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.

Solar Freeways

A Swedish architect, Mans Tham, proposes covering the nearly 500 miles of freeway in LA County with solar panels. Tham's "Solar Serpents in Paradise" leverage the enormity and urban geography of freeways to produce something positive: locally produced renewable energy that can be fed easily into the existing grid, thereby reducing the need for environmentally destructive solar farms in the desert.

Just covering the 10 freeway from downtown to Santa Monica would produce enough electricity to power all the households in Venice. There is also the potential to provide electric charging stations under freeway over passes and to use the carbon dioxide rich air from the freeway to grow algae on underutilized shoulder space.

Regardless of what one may think of freeways, they are likely to remain part of the built environment for many years to come. But simply denigrating freeways as hulking concrete structures that divide communities and degrade local air quality ignores their potential for becoming part of the sustainability solution. Taking sunken infrastructure investments and repurposing them to serve current needs saves time, money, land and is probably the most effective way for existing urban areas like Los Angeles to transition into a more sustainable future.

Decentralized Energy Infrastructure

As electric cars and plug-in hybrids continue to increase their market share in the United States, efforts to decentralize the energy infrastructure for these cars will undoubtedly help make places like Los Angeles more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. I first introduced the idea of decentralized energy infrastructure in an earlier post, "Greener Cars and Fewer Gas Stations." To understand the point I'm trying make, consider that the fewer of these we need...

Gas station in Los Angeles

...means more land is available for developments like this:

Sierra Bonita affordable housing in West Hollywood

And with more housing and commercial development like Sierra Bonita in the heart of the city means there's less pressure to continue building at the urban fringe.

Sprawl in Santa Clarita

I applaud GM for partnering with Envision Solar to install their solar-powered charging trees at GM dealerships. Each "tree" can generate enough electricity to fully charge one Chevy Volt in a day. Making these charging trees available for private residences is the next logical step to improving the urban landscape in Los Angeles and making the region more sustainable.

Chevy Volt with Envision Solar-Powered Charing "Tree"

"Better Block" Project

The Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas transformed a tired stretch of street into a vibrant community center by gathering donations from local businesses and putting their DIY attitude to work. Their project is called "Better Blocks" and it's about greening the city and reclaiming streets for people, whether they be on foot, sitting outside a cafe or riding a bike. In 24 hours they were able to turn this:

Into this:

Making Los Angeles sustainable is about more than energy and resources; people and place matter. Reorienting streets for people, as demonstrated here and by the overwhelming success of CicLAvia last weekend, can help produce healthy, vibrant and safe communities that are socially sustainable.

It would be nice to see the enthusiasm generated by CicLAvia translated into an effort, like Better Blocks, to repurpose some LA's widest boulevards into people-based places. Clearly it doesn't take much in the form of resources or time to make a big impact. Use the DIY-model provided by Better Blocks and test-run certain neighborhood streets. Inexpensive and temporary demonstration pilot projects are a great way to generate community and business support, and help justify more expensive and permanent infrastructure investments later on. This approach may not be successful everywhere but with so little capital and time needed to implement a pilot program, the City has little reason not support such an effort.

Which streets would you like to see LA turn into "Better Blocks"?

CicLAvia this Sunday - 10/10/10

Check out the street map here. The event is this Sunday, from 10am - 3pm. Enjoy a car-free Sunday in LA!

CicLAvia youtube video

WeHo Spur

Joel Garreau made the point in his book, Edge City, that “every American city that is growing is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles.” Studying the patterns of growth found within the Los Angeles region allow us to examine the principle dynamics of contemporary urbanization (de-centered growth, poly-nucleation and sprawl) and propose appropriate planning solutions. These dynamics have produced the unique urban form and scattered travel patterns (and congestion) that characterize Los Angeles today, which many planners are now working so hard to fix.

A tremendous amount of work is being done to correct the problems and negative externalities caused by decades of unchecked growth. Extending the "subway to the sea" is one such effort, which is clearly vital to the public health, economic strength and cultural vitality of the Westside and the region. Despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating the need for extending the subway west under Wilshire Boulevard, which I support strongly, building a transportation network based on a hub and spoke model ignores the very nature of urban growth and travel patterns in Los Angeles. Not all roads lead to downtown, nor should they. Building a de-centered, poly-nucleated transportation network that relies on linkages and connections would mirror the urban system that it is purported to serve.

Sending a spur of the subway through West Hollywood to connect to the existing Red Line station at Hollywood and Highland is exactly the sort of linkage that I'm talking about. Providing transportation connections that don't require a ride through downtown increase options for riders and facilitate easy access to other parts of the region like West Hollywood, while making the rail system more robust and effective overall.

The public comment period for the Westside Subway extension ends October 18, 2010. Be sure to email your comments in support of a West Hollywood alignment by clicking on the link under "Contact Us." 

"Whiskey's for drinking; water's for fighting."

Los Angeles lives on the water it imports from Northern California and the Colorado River. California is expected to add millions of new residents over the next couple decades, many of which are likely to reside somewhere in Southern California. Constrained resources and rising demand make our reliance on imported water unsustainable. Also, transporting water is incredibly energy intensive. According to some estimates, 20% of California's carbon dioxide emissions result from pumping water throughout the state.

Some people are already thinking about to how reconcile the demand for growth and development with the environmental, economic and social imperative to build sustainably. A recent article by Metropolis Magazine discusses the nexus between water and sustainability. The article culminates in a call to action for those interested in designing a sustainable vision for our cities:

"The Living City Design Competition calls on the world’s most ambitious designers to create an inspiring but realistic vision for the future of civilization. Competition teams will conceptually retrofit existing cities, demonstrating how real communities might transform their relationship with the resources that sustain them. These re-imagined cities must achieve each Imperative of the Living Building Challenge, the built environment’s most rigorous performance standard.

To be certified under the Living Building Challenge, a project must capture and treat all of its own water onsite using ecologically sound processes. It must also ensure that 100% of storm water and building discharge feeds the project’s internal water demands or is released onto adjacent sites for management through gradual surface flow, groundwater recharge, agricultural use or adjacent building needs."

Los Angeles River

The challenge to have no net import and no net export of water within a given site is the ultimate metric for water sustainability and ought to be the goal for all buildings in the Los Angeles region. There is no reason why resources and money should be spent to send rainwater out to sea when it could be harnessed for more productive uses, thereby eliminating the need for the costly and damaging practice of importing water.

Getting Past Semantics

The term "sustainability" as a planning concept is vague and poorly defined. Understanding what it means and how best to harness its principles to craft a more positive urban experience have been undermined by our lazy use of language. Bill Barnes from the National League of Cities made a similar point recently, correctly pointing out that the term "sustainability" has been thrown around so freely that we don't really know what we're talking about any more. Discussions about green building, LEED, mass transit, TOD, etc. make it seem as though sustainability is everything. But if it is, then maybe it's nothing? Clearly that's not the case either but to better understand how sustainability impacts planning and our collective vision for the built environment, we need to do a better job defining the terms of the debate. That is the mission of this blog - to provide an open platform for discussing the sort thinking and development that embody and express the core principles of a sustainable built environment.