Our Next L.A. — a comment
In 2020, the City of Angels released Our Next L.A., a far-reaching document about its direction for the coming generation. Below is a short comment on its content.
As an Angelino who has lived in significantly better planned Europe for 20+ years, I often thought with dread about how my Los Angeles had been planned. The car was the default transport mode and without it, you were completely cut-off. You were also a real nobody. Public transport existed, but it was a long way away from Europe. Biking was dangerous, as my experience on Wilshire Boulevard near Westwood in the mid-1980s demonstrated.
LA has improved dramatically since then and under the enlightened and able leadership in City Hall as well as Metro LA’s Phil Washington (now working with the Biden transition team). Released over the summer, the 76-page document, Our Next LA, demonstrates that continuing and evolving leadership. It is well worth a read — both for Angelinos, as well as for anyone interested in learning more about how one of the largest megacities plans to look and feel in the coming ten years. Below are thoughts, themes and the occasional question to inspire Metro to make the city even more effective and more equitable.
Education
Congratulations to Metro LA for recently establishing a school geared specifically for the next generation of transport engineers. The Deputy Director of Transportation of a large American city confessed to me that he was nail-bitingly nervous about who was going to take care of his city’s first class infrastructure. Similarly, a VP of one of the world’s largest construction firms complained that he had openings for 200 engineers and could not fill any of them. Construction is the closest thing to a “job for life” for someone interested in STEAM. If I may, the digital STEAM (coding, etc.) has received a great deal of attention. This is a good career and I wish them well. However, there is something significantly more satisfying around helping to create a cathedral of concrete and steel that depending on the project will last for decades. It’s also something to show your grandchildren, which you’ll find is priceless.
With billions in critical investment, the general public needs to better understand infrastructure’s importance. Metro’s goal should be to share knowledge about the scope and scale of the investment and the value that they can deliver to its citizens. Metro has done a fantastic job in its consultation process, which could be bolstered even further for more effect.
Taking transportation into the classroom, not just for engineers and planners, but to teen-agers throughout the city could really help equip them with the knowledge to help them create the city’s next iteration. The more equipped people are with knowledge, the better the questions and the more complete the solutions. “Here are my challenges….” On both sides. The added advantage will be to create an army of ambassadors acting on Metro’s behalf. This generation will have the knowledge about the financial cost and safety advantages in choosing between a roundabout or a street light, as well as how thin and cost effective bike paths can be (see previous Medium piece).
Learning from others / Knowledge Management
A culture of learning, and not just from other American cities, should be part and parcel of how Los Angeles offers continuous improvement to its citizens.
Los Angeles’s temperate weather and largely flat layout bode well for the introduction of the Dutch culture of “biking as sport AND as mobility”. Some would argue that it is not part of L.A.’s “culture”. However, given the significant progress of the last 20 years, I would beg to differ.
In Berlin, where gentrification is rolling along almost unimpeded, the hoped-for measures are dramatic and show how affected people are. With some residents saying, “please leave the (intravenous drug) needles in place because we don’t want to gentrify”, shows you how desperate some communities are and just how petrified they are of skyrocketing rents.
In world class cities like Singapore and London, where congestion charging has been introduced, what can Los Angeles learn from them? It is encouraging to see the freeways charging in the coming years, hopefully the freeways will be full of buses serving low-income communities and not just luxury cars able to afford the use of the freeways.
Scenario planning — used extensively in the private sector and creeping their way into the public sector, what are some of the ways in which Los Angeles can shape its future, through scenarios and requisite policies? Given our penchant for earthquakes, fires and now the occasional pandemic, what does mobility look like in that petri dish?
Finally, how can Los Angeles learn from the recessions of 2008 and 2020? What are the types of projects that can be streamlined, are potentially shovel-ready, but could be too disruptive to an already-stretched infrastructure? The tapping of Metro’s most senior people and those in the field would be of tremendous use. From my own experience, Shell embodied this culture of continuous learning and improvement through its Retention of Critical Knowledge (ROCK) process.
Accountable Governance
As a public agency with a 2019–20 budget of $13 billion, Metro must have a water-tight governance policy. Open budgets, transparent decision making and conflict of interest registries are the core, instilling trust in an institution, which has just as much an impact on its citizens as the police, schools and hospitals. Metro LA needs to help the average Angelino understand and appreciate that Metro invests approximately $1300 per capita in Los Angeles county. As a public agency serving the public interest, it needs to take note of companies who have a tendency to “lowball” a request for proposal, only to have a constant stream of so-called “change orders” over the years. A public stance and public registry listing those companies will have a dramatic effect almost immediately. Transparency is the output. Accountability is the outcome.
As California goes, so goes the rest of the nation and Los Angeles is no different. City officials can use their weight to demand more from companies in the areas of reliability around governance. No company wants to be blacklisted from working with the city.
Pandemic
Hardly a surprise here, the word “pandemic” is not included in the document. Given the blip, surge or the coming of the second wave, depending on who you ask or choose to listen to, pandemics will likely have a long tail. It is hard to imagine that it will just simply go away, as at least one senior government official opined earlier this year.
As a result, does Metro LA have a contingency plan regarding pandemics? It most certainly has one for earthquakes — quick, violent tremors — but does it have one for a pandemic — slow, subtler — but equally dangerous. Metro did taken advantage of the recent lull to fast-track one of its projects. Is there a list of “shovel ready” projects, just in case and is there a matrix around cost, time, impact with the overall view of equity?
(Potentially) negative impacts
With all of the hardware that Metro intends to insert into the LA landscape, gentrification will continue, potentially increasing in pace. Some real estate leaders have called them “terrorists”, however given the dizzying changes occurring in once homogenous areas, one has to ask who started it. Boyle Heights has been at the heart of it, but it won’t stop there. While Metro cannot avoid all of it, it can study ownership in the area and encourage those who are renting to consider ownership more. This would help them to gain a stake on hte property ladder, as well as guard against rampant rent increases.
Transit-oriented development (ToD) is both an opportunity and a potential challenge. The crucial aspect is to ensure that housing is responsibly built — very small apartments and ideally prioritised for those who keep us well, keep us safe and teach our children. Another positive step would be to ensure that affordable housing takes up at least half of the space. A massive uproar is to be expected (and merited) if lofts are built adjacent to key transport nodes. For the luxury of having good connections, Angelinos should be more than willing to give up personal space.
Flagship and legacy projects — games, an airport and a river
The Olympics receive just one very brief mention in the document. While the document’s audience focuses on those who live in the city, there will be a considerable economic boost to the economy before, during and after the Olympics. LA should be proud that no Olympic Games has produced a profit since 1984’s Summer Olympics. Heavy private investment, licensing and endorsements were a major part of that. In that sense, the infrastructure, Mayor Garcetti’s “28 by ’28” is a private boon to those who live in the city. And just think, if the Olympics is pared down to just athletes because of a pandemic or scrapped, the infrastructure will be there.
The 277-acre Santa Monica Airport will close down in 2028, after hefty legal wresting with the Federal Aviation Authority. The thought of gaining 277 acres so close to the ocean, near freeways to boot, resembles heaven. While not Metro’s job, per se, it should play a strong role in coordinating the development there, which preferably will have no parking minimums per apartment and frankly, forbidden to drive through it. This would be an enormous step change in American urban development — affordable housing, with no cars, only public transport options and micro-mobility.
Another project that will emboss the city is the LA River. Turned from a 1980s concrete flood channel into a 21st river by the impossibly stubborn and eternally imaginative Lewis MacAdams, the LA River’s location will make it an increasingly hot spot to live in the coming years. Metro LA is rising to the challenge with three projects, aimed at biking and walking the river. The three stage process is slated to finished in 2027. Baseline studies on ownership, neighbourhood composition and median income should be part and parcel of these projects to understand how they may change the area’s demographic composition in the coming years.
Metro LA is further promoting equity through biking, particularly in communities of colour, which have not had the traditional access that more privileged communities have had. Access to bike paths, bike shops and general biking education has been an issue, particularly in the Bay Area.
The LA River could act as a north-south unifier, however it may be a problem in separating the western and eastern sides of the river. Metro LA could consider the construction of bicycle / pedestrian bridges, which come at a fraction of the cost of an automobile/truck carrying bridge. Ideally, any bridge would have a pedestrian meeting point in the middle, where communities could meet and build bridges among themselves.
Highlighted here are just a few aspects, which hopefully will be discussed in the coming weeks and months, leading to a more equitable Los Angeles. Other major themes to consider include software, housing stock, materials, the role and rise of the circular economy and types of roads.
Metro LA is definitely on the right path. If it could take a longer-term view, particularly because of the pandemic, as well as understand the short-term negatives around its projects, it could achieve both an equitable and resilient city.
Los Angeles has the luxury of financial wherewithal to create a plan. In my own experiences in Africa and elsewhere, it would be a massive step forward — in equity, quality of life and transparency — if some of the other largest cities took note of the process that the City of Angels has created.
What if Lagos, Kinshasa, Cairo and other megacities in the developing world had a similar approach? The world would certainly be a better place with many grateful citizens.
An Angelino by birth and in heart, Richard R. Dion is a governance and regional development consultant based in Germany.
