Transit Adjacent Markets

Here's a new form of transit-oriented development: Transit Adjacent Markets. The most interesting aspect of this clip is the efficient use of space, common sense understanding of public safety, and informal use of land. The speed with which the life and urban atmosphere of the market is dismantled and reconstructed is impressive and makes one realize that cities often do not need complex and expensive investments to breath life into formerly neglected spaces.

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

West Hollywood's Transit Future

A few things are now certain regarding mass transit in Los Angeles: the subway will be extended as far west as the VA hospital, the Expo Line will be extended to Santa Monica and the Crenshaw Line will connect the Green Line to the Expo Line via LAX. All of these projects are in various phases of approval, funding or construction and are likely to be completed sometime in the next 5-15 years, assuming the Mayor's 30-10 plan takes hold in the new Congress.

Since Metro chose not to include a transfer structure at Wilshire and La Cienega to serve a future subway extension into West Hollywood, the options for providing mass transit to West Hollywood residents are limited. The most viable alternative seems to be a northern extension of the Crenshaw Line, which would create a high ridership transfer point with the Wilshire subway before traveling to Hollywood/Highland via West Hollywood. See figure 1 below for route alternatives.

Figure 1

Demand for a mass transit line that serves the Beverly Center, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood Library (under construction and across the street from the PDC), and Santa Monica Boulevard corridor is incredibly high. We need to double down on our existing and future transit investments (subway, Expo and Crenshaw) and leverage their construction for strategic enhancements to our transit network. Extending the Crenshaw Line northward through West Hollywood makes a lot of sense, for it would not only serve one of the densest and most vibrant cities in the region but it would also improve the connectivity and overall functionality of Los Angeles' expanding transit network.

Measure R and TOD

Rendering for Expo Line's Vermont Station near Exposition Park and USC.

The NY Times wrote recently about the under construction Expo Line, scheduled to open as soon as next summer, and how it is already spurring transit-oriented development.

Los Angeles consistently earns the dubious award for worst traffic congestion in the US. The reasons for congestion in Los Angeles are complex, but the salient point is that most of the city’s residential, commercial, and retail districts were built for people coming and going by car. Few areas of the city are capable of supporting non-auto dependent lifestyles. To rectify this situation, and fight congestion and air pollution at the same time, the city is investing heavily in new transit lines like Expo via Measure R, a voter approved sales tax increase that will raise $30 billion for eleven new rail lines and extensions over the next thirty years.

Los Angeles’ existing transit network of 71 stations and 100 miles of track, coupled with the additional infrastructure investments provided by Measure R, represent the city’s best chance for creating dense, affordable and non-auto dependent communities. There is tremendous potential for Los Angeles to leverage its existing transit network, Measure R and demand for transit-oriented development as the starting point for improving mobility, building community and achieving regional sustainability. Simply building more roads and more parking to accommodate ever more cars is unsustainable and unhealthy. And without much remaining empty land (besides remote desert valleys) the City has little choice (if it wants to grow sensibly) to concentrate growth and vitality around transit stations.