Los Angeles Touring

The City of Compton has launched a new specific plan for the area surrounding the Blue Line's Artesia Station, intended to guide land use around the busy transit hub.

Called Compton Hub City, the plan emphasizes the area's connection to the Blue Line, as well as its proximity to both the Artesia and Long Beach Freeways.  

The effort, which is being guided by SOM, is intended to create: 

• a unified vision for development around Artesia Station; 
• develop a strategy to achieve a walkable mixed-use cultural district; and 
• leverage Compton's heritage to create a unique sense of place.

The specific plan area is bounded by Greenleaf Boulevard to the north, Tartar Lane to the East, Wilmington Avenue to the west, and Apra Street to the south.  Key points of interest within the space include Artesia Station, Compton Creek, the Gateway Towne Center shopping mall - and Crystal Park hotel and casino.

Currently, Artesia Space is bordered by a large swath of industrial land to the south and west, with a residential community and the Gateway Towne Center to the north and east.  Compton Hub City identifies several underutilized plots of land within this area as potential opportunity sites for mixed-use developments.

Community meetings for the project thus far have yielded calls for improvements to the public realm, including new recreation opportunities, dense mixed-use developments, and improved access to and from Artesia Station.  This includes potential expansions of an existing network of trails and new protected bike lanes.

A market analysis conducted for the Compton Hub City area found that there currently exists a strong, stable market for industrial land, and that community retail is dominated by the regional Gateway Town Centre, rather than locally-oriented retail.  There is demand for new housing - projections point to a need for up to 826 new units through 2040 - but also demand for more than 1 million square feet of industrial space, with less robust need for retail and office space.

The specific plan recommends that these land use needs could be parlayed into new transit-oriented developments by the introduction of physical and aesthetic improvements in the community, as well as better connections to the Blue Line and shared parking transit patrons.

Family

Compton Hub City considers multiple development scenarios for the Artesia Station area.  The first, called "Family," envisions a new public park, office development west of the Blue Line, mixed-use projects on both sides of the tracks with townhomes, a new transit plaza, and limited changes to the Towne Center.

Memory

A second alternative, called "Memory," envisions limiting new development to the east of the Blue Line.  The area would see moderate-intensity mixed-use buildings with a public promenade, an enhanced park-and-ride facility for Artesia Station, and limited impacts to the Towne Center.

Energy

The third alternative, called "Energy," calls for higher-intensity mixed-use buildings, as well as a reimagined Crystal Casino site, with the casino separated from the hotel.  Under this scenario, the station area would also see a new public square and changes to the existing transit center, but there would be no impacts to the Towne Center.

Ongoing questions posed by a recent presentation to the Compton City Council include: 

• Should existing industrial uses adjacent to the Transit Center be preserved? 
• Should the proposed open space function as a traditional park or as an urban plaza?
• Should new development stretch to Alameda Boulevard?
• Should the Gateway Town Center be preserved or incorporated into a new retail district?

SOM and the City of Compton intend to continue with planning the Compton Hub City through the coming months, with a draft specific plan expected to be released in Winter 2019.  Approval is anticipated to occur in Summer 2019.

The property came back on the market this month with a heavily reduced, $75-million price tag, which comes to about $291,000 per acre. “If you’re looking at a map of the area and zoom out, you can see this raw parcel of land with everything built up around it,” said Tamkin, who is representing the listing with his wife, Melinda Tamkin. “It’s really exceptional.”

Driving to visit family and friends this Christmas? You’ll have a lot of company on the road— especially if you’re planning to head out of town Thursday afternoon.

AAA and transportation analysis firm Inrix predict the absolute worst of holiday traffic in Los Angeles will rear its head from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. Thursday, when trip times are expected to double. (The firms predicted similar delays for Thanksgiving, for comparison.)

Flying might not be much better, as a record number of travelers are also expected to take to the skies from Saturday to New Year’s Day. The highest number of travelers are expected to fly on December 22, 23, and 26, AAA and Inrix say.

More than 102 million Americans will go by by car for their holiday travels this year, AAA forecasts. That’s a 4.4 percent increase over last year, and the highest number of car-travelers since 2001, when AAA started tracking holiday travel.

In case you forgot just how nightmarish holiday traffic in Los Angeles can be, here’s 2016 helicopter footage of the 405 freeway through West LA before Thanksgiving.

At a packed meeting Thursday, Metro's Board of Directors authorized the study of new strategies to ease Los Angeles' notorious traffic - including congestion pricing and fees on rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft.

Congestion pricing, which regulates traffic congestion in high-demand areas by charging drivers a fee, can take a variety of forms.  Metro staff has put forth three potential ways that it could be implemented in Los Angele County, including:

• VMT pricing, where a fee is charged per mile driven by a vehicle;
• Cordon pricing, in which a fee is charged for entering a certain area; and
• Corridor pricing, where fees are charged for access to heavily-trafficked roads or highways.

Metro staff have estimated that congestion pricing could generate anywhere between $9.6 billion and $83 billion over a period of 10 years, money that could be put toward improved transit service - and potentially, capital projects.

A modest form of congestion pricing is already available in Los Angeles County in the form of the ExpressLanes which run within the I-10 and I-110 Freeways.  Drivers are charged a per-mile toll to access the lanes, with the revenue returned to the corridor in the form of increased frequencies on the Silver Line rapid bus line between El Monte and Harbor Gateway via Downtown.

The Metro Board proved more receptive toward the idea of studying congestion pricing than some had previously anticipated, though some - including County Supervisor Janice Hahn - expressed lingering doubts about the project.  Multiple Board Members noted that County residents had already voted twice since 2008 to raise their own taxes in order to fund transportation projects - after campaigns which billed the measures as "traffic relief" - and were reluctant to make yet another ask of the electorate.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti noted that congestion pricing has been successful in cities such as London, but cautioned that some governments have become "addicted to the money [while forgetting] about the congestion relief."

Nonetheless, congestion pricing also had staunch advocates amongst Board Members, most notably Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Krekorian.

"A hugely disproportionate number o the people who use our system are transit-dependent, and they are disproportionately impacted by congestion slowing down buses," said Krekorian during the meeting. "We build really expensive streets that people use for free, and that is nothing but a subsidy to the automobile industry and people who use cars."

Imposing taxes on trips on transportation network companies - including Uber and Lyft - also raised questions among board members.

Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts expressed concern that giving Metro authority to assess taxes on rideshare companies could have implications for the ability of individual cities within Los Angeles County to regulate the industry and impose fees of their own.

Krekorian, in contrast, welcomed new fees on the transportation network companies, arguing that they increase congestion while siphoning riders away from transit systems.

Duarte Mayor John Fasana agreed with that assessment, but suggested a variable fee for the different products offered by the ridesharing companies.  Private riders could be taxed at one rate, while truly shared rides, such as those in an Uber Pool, could be charged less - or even not at all.

A fee structure has not been fleshed out at this point in time, though Metro has previously estimated that a 20-cent fee per trip could yield $401 million over ten years, and a higher $2.75 fee could raise $5.5 billion over the same time period.

The study of congestion pricing and new fees on rideshare companies falls under a larger campaign branded as "The Re-Imagining of LA County: Mobility, Equity and the Environment," which also includes an ambitious proposal to accelerate completion of eight transportation projects prior to the 2028 Summer Olympic Games.  In that effort, a motion introduced by Garcetti, Butts, Hahn and Supervisor Hilda Solis calls for prioritizing four "pillar projects" for acceleration:

The West Santa Aana Branch was additionally designated as having "first priority," for any public-private partnership that Metro could engage in to accelerate its construction.

Mayor Garcetti urged that the acceleration project - called Twenty-Eight by '28 - should be considering as a distinct effort from the study of congestion pricing and fees on rideshare companies, stating that the first priority for any new money raised through those fees - if implemented - should go first toward operations, with only surplus funds going toward capital projects such as the project acceleration.

The total budget of the projects due for acceleration is $26 billion, per the Measure M expenditure plan approved in 2016.  It is currently unclear costs acceleration will add, though the board is set to report back on a financing plan later this year - concurrently with a report on congestion pricing and fees on rideshare services.

Besides tackling project acceleration and potential sources of new revenue, the Metro Board also approved a construction contract with Tutor-Perini for the construction of the third and final phase of the Purple Line extension, which will run 2.6 miles between Century City and the Veterans Administration Campus in Westwood.  The project is expected to open in 2026 and attract more than 50,000 weekday boardings.

The Board also approved a motion by Barger, Krekorian, and Glendale City Councilmember Ara Najarian seeking clarification on how the scaled back California High-Speed Rail project will affect rail service between Palmdale and Anaheim - the corridor which the train is expected to travel through in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas.  The motion requests a report on what opportunities are available to make improvements to the regional rail system regardless of high-speed rail, making note of Metrolink's ambitious SCORE program, which calls for partial electrification of the 534-mile network.

Telecommuting has been held out as a solution for America’s transportation and land-use woes for my entire adult life and then some. Ever since the rise of the internet and the first tech bubble of the late 90s, it’s been proposed that eventually, the technology would be so good that you do your job from anywhere. That way it wouldn’t matter if Los Angeles were expensive, because you could just live in Spokane and do your job from there.

The experimental evidence we have from the last 20 years does not support this theory. An organization that promotes telecommuting found that between 2005 and 2017, the number of people working from home at least half time in the United States rose from 1.8 million to 3.9 million, or 2.9% of the  US workforce. While that number is not nothing, it effectively represents only a 1.5% reduction in the demand for transportation for work trips. Over that same period, total employment in the US rose by 12.5 million, or 8.5%. So despite the growth of telecommuting, overall employment grew much more quickly and consequently the demand for transportation continued to increase.

The continued success of large US metros relative to mid-size and small metros also suggests telecommuting is having little impact. A recent spate of “millennials are doing X” articles have tried to push the idea that growth is now shifting to mid-size cities, but it’s amazing how many articles there are citing Pittsburgh, when Allegheny County has lost population every year since 2013. In fact, given how high housing prices have had to rise in large metros to force growth elsewhere, I wonder if you could make a case that the internet has actually increased the agglomeration effects of living in a large city.

Finally, while there are clear benefits of telecommuting (lower housing and transportation costs for the employee, lower office and overhead costs for the employer), there are productivity costs as well. I’ve found in my personal experience that it’s much easier to supervise employees and coordinate a large project team when everyone is in the same office. Being in different offices in the same city is worse, and being in different time zones is even worse.

While I’m not a great manager by any stretch of the imagination, I would like to think I am at least marginally competent and that my experience in this regard is not unique. The single biggest benefit of being in the same office as other people is that it makes it impossible for them to avoid you. Emails can go unanswered, calls can go unreturned, but if I show up at your desk asking you about something, you have to respond. This is a pretty common thread in human relations – it’s much easier to keep up and keep in touch with people that you see than people you don’t.

Finally, there’s the simple fact that living in a bigger city give you more amenities. You might be able to do your job from an RV in rural Nevada, but you won’t be able to access the amenities of Las Vegas or LA.

Even throwing all of that aside, it’s worth asking who could theoretically telecommute. Chances are, if you’re reading this blog or City Observatory or Curbed or City Lab, you have a job that you could telecommute to do, or at least have a lot of friends who do. But that is not a very representative sample of American employment. The five biggest major industry sectors according to the BLS are professional and business services (20.1 million jobs), state/local government (19.4m), health care (19.1m), retail trade (15.8m), and leisure and hospitality (15.6m). My guess is that if you’re reading this, you work in professional and business services, easily the category that best lends itself to telecommuting, and is still subject to all the problems above. Some of these sectors, like health care and retail trade, have almost no potential for telecommuting, as do other major sectors like manufacturing, construction, and transportation/logistics.

Let’s do a quick analysis on the major industry sectors with low, medium, and high guesses for the percentage of people that could telecommute. All numbers are BLS 2016 data.

At the low end, something like 10% of people will be able to consistently telecommute. That suggests we’ll see more growth in telecommuting, but it still won’t have much impact on transportation demand or housing prices. Even at the high end, if 25% of people were able to telecommute tomorrow, that would put the number of employees not telecommuting at about the same as total employment in 1993, and of course, the economy is still growing.

None of this is to say that telecommuting is per se bad, or that you shouldn’t do it if it works for your personal situation or your business. But if you’re counting on telecommuting to fix traffic and housing prices in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, it’s not going to work. We should be planning cities for how people want to live, not hoping for technological solutions to bail us out of the problems created by a few selfish actors.