L.A. Streetsblog - Lite
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The new Expo Line Culver City Station signs, installed recently, have been destroyed by a fire. They were also covered in tagging. The cause of the fire remains to be determined.
“It took months to put the signs up, but only a couple of days to destroy them,” said Gökhan Esirgen, who provided the photo.
We stand corrected! Thanks, Culver City TV, for the heads up.
The new Expo Line Culver City Station signs, installed recently, have been destroyed by a fire. They were also covered in tagging. The cause of the fire remains to be determined.
“It took months to put the signs up, but only a couple of days to destroy them,” said Gökhan Esirgen, who provided the photo.
Walking Rates in America Improve, Still Pitiful
There’s a new report out from the Centers for Disease Control that finds nearly 40 percent of American adults had not walked for a ten-minute period in the previous seven days. Yikes.
Believe it or not, that’s an improvement over the 2005 results, when just over half of all Americans had found the time and energy for a ten-minute walk in the course of a regular week.
Could this somehow be tied to the fact that in this country we’ve developed a transportation system where $1.7 billion urban interchanges are a matter of course, but where Congress takes aim at a much less expensive national program to help children not get killed while walking to school?
Japanese man travels round the world on public transport
A 106-year-old man has become the oldest person to have traveled around the world using public transportation.
Long Beach: Suja Lowenthal Takes Her “One Shot” to Create Inclusive Transportation
There is a reason Suja Lowenthal is speaking at the Pro Walk/Pro Bike Conference—and it goes beyond her being a policy maker for Long Beach, where the conference is going to be held this year. It’s because she holds a simple streetscape philosophy: if you gear urban design towards the most vulnerable of mobility types, walking, it can and will be safer for all mobility types.
Choosing the Paths Less Traveled? There's an App for That
Design student Tom Loois has created an app to help people follow the road less traveled, in a literal sense! The app maps the routes you’ve taken in your city and indicates those yet unexplored.
![jillathrilla:
New York City has experienced a biking boom in recent years, but the flip side of that trend is oddly sinister: hundreds of abandoned bicycle corpses are rotting away all over the five boroughs, and it’s a lot harder to get rid of them than you might think.
In late April, Transportation Nation, a public radio reporting project of WNYC, asked readers and listeners to submit photographs of abandoned bikes throughout the city. They received more than 500 submissions and mapped them online. Now, the bikes’ afterlives have become an art exhibit at The Greene Space in Manhattan. From August 1 through September 4, WNYC’s Abandoned Bike Project photos will be on display as “a collection of the detritus of urban mobility in a busy city.”
“Once we got in hundreds and hundreds of photos of these abandoned bikes we started to notice there was a rhythmic beauty in how they were all so similar but they were all so unique in the peculiar but familiar form of decay,” says Alex Goldmark of Transportation Nation (who’s also a contributing editor at GOOD). “And we have a performance space here that supports art events. The director suggested we make an art exhibit because some of [the photographs] do rise to the level of art.”
A crowdsourced project to get abandoned bikes off the street results in an urban art project. My latest for GOOD. Read more…](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8i6mcvEFg1qdvy24o1_500.jpg)
New York City has experienced a biking boom in recent years, but the flip side of that trend is oddly sinister: hundreds of abandoned bicycle corpses are rotting away all over the five boroughs, and it’s a lot harder to get rid of them than you might think.
In late April, Transportation Nation, a public radio reporting project of WNYC, asked readers and listeners to submit photographs of abandoned bikes throughout the city. They received more than 500 submissions and mapped them online. Now, the bikes’ afterlives have become an art exhibit at The Greene Space in Manhattan. From August 1 through September 4, WNYC’s Abandoned Bike Project photos will be on display as “a collection of the detritus of urban mobility in a busy city.”
“Once we got in hundreds and hundreds of photos of these abandoned bikes we started to notice there was a rhythmic beauty in how they were all so similar but they were all so unique in the peculiar but familiar form of decay,” says Alex Goldmark of Transportation Nation (who’s also a contributing editor at GOOD). “And we have a performance space here that supports art events. The director suggested we make an art exhibit because some of [the photographs] do rise to the level of art.”
A crowdsourced project to get abandoned bikes off the street results in an urban art project. My latest for GOOD. Read more…
Sustainable transportation advocates may read news headlines about new voter ID laws, roll their eyes at the prejudices of red-state legislators, and turn the page — at their own peril. This seemingly unrelated issue may have far-reaching consequences for transportation policy. New state laws mandating photo ID for voters threaten to disenfranchise nondrivers, and the skewed elections that would result could lead to political control by forces hostile to transit, cities, and even Safe Routes to Schools.
Eleven percent of eligible voters lack the necessary ID, and, as the table above illustrates, nearly half a million people in the 10 affected states both lack access to a vehicle and live more than 10 miles from the nearest ID-issuing government office.
A New Warning System To Keep You From Driving Into Cyclists
GM’s system integrates Wi-Fi Direct, a peer-to-peer wireless standard that lets smartphones directly communicate with each other, with driver alert and sensor systems found in many of today’s vehicles. Wi-Fi Direct allows devices to communicate within a second, while conventional systems that force smartphones to connect via an intermediary (like a cell phone tower) take seven or eight seconds.
As a result, a driver with a Wi-Fi Direct alert system that’s near a pedestrian or cyclist carrying a Wi-Fi Direct-equipped smartphone could be warned when their vehicle is inching a little bit too close. “This new wireless capability could warn drivers about pedestrians who might be stepping into the roadway from behind a parked vehicle, or bicyclists who are riding in the car’s blind spot,” explained Nady Boules, GM Global R&D director of the Electrical and Control Systems Research Lab, in a statement.
Progress Tracker – We pledged to make LA more energy efficient by transitioning our street lights and traffic signals to LED. Today, we are keeping that promise with over 250,000 units replaced. That’s good for our environment and our bottom line. Learn More: http://bit.ly/OtAOx9
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