Sure, it may be hot in Toronto now, but everyone in this city knows that at this point in history, summer is strictly a temporary happenstance. The same doesn't hold true everywhere. In December 2009 I was in Los Angeles, a trip which gave me the opportunity to do something impossible up to that point in my life: go to a beach, in December, and not freeze. As I recall, this shot was taken somewhere along Venice Beach. I like the way it turned out.
Fun fact, incidentally: this is the 697th photopost I've made to this weblog, and the file name that my camera originally assigned this shot was IMG_0697. What a synchronicity!
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If you visit the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles, where they display some of the interesting things that have been recovered from the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits, among the things you will notice are the dire wolf skulls. There were a lot of dire wolf skulls in the tar pits; thousands have been found so far. The dire wolf itself went extinct ten thousand years ago, but considering the extent of its former range, that likely has more to do with human predation than getting trapped in tar pits.Though I notice now that these dire wolf skulls they've got on display, apparently with the lower jaws removed - they sort of look like fossilized prehistoric shoes.
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There are some cities that it seems everyone wants to go to, and one way to tell is to look at the airlines that fly into its airport. Los Angeles International Airport is one such place; it's the fifth-busiest in the world, and planes fly there from every continent in the world except Africa and Antarctica. When I left there in December 2009, I managed to take this shot during the early stages of takeoff that shows the variety of airlines that drop their wheels at LAX; from the left there are planes from TACA Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, EVA Air, and Air Tahiti Nui - that last one is an uncommon find, since LAX is the only place in North and South America where it lands. As for the last one, the small one - I have no idea what airline that is.Incidentally, this talk of planes and airlines reminds me that even seventeen years after its initial release, Aerobiz Supersonic for the Super Nintendo remains an excellent game.
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What the impending Carmageddon in Los Angeles has really underscored to me is the necessity for major cities to seriously invest in their public transit infrastructures - and what it's demonstrated to me is that Los Angeles wasted a lot of time before it started getting around to that necessity. I know that all the cool cities were tearing up their streetcar networks in the years after the war, but subways were also cool in the 1950s. Hell, Cleveland of all places built a subway in the 1950s. I have to wonder if LA would be in this situation today if it had been building up a subway network over the last sixty years.Still, at least it has one now... it's a start. In this photo from 2009, a few riders wait to board a train at Union Station.
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Two days from now, Los Angeles will be burning! There will be no escape for the millions trapped in the City of Angels as chaos and despair descends upon the Southland, turning the air yellow with smog and the surface streets into blood-and-gold rivers of headlights and brake lights! It will be madness, I tell you! Disastrous! It's Carmageddon!At least, that's the impression I've been getting from the media. To put it in more prosaic terms, a sixteen-kilometer segment of the 405 freeway between the 101 and the 10, a route that carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles every day and one of the busiest stretches of highway in the United States, will be shutting down Friday night and not reopening until Monday morning for a lane widening project associated with the partial demolition of the Mulholland Bridge. For Torontonians, if you think of it as two and a half Don Valley Parkways, I don't think you would be far wrong. But I remember times when there was no movement on the DVP and it didn't break the city - we called it "rush hour." ZING!In all seriousness, this is a hell of a thing to watch. Not being an Angeleno, in fact barely knowing anyone from Los Angeles, and having about a week's worth of experience with it, I know that I can't understand Carmageddon the way someone living there understands it. From what I'm seeing online, this seems utterly earthshaking, in the metaphorical sense. The Los Angeles Times has an entire section devoted to Carmageddon stories. The LAPD solicited the assistance of celebrity tweeters like Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga, and Tom Hanks to spread the word of the closure. People are being urged to shop as locally as possible and stay close to home. Metro is going zero-fare for the entire weekend, which would be pretty nice if you like tooling around on the subway. Though, I do note that as of this writing, #Carmageddon isn't a trending Twitter topic in Los Angeles.They say that it's in times of trial that a person's true colors emerge. I suspect the same may be true of cities, too. If that's the case, and if the news and reports I'm getting are credible, the general reaction to impending Carmageddon can tell an interested observer a great deal about Los Angeles... though a lot of it is nothing that wasn't already taken for granted.
Eastbound traffic crawls in a stereotypically Los Angeles manner along the 101 at Vermont Avenue in December 2009.
I'm signed up to get daily transportation headlines from the Los Angeles Metro Library and Archive, so it's not like I can avoid the news of the impending Carmageddon; that is, the planned closure of Interstate 405 for a fifty-three hour period focused around July 16th and 17th - an entire weekend where the five hundred thousand cars that normally use that route will have to find another one.In Los Angeles.Good luck with that.Even when everything's normal, traffic is an inescapeable presence in Los Angeles - it's just that some times are better than others. Take this one, for instance, from December 2009; this is a southward look toward the Hollywood Freeway, U.S. Route 101, from the Hollywood Bowl Overlook off Mulholland Drive. For those people heading into the city, it looks surprisingly smooth.
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It can be easy to forget the importance of the chain of command. Establishing who can give orders to which people is of vital necessity in any organization or bureaucracy, whether you're talking about one that runs a country or one that you can fit in a broom closet. What's really important about it is the establishment of responsibility: no matter what, in every situation, there should always be someone who an order can be traced back to, who could theoretically stand up and acknowledge that a specific action was taken at their behest. Otherwise, the system is ripe for abuse by people whose ambitions outstrip their authority - and it happens, more often than you'd want to think.When I was in Los Angeles in December, one of the attractions were the costumed characters along Hollywood Boulevard: everyone from Superman to Spider-man and Stormtroopers to Captain Jack Sparrow were there, mingling with the tourists and posing for photographs. Which, really, I can understand. Costumes aren't free, particularly the kind of costumes that characters in popular entertainment generally end up wearing. I don't recall ever having been accosted by a costumed entertainer on the Boulevard; it's a busy street, and there were always plenty of tourists who had no issue with being obvious tourists to compete for the characters' attention. I'll admit that one data point is just an anecdote, but it's all I've got.Not so anymore. Back in June, though I didn't hear about it until yesterday, the Los Angeles Police Department launched an operation to arrest and evict the costumed characters from Hollywood Boulevard, in what KTLA News described as a "'zorro' tolerance policy." The most probing issue for me, learning about this situation, was "why?" After all, it's the most important question, and a question we should *always* be asking of authority figures. An August article in Curbed LA, detailing a suit filed against the city by some of the arrested characters, suggests that the solicitation of tips was an issue - even though the charges, it seems, never went ahead. At first I thought it could be an issue of characters being masked and not easily identifiable, but they've arrested Superman as well - and without his Clark Kent glasses, there's no super-hypnosis making you think he looks different than he actually does.
As long as he stays away from Hollywood Boulevard he should be fine.
I'm not sure what this building is, on the east side of Vermont Avenue south of Santa Monica in Los Angeles. It was the way that the sun is just barely contained behind that palm tree that drew my attention to it. I know that this was taken relatively early in the morning, and that it is Los Angeles, but even so - the lack of foot traffic in a lot of the photos I took from that city tends to get me. This was taken, if you're interested, on December 8, 2009.
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One of the things I really liked about the Los Angeles subway system is how aesthetics was taken into account during design and construction; as a result, while Toronto's first subway stations tend to resemble neglected 1950s bathrooms, the stations along the Red Line and Purple Line have open, soaring designs that strikes me as a great deal more welcoming. That style's easily seen here, on the Hollywood/Highland station platform, where the roof reflects the tunnels below.
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One of the strangest things I encountered on the Los Angeles County Metro Rail system was the nature of the light rail tracks along Flower Street, currently used by the Metro Blue Line and soon to be shared with the under-construction Metro Expo Line. While most light rail systems use rights-of-way that are either in the center of a road or isolated from it entirely, on Flower Street the rails are between the road and the sidewalk - making that entire half of the street inaccessible to private transit. I'm not sure how big of an issue this is among local drivers, but I've yet to find another instance of street rails being laid down in this fashion.Note that this is another one of those photos that can't be taken exactly like this anymore - it was taken in December 2009, and this is the spot where the new Expo Line tracks split off from the current Blue Line route. I'll have to go back to LA once it's done - or maybe wait until at least they finish Phase 1 of the subway to the sea.EDIT: Two days ago was the Blue Line's twentieth birthday. I was too oblivious to notice at the time. So consider this a "twenty years of Blue Line" post. Woo!
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The local geography of Los Angeles is, I think, a bit of a mixed bag. While the surrounding mountains mean that it doesn't get as much air circulation as cities in flatter regions, they also provide crackerjack photographic vantage points. This particular one was taken from a lookout just off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills, looking over the Hollywood Bowl to Hollywood itself with the skyscrapers of downtown LA just visible in the distance.
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It's easy to understand why so many people have chosen to live in the Los Angeles area. It's got the sort of Mediterranean climate that's rare in North America, warm throughout the year but not too warm, and if it wasn't for the seismically active nature of the land it's built on it'd be perfect. One aspect of its climate is that it doesn't get that much rain - about 30.5 centimeters per year, and most of that in the winter months - for comparison, Toronto gets 83.4 centimeters in an average year. So it wasn't all that surprising that it rained for four out of eight days I was there, though I didn't exactly enjoy that part.I suppose it's because heavy rains are so rare in Los Angeles that there doesn't seem to be much drainage infrastructure in the streets themselves - at least, not compared to northern cities like Toronto or Chicago. As a result, when there's a lot of water and cars around things can get... splashy.
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Los Angeles is centered where it is partially because of the Los Angeles River, the city's original source of fresh water. Owing to local geography it had a tendency to meander and flood at unpredictable degrees, and so in an initiative that should come as no surprise in a place like southern California, the river was paved over and almost entirely transformed into a concrete-lined flood control channel. To me, it's just another reminder that we've been managing our environment at one scale or another for a long time - better in some ways than in others.
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I've mentioned before that while I was in Los Angeles, I found the streetscape there at best indifferent to pedestrians - at least, the parts of it I have personal experience with. The only place where this wasn't the case was Hollywood Boulevard, and considering that it's Hollywood Boulevard and thus one of the city's major tourist draws, it sort of stands apart from the rest - and even then, it's pretty much only the bit between Vine and La Brea. Elsewhere, I tended to get a rather "suburban" vibe from the cityscape, optimized for the car and not used so much by people on their own two legs.One such place was East 1st Street, where I took this photo. The new Gold Line Extension runs along the street, and it's a stone's throw from downtown Los Angeles - and yet I encountered maybe two pedestrians between Little Tokyo/Arts District and Pico/Aliso. It's probably because I'm contrasting it to Toronto, where pretty much any neighborhood within easy sight of the downtown core is pedestrian-friendly and thrumming with people, that it seems so sparse.
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The bus rapid transit Metro Liner system is one of the newest public transit options in Los Angeles today. While I was there I had a chance to check out the Orange Line, which at the time was the only active Metro Liner service - the Silver Line started operations the day I left California, and I wasn't about to risk missing my flight so I could ride a bus around. The Orange Line exists mainly due to political wrangling, and I didn't cover it in my latest Tunnel Visions post because, really, these buses don't got rails. Since it was night when I rode it, I didn't see much.The buses themselves aren't that bad, though. This same model, North American Bus Industries' 60-BRT, is also used on Metro's Local and Rapid bus services. What I found particularly interesting were the scrolling digital clocks mounted on the roof, and the televisions jutting from the walls, playing Metro-focused programming. A system like that might be something for the TTC to consider - TVs on the buses and streetcars would make it easier, at the least, to disseminate news of subway shutdowns _before_ people get to the platforms.
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I mentioned yesterday in the course of my fulmination that streetcars ("trams" if you're European, "trolleys" if you're American, from what I understand) were common across North America and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While a number of the European tram systems did survive, or have since been rebuilt with more up-to-date technology, most of the survivors in North America were "heritage" lines run for nostalgic purposes and to catch tourists' eyes. One such trolley runs today in Los Angeles, a privately-operated line that glides between the Farmers Market at 3rd and Fairfax and the adjacent retail development at the Grove.I'll admit, it does have a way of catching the eye, but even back in the glory days of streetcars or trolleys or whatever you want to call them, they never did look quite like this. For one, they tended to be powered by overhead wires. That's why they're called "trolleys."
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Sometimes, not even stereotypes can prepare you for the oddness. A great case in point is Southern California. Everyone knows that Los Angeles is utterly built for the car in ways that put other cities to shame, but it took a while for that to be made absolutely clear, and technically speaking, it didn't happen in Los Angeles at all.Brand Boulevard is one of the main streets of Glendale, California, long and straight and with plenty of room to install a streetcar or LRT system (but I digress). If you're travelling north from Los Angeles on it, though, in order to reach downtown Glendale you first have to traverse Brand Boulevard of Cars, which is a stretch of Brand Boulevard absolutely lined with automobile dealerships. To the extent that there are signs pointing to them in the median. Throw in a few inexpensive motels, tire salons, and wonderful, wonderful billboards and you'd practically have Judge Doom's dream made real.That's what finally convinced me that Los Angeles really was a four-wheeled city.
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One of the advantages the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Agency has, being an agency that's only existed for twenty years, is that it doesn't have as much historical inertia or preconceived notions to overcome as transit agencies in other cities. Case in point: its subway stations. I've recently heard grumbling over the TTC's preferred designs for the six stations of the Spadina extension into York Region - and they're eminently understandable. Take the plans for Highway 407 Transitway station, one of the two stations to be located outside Toronto. It will be huge, incorporating a surface bus terminal serving York Region Transit and GO Transit buses with plenty of space underground for passenger movements. What may end up drawing negative attention is that the costs for this station are estimated at $134-million, when the budget for construction is a mere $95-million.Beyond that, have you ever been to the area where the station is going to be? I haven't, but if the map photos I've seen online are anything to go by, it's desolate. You would think a better plan would be to build a smaller station capable of being expanded to serve higher traffic volumes if/when necessary, but that's not how this is going.Los Angeles has a better idea, I think. The only parts of Metro Rail subway stations that are on the surface are their entrances, and they don't look drab, either. Take today's photo, the main entrance to Vermont/Santa Monica station.
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As I mentioned in my recent Tunnel Visions post, the architecture of Los Angeles County Metro Rail stations is understandably influenced by the climate of Los Angeles - which is generally dry, warm, and pleasant, except for the times when I'm there or might have been there. Today's photograph, one of the entrances to Civic Center station, demonstrates that. Not only is the entrance portal massive, it's deep, and as such the stairs and elevators are exposed to the elements for a good portion of their length. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem, but on days when the rain's coming down - as I understand it was fairly recently - it doesn't exactly strike me as the best of all possible designs. Escalator traffic jams are bad enough without having a bunch of umbrellas all up in your face, and I don't doubt that people in Los Angeles also flaunt the general stand on the right/walk on the left escalator dynamic.
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During the course of gathering impressions and information for my Tunnel Visions: The Los Angeles County Metro Rail post, I assembled a lot of photographs - far more than I needed, if only because I was keenly aware that I had to try and anticipate everything I might need for the post, because I would not have an opportunity to return and gather what I'd missed. So I was gathering plenty of photos of the stations themselves - I would alight from the train, get some good photos of the station exterior, return to the platform, board the next train, ride to the next station, and repeat the process. The long headways on the Blue Line made this somewhat stressful - sure, I had plenty of time in theory, but if a southbound came along earlier than I expected, I'd be on the platform for another fifteen minutes waiting for the next one.Below is one of ten photographs I took in the immediate environs of Vernon station on the Blue Line. Since I was hurriedly skittering clockwise around the intersection taking shots from every angle before the next train showed up, it's no surprise that I attracted some attention. One guy, waiting at the station entrance for some reason, asked if I was "some kind of photographer" in a tone that suggested he didn't think I was. Another asked me if I was a cop, because if you're an undercover cop and someone asks you if you're a cop, you have to say yes (this is NOT true). No one in Toronto, Montreal, or Chicago has reacted to my transit photography before - for two guys to do so at the same place was something I didn't expect.
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