Mayor Wants to Make Homes EV Ready in 7 Days

While at the 2010 LA Auto Show, Mayor Villaraigosa announced that Los Angeles would streamline the permitting process so that owners of electric cars can have charging stations installed in just seven days. DWP is launching a customer hotline (800-342-5397) and the City created a new website (https://www.permitla.org) to expedite the permitting process.

As I argued in an earlier post, "not only have we dedicated enormous tracts of land to cars in the form of freeways and 6 lane roads, but auto-related infrastructure like gas stations also consume valuable real estate that would be much more productive as housing or neighborhood commercial/retail." De-centralizing the infrastructure needed to "refuel" cars will make it possible to re-appropriate gas stations for uses that are more socially, environmentally, culturally and economically sustainable and productive.

However, it would be nice to see the Mayor find a way to consolidate all of the city's numbers/websites and provide the public with a single, easy to use portal for accessing city-related information and resources. The good intentions of the city are often obscured by an overly cumbersome bureaucracy that makes obtaining permits, approvals, filing complaints or finding information a frustrating process. Streamlining the process for getting an electric car charging station installed in your home is great but I doubt many will hear about the Mayor's announcement, and those that do won't know where to look to find the hotline or website.

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.

LA River Vertical Campus

"A starkly modern grid-patterned skyscraper within the heart of Los Angeles, the Vertical Campus, designed by architects Gail Peter Borden and Brian D. Andrews, is a tower that 'engages urbanity,' and seeks to energize and engage the community by re-orienting the landscape from the city’s horizontal sprawl to a vertical complex.

The tower is located over the Los Angeles River, using the building’s base to generate hydroelectricity, and is a mix of residential, commercial, garden and civic spaces.

Instead of just being a skyscraper, though, the Vertical Campus seeks to help re-envision how to unite people through design, how to house new growth in an already dense city, and how to blend complex building systems to unite an existing complex urban fabric. The building will, through its design and also programmatic elements, be a literal bridge that unites the people of different economic and social classes that currently reside on the opposite sides of the river.

Wind turbines join the hydroelectric to provide energy, as does photovoltaic film; horizontal farms breed algae for energy use while hanging gardens grow vegetables and flowers for residents; rainwater is collected and purified; and all of the city’s transportation paths – bike, pedestrian, car, subway, train – run across the building’s base, unifying the building in another way with its landscape." (Source: eVolo)

Using planning and architecture, through thoughtful and provocative design, to connect disparate and geographically isolated socio-economic groups is fundamental to the social sustainability of Los Angeles. At the same time, the tower's use of existing on-site ecological and infrastructural resources, made possible by its near perfect location adjacent the LA River and existing bike, pedestrian and rail connections, make it a model for vertical sustainability and performance-based design.