an idea that once seemed deader than dead: an aerial tramway to the top of Griffith Park.

On April 7, Gov. Jerry Brown officially declared California’s long drought over.

Michael Fishman’s heart still sinks when he remembers the time his beloved bike, custom painted in Lakers purple and gold, was swiped while he watched a midday movie with his wife near his Silver Lake home.

For decades, Angelenos complained about downtown L.A.’s uninspired skyline, which was shaped by an ordinance that required all skyscrapers to remain flat-topped to accommodate a rooftop helipad.

The California political class almost uniformly accepts the argument that residents must drive less if the state has any chance of meeting its tough climate-change goals.

Employer-paid parking is an invitation to drive to work alone.

For all the acrimonious debate over Measure S, the slow-growth ballot measure that suffered a decisive defeat this month, most factions could agree on one thing: The development process in Los Angeles is broken.

This past November, Los Angeles County voters overwhelmingly passed Measure M — gifting Metro, the county’s transit authority, $120 billion over the next 40 years to build a 21st century public transit system.

Two and a half years ago, my brother Daren died as a result of his struggles with homelessness and schizophrenia.

Every weeknight, a nondenominational group of Angelenos that I’m a member of — called the Monday Night Mission — meets to hand out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the residents of skid row.

Los Angeles is fed up with its traffic.

It’s no secret that Los Angeles has some of the most dangerous streets in America.

Dear Blue Line: It may be time for us to break up. Yes, I know this could be hard.

The recent crackdown in Los Angeles on people living in their cars and recreational vehicles got me remembering what it was like to be homeless.

The bane of my bike commute in Calgary, Alberta, is the river valley hill.

Los Angeles tends to define itself — or at least to discover its public nature — when it takes to the streets. 

You’ve seen the cranes over Hollywood. You’ve read the stories about new development downtown.

California’s new minimum wage increase is pushing some businesses out of the state, at least according to one clothing manufacturer, who plans to move his operation to Las Vegas.

My new year’s resolution this year is as simple as it is sad: Get a dashboard camera for my car.

The wolves are back! California now has a well-established wild wolf population. “Hurray!”

For close to 20 years, my favorite landmark in Los Angeles was a pair of plastic sawhorses, each emblazoned with “City of Los Angeles Dept. of Public Works Street Services.”

Angelenos voted overwhelmingly last month to expand L.A.’s transit network.

On a small and skinny lot wedged behind its historic city hall, Santa Monica is trying to accomplish something that has never been done before in California.

On Nov. 8, Los Angeles voted to invest in infrastructure improvements that will transform the region for generations to come. 

What will Los Angeles look like in 2050?

The 52 square blocks that make up Skid Row are not the sort of thing you see in blown-up photographs by the baggage claim at LAX.

Nearly 50 years ago, Los Angeles County voters were asked to approve the region’s first sales tax increase for public transportation.

I have these cool neighbors.

Los Angeles has the well-deserved reputation as one the worst metropolitan regions in the country when it comes to parks and public space.

There were no parking spaces on my block in Mid-Wilshire. This is true as often as it is not.

Cities across America are facing a devastating housing affordability crisis.

Like many bicycle commuters across America, Kurt Holzer looks at a stop sign and sees a suggestion rather than a command.

In 2013, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation rather famously installed a safety improvement project on Rowena Avenue in Silver Lake, with the goal of saving lives by reducing deadly collisions.

Last month, California’s Water Resources Control Board took the easy way out on water conservation. 

The completion of Metro’s Expo and Gold lines has made it easier than ever to travel from Azusa to Santa Monica without getting into a car.

In a time of skyrocketing rents and stagnant income growth, the specter of gentrification hangs over working-class neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles.

There is no place in the country better positioned to use transit to its advantage than Los Angeles County.

Living in Los Angeles can be frustrating.

My neighborhood is called either Fairfax Village or Mid-City West or Melrose or maybe all three.

Faced with an intractable and growing homeless crisis, two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors made a bold and largely unprecedented move: It approved a November ballot measure that would impose a 10% tax on gross receipts of medical marijuana as well as recreational marijuana businesses, if statewide legalization passes at the polls, to help fund the estimated $450 million a year the county needs for homeless housing and services.

Los Angeles is a city that has fallen in love with rail.

Last year, faced with one of the worst droughts in California history, Gov.

I have a not-so-secret alternate identity as a superhero.

Take a ride on downtown L.A.’s first major protected bike lane and you’re rolling over something more than asphalt and paint: the symbolic end to vehicular cycling, an idea that dominated American urban bicycle advocacy for nearly 40 years.

How will people get around Los Angeles in 2066?

On Thursday, the Metro Board of Directors plans to vote to finalize its recently revised plan to vastly expand and improve Los Angeles’ transportation network over the coming decades.

Gov.

When babies learn to walk, they stumble at first, clumsily cruising from coffee table to couch until a leap of faith finally frees them to walk independently.

The natural gas leak at the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility was a disaster with continuing widespread repercussions.

On a recent evening, caught in traffic on the way to Hollywood, my wife suggested we use Waze or Google Maps -- some app or another to help us work around the crush of cars and trucks that mired the macadam like a mud flow.

At 12:08 p.m. on Friday, the first train on the Expo Line extension glided out of Santa Monica’s downtown station and the passengers clapped enthusiastically.  

Starting Friday, you can board an Expo Line train in downtown Los Angeles and disembark in Santa Monica less than an hour later.

It’s Bike Month in Los Angeles — but no one told that to the strip of chewed up asphalt along my morning commute that passes for a bike line in northeast L.A. 

When it comes to enacting bans on plastic bags, the reasoning sometimes sounds remote.

The Expo Line extension to Santa Monica starts its official roll Friday, and while there is lots of excitement over an alternative to the dreadful 10 Freeway commute, some transit advocates are pressuring the city of Los Angeles to use traffic signals to help speed up the train.

What’s the root cause of Los Angeles’ affordable housing crisis?

Metro’s light rail Gold Line expanded east in March, and in a matter of days, its Expo line will link Culver City and Santa Monica, finishing a long-sought rail line between the beach and downtown L.A.

On Thursday, Los Angeles got some good news.

For most of the last half-century, American cities have been defined by the decisions of a select and siloed few who have created their own agendas and imposed those ideas on the public.

One of the great things about Los Angeles is that honking is a regular and acceptable part of driving.

In honor of Earth Day, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Friday released the city’s first annual report on its “Sustainable City Plan" implementation.  

Noel Massie’s days are dominated by two things: trucks and minutes.

I am a German-American and Southern California native. 

On a perch above 10 lanes of freeway traffic, dogs chase Frisbees, kids frolic, boot-campers sweat and barbecues smoke.

Southern California witnessed wildlife evolution this week.

This past year, our family’s combined monthly electric and gas utility bill hit $500 for the first time.

The opening this month of the Gold Line extension from Pasadena to Azusa is an example of how voter-approved tax dollars are now delivering real transit projects for Los Angeles.

As a scientist and the executive director of the Bay Foundation, I’ve spent years filling in Angelenos on the important but admittedly unpleasant details of how Los Angeles treats and discharges its sewage and stormwater into the ocean.

It’s finally happening.

When trains start running on 11 new miles of Gold Line tracks this weekend stretching eastward to Azusa, will they carry any passengers?

In 2013, I started a project using graffiti art to speak for the homeless.

Meet Britani, a young teen, busy on her smartphone, sitting in her freeway-adjacent bedroom with her windows closed.

One of the biggest pieces of any Olympic bid is the plan to accommodate thousands of athletes, if not in high style, then at least in relative comfort and proximity to sporting venues.

In his 2013 book, “Happy City,” urban theorist Charles Montgomery argues that car-dependent suburban sprawl makes people feel isolated and unhappy, and that a well-designed city is one that enables people to live connected lives.

There’s collective angst among proponents of local transit about the news that ridership in Los Angeles has been falling.

In the coming months, Los Angeles will become the latest American city to adopt a bike-share program.

My hometown, Portland, Ore., has a serious homelessness problem.

One night a few months ago, as my husband sat in the backyard, a coyote appeared, so swiftly and silently that one moment it wasn’t there and the next, it was standing on the slope 15 feet away.

There’s been a lot of talk about which professional football team should return to Los Angeles, and which stadium proposal -- Carson or Inglewood -- is the better bet.

Welcome to the new world of urban climate politics post-Paris 2015.

Before it began crushing box-office records this month, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” set a new record in Los Angeles when it shut down nearly half a mile of Hollywood Boulevard for five days for one of the largest movie premieres in Hollywood history.

The other morning, I needed to get some reading done for work. I could’ve driven to my office.

The college kids wanted us to rip out the frontyard.

The weather phenomenon known as El Niño tends to mean different things to different people.

There’s a revolution happening in Los Angeles: Rapid transit stretches from Hollywood to Santa Monica, from Pasadena to Long Beach, and people are moving back into the urban core rather than farther out, defying the cliche that we are 72 suburbs in search of a city.

Angels Flight has sat idle since 2013 — the third time in the last 15 years that L.A.’

If someone had told me six months ago I would be bicycling in the street past Staples Center at the peak of a weekday morning commute, I wouldn’t have believed it.

My Broadway story begins with the memories of those who came before me.

Even with the backing of companies such as Google, Tesla and Cruise, the idea of driverless cars toting us around in the near future seemed like sci-fi wishful thinking to many observers.

Many of us living here in Los Angeles try our best to be as environmentally responsible as possible.

Take note, L.A. political speechwriters and Metro marketing staff: Building public transit may not reduce freeway traffic.

Unlike our world, the human brain has not changed much in thousands of years.

In recent years, Los Angeles has invested mightily in its public spaces in efforts to create a “world class city.”

Angelenos spend a larger share of their paychecks on shelter than the residents of any other city: Renters, in the aggregate, spend about 48% of their median income, while owners spend about 43%.

Every Angeleno who regularly takes the 5 Freeway past downtown has glimpsed the Piggyback Yard, a sprawling 125-acre stretch of Union Pacific railroad tracks etched into the shoulder of Lincoln Heights, between the Los Angeles River and the L.A.

Today is “Back to the Future” Day, the day in the movie trilogy’s second installment in which Marty McFly arrived in “future” Hill Valley and nearly destroyed 1985.

In a very dry state, turning to the sea as a source of water for drinking, bathing and irrigation has its attractions.

It used to be when L.A. appeared on the silver screen, the view was generally of the beaches of Santa Monica, the hills of Malibu, the boutiques of Beverly Hills, the mansions of Bel-Air or the twists of Mulholland Drive.

Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Phil Washington wants his agency to do more to prepare for gentrification around new transit lines and help prevent the displacement of longtime residents.

Anyone who’s ever hung out at a Los Angeles bus station knows the wait can seem interminable.

The surprise has worn off Los Angeles’ last-minute sprint from distant runner-up to official U.S. host city nominee for the 2024 Summer Olympics.

I meet Nitro on the corner of Buckingham Road and Martin Luther King Jr.

A tide of change is currently swamping Crenshaw Boulevard in South Los Angeles.

I love the Olympics. I moved to Los Angeles just before the last Games were held here, in 1984.

What makes a city livable? Clean streets? Plenty of parks? Big wide highways, free of traffic?