Metro Retires Last Diesel Bus

There's nice article from Steve Hymon at The Source on Metro's retirement of its last diesel powered bus (article link here). With this milestone, Metro becomes the only major transit agency in the country to have a bus fleet equipped entirely with alternative-fuel technologies. As the LA Times notes, the regional impact on pollution is significant:

In an urban area where diesel buses began operating in 1940, the MTA now has 2,221 buses powered by compressed natural gas, as well as one electric bus and six gasoline-electric hybrids.

Transit officials estimate that the elimination of diesel engines has reduced the release of cancer-causing particulates from the bus fleet by 80% and greenhouse gases by about 300,000 pounds a day in one of the smoggiest areas of the country.

Increasing mass transit ridership is undoubtedly one of the keys to making transportation and land use more sustainable for everyone in the Los Angeles region, but the way in which riders are transported is also important; a cleaner bus fleet is critical for improving for the public and environmental health of the region.

Design for Broad Museum Unveiled

Diller Scofidio + Renfro/January 6, 2011. Source: LA Times

The Los Angeles Times wrote this morning:

The architectural design that Eli Broad is scheduled to reveal Thursday in a news conference at Walt Disney Concert Hall wraps the museum housing his contemporary art collection in a porous honeycomb. The billionaire collector and philanthropist hopes the $130-million building will help bring about his vision of downtown L.A. as a bustling urban hive of culture and street life.

The three-story museum will be known simply as the Broad, although the Broad Art Foundation is its formal name. The wraparound bonnet of interconnecting concrete trapezoids is courtesy of New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Lead architect Elizabeth Diller's term for it is "the veil," because it enables the museum to relate to its surroundings by providing slots through which visitors can look out on Grand Avenue, and passersby outside the museum can get glimpses of what's inside. Visitors will enter the museum at ground level, take an escalator bathed in natural light to the top-floor galleries, and return via a staircase from which they'll have views into what she has dubbed "the vault" — the storage facility on the first and second floor that will house all the art from the 2,000-work collection that's not on display or on loan to other museums.

Coverage of the unveiling has been extensive thus far. You can read additional coverage from Curbed LA, blogdowntown, LA Downtown News, and The Architect's Newspaper by clicking on the links and a review by LA Times architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, here.

Leaving an evaluation of the museum's green credentials for another time, the most significant planning and sustainability issue facing The Broad involves the transportation of the more than 500,000 visitors that Eli Broad anticipates will visit his museum and MOCA each year. Finding ways to ensure that these half million people do not all arrive by car is important for reducing congestion and pollution in Los Angeles. Of particular importance is the street widening of Grand Avenue from 2nd to 4th streets and the new public plaza proposed for the southern and western edges of the site. These two proposed improvements hold tremendous potential for enhancing the public realm downtown and making Grand Avenue more pedestrian friendly.

Source: Metro

With the regional connector planning to add a stop on the backside of the museum, it is doubly important that the City leverage the proposed public plaza and streetscape improvements as a way to create a strong connection with the proposed station, inviting museum patrons from throughout the Los Angeles basin to arrive via mass transit instead of by car. See the regional transportation map below for the variety of different locations that one could take the train to Grand Avenue. The regional connector is poised for completion in 2019, six years after the The Broad opens.

Source: Metro