narrow streets: los angeles

Friday Favorites: Point Richmond, California.

2011-12-03T07:20:00.000-08:00

Walk Eagle Rock (photos, blog) sends in this lovely little path that also happens to be a two-way street. Yes, drivers, taking turns is a perfectly reasonable way of traveling!

friday favorites: "the angels" by givot

2011-08-05T09:43:00.001-07:00

Happy Friday, everyone. Have a magical weekend.

julie kim's hammock coffee table in the city

2011-07-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Local furniture-maker and space designer Julie Kim put her newly-designed hammock coffee table at a bus stop on the corner of 6th + Vermont in K-Town, just to see what would happen.

Okay, not a whole lot happens, but the concept is a really good one: let's make bus stops, I don't know...nicer? So more people will actually want to ride the bus, and all that good critical mass stuff? I would love to see more experiments of urban guerrilla beautification like this!

Las Vegas Strip (II)

2011-07-23T20:55:00.000-07:00

Another view of the Vegas Strip, including Treasure Island, the Palazzo, the Wynn & Encore, and the Stratosphere off in the distance, with the street squeezed down to just one lane. See it narrowed!

friday favorites: asheville, north carolina

2011-07-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

A discussion about skewed intersections on Streetsblog's Google Group led to alternate intersection designs, which led me to this very postiive FAQ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety about roundabouts: those momentary shifts from cartesian to polar (and back) that people seem to be so afraid of, but actually are safer for everyone—and all at a drastically reduced maintenance cost, too! My favorite is this before-and-after conversion in Asheville. I took a Segway tour that crossed this lovely part of downtown. See it rotarized!

friday favorites: washington street, norwalk, connecticut

2011-07-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Finally, finally getting around to sharing this great post by Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist with some nicely articulated thoughts (as well as resource links) about the value of narrow streets. He even squeezed down the street above to illustrate his point, drawing inspiration from Nieuwendijk in Amsterdam and...me!

Be sure to check out the lively debate that ensues in the comments (are cities just shopping malls?) as well as the rest of his blog. See it narrowed!

Las Vegas Strip (I)

2011-07-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

I followed my wife to a work junket in Las Vegas recently (where randomly enough, Ben Mezrich spoke and later ate steak at my dinner table), and I took a break to wander up and down the city's famous Strip. Architects and brainy types love Vegas because of the purity of its simulacra, its uber-meta-ness. I kinda agree. Vegas is so proudly...artificial. No one goes to Las Vegas because of anything inherent to its geography, besides maybe the hot weather. Las Vegas might as well exist at the bottom of the sea next to Rapture—as long as you could still fly there from LA in less than an hour, I doubt anyone would care. People go to Vegas because it's Vegas, and there's no place else like it.

That's why I've always been confused by the mind-boggling width of the Strip itself, which at around ten lanes seems to be stubbornly preoccupied with almighty transport as its main function—on paper. It's as if the city planners are still in denial about what the Strip really is: a huge adult amusement park and pedestrian haven for tourists from all over the world, all strolling up and down nursing their yard-long margaritas dangling from souvenir lanyards. Amusement parks don't have freeways running through them. So why not make the Strip feel more like the Disneyland of Sin that it is? See it narrowed!

NS:LA in MAS Context architectural journal

2011-01-16T11:51:00.000-08:00

Got a lovely package in the mail last week: the latest issue of MAS Context, the architectural & urban design journal created by Iker Gil and co. at MAS Studio architects in Chicago, Illinois! This issue is entitled "PUBLIC."

In addition to my NS:LA spreads, this issue is chock-full of really great, thought-provoking material about how public spaces can represent so many possibilities to local communities. Really awesome stuff. One of my favorites has to be this gorgeous photo essay on Shanghai's older, more multi-functional streets, where village activities spill out onto thoroughfares. I had the pleasure of witnessing scenes like this when I was traveling there back in college:

The issue available to read online, but do yourself a favor and order a printed copy of the real deal to get the full effect. It's a bundle of inspiration you'll want to keep nearby for spontaneous reference.

Order MAS Context: PUBLIC on Lulu

the geography of somewhere group exhibit in echo park: pix!

2011-01-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

Those are my prints (on the left) from the Geography of Somewhere exhibit back in July 2010. More on my photostream.

pacific coast highway, santa monica

2010-11-29T06:35:00.000-08:00

My wife, who grew up near the sleepy beach towns of Jamaica, asks me every time we drive along PCH: who decided to put a freeway next to the ocean? Blemishing the very thing that makes California so famous? We Angelenos have grown used to the mayhem that happens along this famously fast stretch of road, and not just certain Ferrari Enzos sliced in half by crazed millionaires and careening jaunts by drunk neo-Nazi celebrities — crashes on PCH are a regular part of our morning commute. The road is another classic example of the Angelene Paradox: almost daily violence and road rage, but in an idyllic setting. Part of me wishes we could do a better job of living up to our laid-back reputation, but I know better. Hawaii has its traffic jams, for instance. Crime happens in the Bahamas. No place perfectly aligns with its ideal image. But couldn't we, you know, maybe try a little? See it narrowed!

"narrow" is to "streets" as "micro" is to

2010-09-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

lawns. Microlawns, another photo blog of mine you may find amusing. It's still urban portraiture, but it's less critique and more absurdist snark. ^_^

Denton, Texas traffic engineer: "The cyclist should consider actuating the pedestrian push button."

2010-07-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

Amazing quote from the Head Traffic Engineer in Denton, Texas that pretty much sums up the infrastructural corner we've painted ourselves into. Behind all the technical smoke-and-mirror excuses lies a simple unwillingness to question the wisdom of initial urban design mistakes made long ago.

"It is worth noting that there are no known published national, TxDOT or regional metro policies/standards/guidelines/etc concerning what a "safer" timing is for a bicyclist at a signalized intersection. There are substantial timing and traffic mix/volume variations at every intersection in Denton, further complicating a determination of what a "safer" timing might be that would not only be beneficial to a cyclist but also be defendable in the event of litigation.

Inductive loops are installed in the pavement, and an electrical current is sent through it to set up a magnetic flux, which when passed over by a ferrous material, disrupts the flux and in so doing the controller "assumes" there is an object that needs to be serviced. The problem with this technology with regard to a bicycle is that with more and more bikes being made mostly of aluminum, polycarbon, composites and the like, there is less and less iron in the bicycle to be detected. Even specialized inductive loops installed near the gutter exclusively for bikes are becoming more and more ineffective. That is why on heavily traveled bike routes, some "bike friendly" agencies are beginning to install bike push buttons (works the same as the pedestrian push buttons mentioned herein above). Standard vehicle loops are installed in the middle of a travel lane and are typically four to six feet wide. Therefore, a cyclist that is riding near the gutter, even if he is on a bike that has enough iron in it to be detectable by the loop, would not be picked up because he would be outside the detection zone. Because of the likelihood of a bicycle not being detected, even if it occupies an inductive loop, one would have to add green time to each phase and cause it to happen continuously (24/7). For a random and infrequent event, this means that the controller cannot cycle as fast and therefore will cause delay (lost time) and greater pollution (because of the greater vehicle idling) for the cross street traffic, thus defeating the benefits of the bicycle. Placing a "T" marking for a standard vehicle detection zone would require a cyclist to occupy the center of the travel lane, placing them at greater risk with vehicles doing the same thing. The detection of the bike would be suspect and so could cause the phase to be skipped because a vehicle with enough iron was not on the loop, creating further issues.

For these reasons, rather than attempting to modify signal timings and equipment to accommodate this highly variable demand, it might be preferable to provide public education indicating that if a cyclist is concerned about the amount of green time that might be provided at any particular intersection because of little or no vehicle activations, that cyclist should consider actuating the pedestrian push button for the signal, thereby obtaining more green time for crossing the street. This type of public education could be provided on the City’s website, possibly on DTV or on one of the local bicycle advocacy web pages."

Via Google Groups.

"the geography of somewhere" group exhibit in echo park

2010-07-08T09:55:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of posts lately--I had some writing deadlines to take care of, which sucked away all my time. But if you wanna catch up, meet me in Echo Park where I'll be showing Narrow Streets photos in a group art exhibit. Woo hoo!

Fellow artists include Carlos Reynoso, Christopher Bibby, and Joseph Powers Bowman. Should-be-could-be fun!

The show opens tomorrow (July 9) and runs until July 28 at the Echo Park Curiosity Shop ("Echo Curio") at 1519 Sunset Blvd in Echo Park. More show details.

6th street + spring street, downtown (II)

2010-06-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

I'm endlessly fascinated by Downtown LA. It teems with life during the weekday; at night and on weekends, it becomes a zombie-filled ghost town worthy of a level design from Left 4 Dead. It is crowded with buildings but at the same time overbuilt for cars — a paradox that leaves it neither here (is it a city?) or there (is it a suburb?). The photo above shows what Angelenos would consider a "small" street at only five cars wide. A similarly-sized street in New York City, by contrast, would be considered a major conduit. 8th Ave, for instance, is as wide as the street above because it borders crowd magnets like Madison Square Garden and Penn Station — makes sense, right? But that's New York City, which has a variety of street sizes befitting local use: one-lane roads for residential neighborhoods, and larger arteries for heavily trafficked areas. In Los Angeles, on the other hand, every street behaves as if it were a regional conduit regardless of actual, boots-on-the-ground use. The city becomes merely a place to pass through, not a destination unto itself, leaving only the roar of traffic and the crazed bellowing of its down-and-out street denizens echoing off its walls. See it narrowed!

friday favorites: power line-free streets

2010-06-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

The wonderfully-named Don Quiposte takes streets in Santos, Brazil and re-imagines them without all those unsightly power lines. Her results are quite satisfying, like clearing cobwebs or untangling a big mess of computer cables at home.

From her profile:

Don Quiposte is an urban activist with the impossible mission of finishing with the electric postes of Santos- Brazil and other cities. Her motto is Impossible is Nothing.

Visualizations like hers do a great job of showing the real priorities of a street's design (is it a place for living? Or an electrical conduit?). More photos and commentary at Don Quiposte.

press log: quesabesde

2010-06-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

Hooray! It's always nice to get a mention in one of my favorite blogs — Quesabesde, a camera geek blog, re-posted my how-to video. From the article:

El hombre que estrechaba calles. No, no se trata del poder de un nuevo superhéroe… a menos que el dominio de Photoshop sea considerado como tal.

press log: adobe blogs

2010-06-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

Nice little re-post of my how-to video by Adobe's John Nack.

wilshire corridor

2010-06-01T12:28:00.002-07:00

I like to think of Wilshire Corridor as LA's own sort of Upper East Side Park Avenue, with its long stretch of luxury condo high-rises catering to the older wealthy. I can even imagine Eloise traipsing along, au pair in pursuit, on her way from Westwood to Beverly Hills. But as with all things Los Angeles, this east coast facsimile has a unique west coast twist: eight lanes of heart-pumping traffic careening up and down its hilly curves at a blistering 55mph. (Try it on a 125cc scooter, and it's even more hair-raising.) The usual paradox is there: heavenly towers with names promising old world grandeur ("The Wilshire Marquis", or the more pastoral "Carlyle on Wilshire") located right alongside what is practically a freeway. Me + the wife looked here once for an apartment, and could not get past the constant echo of traffic, double-paned windows be damned.

The toughest paradox about Wilshire Corridor's sheer speed is the impact is has on its residents, many of whom are older. Nowhere on Wilshire is pleasant to walk along, and the Corridor is no exception. So they take to their Lexuses and Jags instead, tentatively nosing them into the automotive stream before gunning it to catch up with the fast flow. The result is a desolate but beautifully manicured towerscape reminiscent of those pearly retirement enclaves in Florida: waiting rooms for those next in line for ascention, cordoned off from the rest of the living. See it narrowed!

press log: boing boing

2010-06-01T09:22:00.001-07:00

Featured by guest blogger Bill Barol, former senior writer at Newsweek and contibutor to The New Yorker, Time, Slate, and elsewhere. He blogs at True/Slant and Pix365.

press log: planetº magazine

2010-05-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

Really lovely feature in Planetº Magazine's art section by the kind + indefatigable Jenna Martin.

press log: photojojo

2010-05-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

Featured on their lovely blog, with a handy mention of my how-to video, too.

press log: zeitgeist studios

2010-05-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Featured by architecutural designer Tyler Barnard.

interview: lost in a supermarket

2010-05-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

Had a really fun Q + A with Nicholas Stetcher from his awesomely-named Lost in a Supermarket blog. A silly excerpt:

Q: Do you often work with music in the background? If so, what inspires your work or makes the labor more endurable?
A: I usually listen to whatever pops up on the iPod. The Shins are a favorite, or Erlend Oye, Vampire Weekend, Nine Inch Nails, or The Futureheads. Pan Sonic makes me drop everything and become catatonic.

friday favorites: university of california at berkeley

2010-05-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

Reader Severin Martinez sent in a snapshot of the Berkeley campus (my alma mater...go Bears!) near the Campanile.

A campus is a great example of a pedestrian-centric urban development, if you think about it. Roads are narrow, there are plenty of facilities for bikes and people (park benches, water fountains, shaded paths, cafes, bike racks, even emergency police call boxes), and the pace is generally slower and much more pleasant than the freaky nonstop Death Race 2000 happening right outside its gates. This road has sharrows to remind drivers of its mixed use nature, and it's only wide enough to let two cars pass, no wider — a bigger street would only invite speed.

Successful models for "car-light" urban design exist all around us (think outdoor shopping malls or even movie studio lots), and there's no reason we couldn't apply the same design patterns to everyday streets.

Got a Friday Favorite of your own? Send 'em in.

press log: the atlantic

2010-05-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

Nifty little mention on their special report entitled The Future of the City.

press log: the league of ordinary gentlemen

2010-05-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

Mentioned in The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, which I in turn mention simply because I love that blog title so much.

omg: street widening in pre-wwii moscow

2010-05-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Via Gizmodo via English Russia, photos of an entire city block being moved to widen (yes, widen) a street in 1930's Russia. Who says the opposite couldn't be done? ;)

More crazy pics and detailed history, plus before + after photos, at English Russia.

press log: los angeles times

2010-05-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

Brief little mention on LATimes, within a news round up headlined by...Octomom. Holy non-sequitur, Batman.

press log: good

2010-05-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

Featured on GOOD. God, I admire the hell out of those guys. I'm thrilled to be keeping company with them.

press log: io9

2010-05-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

Featured on io9, one of my absolute favorite blogs that's dedicate to all things science fiction.

press log: archinect

2010-05-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

Short + sweet mention by Archinect's Paul Petrunia.

press log: it's nice that

2010-05-13T09:01:00.000-07:00

Featured by the superfriendly Alex Bec on his fabulous London-based blog. And I thought only Angelenos would care about this stuff.

friday favorites: floating logos

2010-05-07T07:52:00.001-07:00

From Matt Siber (via my pal Jacob), carefully Photoshopped portraits of roadside signage with their supporting structures removed. From Matt's statement:

Making the signs appear to float not only draws attention to this type of signage but also gives them, and the companies that put them there, an otherworldly quality. References can be drawn to religious iconography, the supernatural, popular notions of extraterrestrials, or science fiction films such as Blade Runner. Each of these references refers to something that can profoundly affect our lives yet is just beyond our control and comprehension.

For me, they also show how signage designed for cars and not humans can literally loom over our heads, distant and free of context like a silent sentinels visiting from another planet, adding to an already alienating landscape of sprawl. More beautiful work at Matt's site.

Got a Friday Favorite of your own? Send 'em in.

santa monica boulevard + sepulveda boulevard, westwood

2010-05-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

Here's the intersection right around the corner from my house. The office towers proudly call themselves the "Gateway" to "Westwood," but I think of it as the point where the great Beverly Hills Freeway comes to an end, abruptly cutting off its dedicated bike lanes and continuing its auto-frenzied free-for-all to the sea. The buildings, far from being an integrated part of their surrounding urban ecosystem, function as self-contained acrologies right out of Sim City and leave pedestrians to fend for themselves against the river of cars that fight for space in the transition from freeway speeds to the daily bottleneck caused by the entrance to the 405 just ahead. This intersection suffers from the classic Los Angeles problem of being a landmark solely on paper; as a destination, it offers nothing for those walking on the street. Narrowing it reveals its true autocentric nature: the lawns on the left become an absurdist ghost park, and the columns on the right suddenly feel disproportionately huge. Like many places in the city it's a perfect candidate for infill by new retail, something I'm sure the workers in those towering offices would rejoice at. See it narrowed!

alley, santa monica

2010-05-04T06:02:00.000-07:00

When I used to live in Santa Monica I would walk one mile to work each way, a lovely commute that seems enviable now. I tended to avoid busier streets like Montana, Washington (which has become an overcrowded, illusory "shortcut" to nearby Wilshire), and the "3n+2" streets: 11th, 14th, and 17th, all of which have signal lights and therefore invite faster traffic.

Instead, I would opt for the alleyways permeating this residential area. Smaller, quieter, and generally car-free, they're inviting places to walk with less purpose and more pleasure, to peer at cats hiding under cars, or glass flowers on a windowsill. Alleys are a missed opportunity; in most minds they're places for "dirty" functions like trash collection and parking, but those activities take up only a fraction of their time each day. The rest of the time they are no-cars-lands, effectively becoming some of the most meditative walking paths in the city. Narrowing this alleyway in particular reveals its true nature: an intimate, silent haven. See it narrowed!

friday favorites: VW microbus subway

2010-04-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

A classic Volkswagen Microbus, put to much better use. Thanks to reader Marc Phu for the tip, via the Racionais Pra Tudo tumblog.

Every Friday I'll post a narrow or otherwise interesting street snapshot from somewhere around the world (or in this case, a striking photo mashup!). Got a Friday Favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

thursday do-overs: american makeover's "sprawlanta"

2010-04-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

The average Atlantan drives 60 miles a day? "Drive 'til you qualify" for affordable housing, indeed. Filmmaker John Paget continues to kick ass all over the place with his great documentary, which is peppered with eyebrow-raising factoids such as "3 pedestrians get struck every week" on the streets of Atlanta (many of which routinely stretch 8 lanes wide). Or how about: Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell was killed crossing the street in this city — an idiot death for such a brilliant writer.

This film makes its point loud + clear: the time is ripe for a major do-over on a nationwide scale! Maybe it's time for a Narrow Streets: Atlanta edition..?

sunset boulevard + doheny road, west hollywood

2010-04-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

If you head just west of the Key Club on Sunset Strip, stop at Gil Turner's liquors, and look downhill, you'll see this long downhill view. It's a bit vergitinous, and cars do indeed bomb down it at speeds reaching 50mph. All the roads perpendicular to the Sunset Strip are like this: a deadly matrix of intersections that invite danger. I should know: I used to work in this neighborhood, where a motorcyclist lost his life one day.

The crash (I never call them "accidents") happened just two blocks west, near where the old Tower Records used to be, and tragic as it was no one seemed all that surprised by it. Sunset is a blazing-fast seven lanes wide after all, with huge intersections to match — intersections with interminable light cycles that all but encourage drivers to take risks like running red lights. Sunset's speed, combined with the decreased stopping ability of drivers frantically rushing downhill, allowed a car to run right into a lane-splitting motorcyclist as he burst into the intersection. A co-worker of mine (trained as an EMT) was on the scene + tried to revive him; she told me what had happened while washing her hands of his blood in the office sink.

The situation could have been prevented if common sense had prevailed during the neighborhood's construction: narrower streets designed to reduce downhill speeds to something less fatal (like 25mph or so). A narrowed Doheny (above) makes much more sense. As it is, it looks like it had been designed as if perfectly level: an idealized mental model on paper divorced from the simple reality of its slope. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

google search story: "LA street story"

2010-04-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

My YouTube Search Story, about a search for escape from car commuting that becomes the inspiration for positive change. This Search Story thing is fun!

I just had to show how NS:LA seems to show up a lot in Google image search, which is how about a third of my visitors find me. Wacky!

wilshire boulevard + 3rd street promenade, santa monica

2010-04-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

This is probably one of the most well-populated intersections in Santa Monica, in terms of foot traffic, being situated at the end of the 3rd Street Promenade as it is. It's not without its problems, however — cars waiting to make left turns creep impatiently toward the throngs of crossing pedestrians, spoiling the shopping fun by unnecessarily rushing tourists + locals alike. It's also dangerous, too: pedestrians get hit most by cars making careless left turns, especially at larger intersections where the line of sight is more distant. 3rd + Wilshire is a perfect candidate for conversion into a public square, with a fountain or statue in its center. But for now, let's imagine that the charm of the world-famous Promenade follows through all the way to its terminus and beyond, with a nicely narrowed street that clearly indicates who it belongs to: the people! See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

friday favorites: tyler street, dallas, texas

2010-04-23T07:35:00.000-07:00

Something amazing: local residents and Go Oak Cliff + Bike Friendly Oak Cliff members transform a blighted, car-wild street in human-hostile Dallas into an irresistible public space right out of old Yurp. I love the dramatic difference in traffic speed before and after conversion — the latter sense of safety is clearly apparent. The whole project perfectly highlights what complete streets do best:

Slow traffic with narrower streets
Encourage jaywalking
Create bonus retail space
Give people a no-pressure reason to be outside: not to commute, or run a 10k, but simply to relax!

Apparently this inspiring fit of guerilla activism was so successful that Dallas DOT wants to make some of the changes permanent. And two other Texas cities have asked the BFOC to re-create the event in their streets, too.

Nice to see this bunch of "complete" freaks in action!

Via Bike Friendly Oak Cliff.

Every Friday I'll post a narrow or otherwise interesting street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday Favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

do-over thursday: time-lapse narrowing fun!

2010-04-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

Remember that Spring Street bridge I narrowed a little while back? Well, here's how I went about it. View full-screen to see the interface details better.

I used Photoshop, but there's plenty of free, open-source altenatives, including GIMP. The key is getting your initial shots nicely aligned.

pico boulevard near vermont avenue, byzantine-latino quarter

2010-04-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Nirad Gupta at SIFTAngeles for the location request.

I came here to shoot photos at 9am on Easter Sunday, and even at that early hour the streets were already filling up with 50mph traffic. But during the periods of silence in between packs of swiftly moving cars I was able to focus on the human face of the neighborhood's soul: its considerable foot traffic. Foot traffic which, on a narrower street, feels more at ease.

On paper, the Byzantine-Latino Quarter has a long, rich record of ethnic ebb + flow; a neon sign and inspirational mural on the corner of Pico + Normandie give clues to those origins. Otherwise, it's tough to get a sense of any of its history at street level. The BLQ is crying out for a public square to physically mark its center and give the neighborhood a sense of permanence — its official center at Pico + Union only features disappointingly typical stripmall carchitecture. But streets this wide + fast defy public space. Like most designations in LA its identity seems temporarily written, an abstract construct of the mind marked only by blank rivers of asphalt; a figment poised to be gentrified into oblivion without even a statue to mark its passing. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

visualization fix: green island

2010-04-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

An oldie but a goodie: Green Island by tag, IMKW, and immr in Japan. I've actually had dreams along these lines, where all the asphalt of the city was replaced by fields of green. In my dreams people would drift race like maniacs on the slippery grass to wherever they were going, the smell of freshly muddled sod in the air. Really fun, actually.

These fantastic, outrageous visualizations are the next best thing to dreams. It's amazing how green grass brings an instant sense of calm to a normally chaotic scene. The creators behind Green Island don't do many of these, but when they do they're always impeccably detailed + stunning. They've even branched out to France, Vietnam, and right here in US, in Las Vegas:

Brilliant stuff. Of course it's not meant to be taken realistically — it's meant to get people thinking + talking, and it does so in a beautifully paradoxical, pastoral way. Check out more.

alley between 3rd + 4th streets off the 3rd street promenade, santa monica

2010-04-19T07:35:00.000-07:00

Remember that alleyway in Santa Monica with Westside Comedy Theater? The one that's just dying to have a bar put in next door? Well, I revisited it.

Alleyways are such a restrictive form of urban design — they separate + compartmentalize the "uglier" functions of the city, i.e. trash collection, and unwittingly create creepy, crime-ridden dead zones in the process: a telltale sign of an unhealthy monoculture. Cities like New York or Paris mix things up more, putting smaller batches of trash out in the open for more frequent pickups. Their streets may smell a little more ripe, but they're still nothing compared to the rank, concentrated fumes lurking in LA's cesspool alleyways. Distributing functions more evenly across the urban system (even the smellier ones) would reduce restrictions on what alleys can + can't be used for. And it would also literally open up miles of fresh real estate for entrepreneurs to play with. So with that in mind, I installed a bar next door to this comedy club: the Cabo Cantina, transplanted from just one street over on the 3rd Street Promenade. Hellooo, fun! See it bar-ified!
High quality prints available

friday favorites: long tang street, shanghai, china

2010-04-16T06:32:00.000-07:00

Photo: PitBox.

I saw plenty of streets just like this one when I travelled around China years ago. At only 8 feet wide, there's still plenty of room for scooter parking, laundry, life, and mystery.

Every Friday I'll post a narrow or otherwise interesting street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday Favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

do-over thursday: NYC DOT's open call for public space proposals!

2010-04-15T06:07:00.000-07:00

This is incredible. New York's Department of Transportation, headed by the supergreat Janette Sadik-Khan, has opened itself up for proposals to reclaim wasted city space to create new public plazas. It's an amazing effort to get locals involved in defining their environments and improving their quality of life — what a concept! From the overview:

NYC DOT will work with selected not-for-profit organizations to create neighborhood plazas throughout the City. We will do this by transforming underused streets into vibrant, social public spaces. This Program is a key part of the City's effort to ensure that all New Yorkers live within a 10-minute walk of quality open space.

The deadline's June 30, 2010. I can imagine some really sweet visualizations will come out of this call-to-arms. Urban design by the people, for the people! Does Los Angeles have the guts to do something similar? Or will we forever defer to traffic engineers?

reader request: 6th street + spring street, downtown

2010-04-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Phillip Estes from Los Angeles County Regional Planning for the location request.

This intersection is a perfect example of that "almost there" feeling I get whenever I visit Downtown: the buildings have the trappings of an old, urban center; there's even foot traffic. The only thing holding it back are the streets, which at five lanes in either direction still allow cars to travel at unreasonable speeds — speeds which effectively prevent easy jaywalking and turn the sidewalks into long, dead alleys. It's an important detail, given the sketchy types that can frequently be encountered when walking in Downtown. Smaller streets provide more "escape" routes and give even sparse foot traffic greater density, mixing normal folks closer in with the crazies, providing a sense of safety in numbers: crazies are fine in my book, as long as they're vastly outnumbered by us normals. But larger streets thin out the crowds and increase approach distances, bringing a sense of dread that gives creepy types time + license to act even creepier. So I got a little ambitious with this rendering, narrowing not just one axis of the street but all four corners to shrink the entire intersection down by 75%. The result is a scene straight out of NYC.

Apologies for the slightly blurry background building — as I was taking the shot I was jarred by a driver who felt the need to honk and yell at me ("What the hell is wrong with you?"), even though it was 8:00am on a Sunday and he had four other completely empty lanes to choose from. Driving indeed brings out the savage child in all of us. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

visualization fix: taichung gateway project

2010-04-13T05:46:00.000-07:00

Takuma Ono brings us this lovely visualization of a riverbed public space designed to bring some green to urban Taichung, Taiwan. It's a slick realization, effectively blending 3D animation with simple stills (the soccer players at around 1:00). The stark white buildings allow proper showcasing of the green space, the project's core theme. Another nice touch is at 2:13, where a soccer game is projected onto a wall, emphasizing free outdoor events for the community. Reminds me of summer movie nights at the Hatch Shell at Boston's Esplanade riverfront. Fireworks at the end of the visualization serve to remind us that these sorts of improvements are all about raising the quality of life. Nice!

Takuma participated in GOOD Magazine's Redesign Your Street contest and was a gracious supporter of the Envisioning Urbanism photo exhibit at the 2010 LA StreetSummit.

spring street bridge, glendale junction

2010-04-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles has a fair share of bridges, bridges that can actually be quite pretty: the one above features farily detailed moulding, ornate streetlamps, and even a dedication plaque. Sadly, these details vanish when viewed from a car at 50mph, the routine speed of traffic moving along its four lanes. And so we're left with that empty, apocalyptic feeling again — here someone went through the trouble of decorating a bridge for an audience that will never bother to look. One of the biggest problems with moving as fast as we do, each + every day, is that there's no longer any practical reason to make things beautiful. People moved slower in 1929, when this bridge was originally built, so attention to detail made sense. But now, such notions are considered quaint, even naive, turning this bridge into a living ruin. It's a shame, because everyday beauty has the secret power to improve our quality of life at an almost subliminal level. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

friday favorites: belden place, san francisco

2010-04-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Jacob and his CIVICnurgs for the tip.

Here on this beautiful, sunny Friday we have a lovely alley cafe in...San Francisco?!?! Yep, this ain't Yurp — It's the good ole' USA. Photo from an inspiring article about the cultural value of alleys from George Calys at Examiner.com.

Jacob also forwarded an LA Times article about the growing trend to reclaim heretofore wasted alley space from drug dealers + criminals and transform them into places to live. Plus a link to the absolutely wonderful USC Center for Sustainable Cities' Alleys Project page, which has tons of resources with which to fire your imagination. Bzzzrt!

There are literally thousands of opportunities to convert alley space in our fair city. For instance, the Westside Comedy Theater in a Santa Monica alley is just dying to have a bar installed next door:

Photo from LAist.

Every Friday I'll post a narrow or otherwise interesting street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday Favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

do-over thursday: what's wrong with this picture?

2010-04-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

Via Pedestrianist, a possibly circa 1948 plan sketch for something called the Minnatoma Project, which was to involve a row of parking structures connecting the Bayshore Freeway to the Bay Bridge Freeway right in San Francisco. Yikes!

This rendering sure is cringe-worthy. But why? Let's break it down in the comments, one design detail at a time--what's wrong with this picture?

More great pix at Eric Fischer's photostream.

figueroa street + olympic boulevard, downtown

2010-04-07T06:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my pal Mochi for the location request.

Angelenos talk about Downtown much like Bostonians once talked about their Red Sox: there's hope, they're getting closer each year, and so on. Downtown, or DTLA, is constantly on the verge of becoming. And great strides have been made — the LA Live shopping mall finally gives greater context to classics like the Hotel Figeuroa lounge and The Pantry Cafe. But the infrastructure keeps getting in the way. Here, Figueroa streams nine lanes of 50mph traffic — half a freeway, a perfect candidate for infilling. Its auto-centricity is emphasized by that bizarro car wash on the left, whose awkward single story feels sprawly, suburbanish, and wholly inappropriate among downtown's verticality. Interestingly, Figueroa sheds four lanes beyond Olympic; when I narrowed down this scene I noticed not only a cozy picture of density but also the illusion that the whole street had been tied off with a neat T intersection. Talk about traffic calming! See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

one to watch: community design group

2010-04-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

Nifty little teaser video from Community Design Group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I'm starting to obsess over quick + dirty methods for visualizing complete streets, and this fits the bill wonderfully. More at their site and YouTube channel.

ocean avenue + santa monica boulevard (II), santa monica

2010-04-05T05:26:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favorite spots in Santa Monica. Tapas to the left of us, sushi to the right, and Ye Olde King's Head pub up ahead — all in all, a great place to chill out with a "real" (i.e. Imperial) pint of Boddington's and watch the tourists go by. But there's a slight annoyance: buses. They run right in front of the outdoor seating area, meaning diners get a little diesel with their fish + chips. Passenger cars, annoyed with pesky, pokey public transport, honk + rev away with angry flatulence. This automania almost threatens to ruin the experience; it's hard to fall into the completely deep relaxation found, say, at the nearby car-free 3rd Street Promenade. Narrowed, this terminus of the mighty Santa Monica Blvd. becomes a calm back alley. I left in the "buses only" asphalt paint for fun, because I like to imagine an optimistic near-future in which our current carbon-spewing peoplemovers are replaced by silent gliding electric vehicles. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

van nuys boulevard + burbank boulevard, van nuys: the future is wide

2010-04-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

I took another look at Van Nuys Blvd., a reader request from a while back, just to re-think what its design intent was. At the 2010 StreetSummit, someone mentioned a little-known DOT rule mandating that portions of certain roads be wide + straight enough to serve as an airplane runway. Mystery, solved. It's a reasonable bit of contingency planning (better safe than sorry), but one that I feel is still woefully inadequate. It doesn't take into account, for example, the case of two jumbo jets landing at the same time, potentially in opposite directions. (It's happened before.) And Mayor Villaraigosa has already pledged to ensure Van Nuys' future as a mixed use district, providing shopping, parking, residences, parking, spaceport facilities, as well as serving as an ideal landing site for potential future (and inevitable) visits by extra-terrestrials, whose looming ships tend to be large + awkwardly shaped (eg. V, District 9). Van Nuys Blvd., currently only eleven (11) lanes wide, needs to be built further out with these New-new Urbanistic goals in mind. Widened, it accommodates a breathtaking 19 lanes — big enough to handle almost anything the Universe can throw its way. See it widened!

(happy April fools day!) :)

video: my 2010 LA streetsummit presentation

2010-03-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

My slideshow presentation, with audio graciously provided by Streetsblog Editor Damien Newton. It's 36 minutes long, so be sure to prepare a beverage and maybe a snack. Workshop description:

Urban design tends to remain invisible for most people — until something drastic happens to shake things up. That's the mission of Narrow Streets: Los Angeles, a project where I take photos of our city's famously wide roads and narrow them down using Photoshop. In the process, the photos reveal a suddenly non-car-centric vision of L.A. designed to spark the viewer's imagination and emphasize how important street design can be in affecting our daily lives.For this workshop, I'll present an overview of studies regarding wide street safety, livability, and property value before reviewing street traffic calming design strategies and the virtues of narrow, human-scale streets. Then, we'll use narrowed photographs to facilitate a freeform discussion about the current state of street life in L.A. and how we could improve things in the future. I'll also demonstrate my photo editing process for those interested in taking urban landscapes of their own.

After the slideshow I invited people to engage in a freeform discussion. Here's a transcript of our lively conversation.

ME: So I wanna talk about you guys. What about the streets in your area?

GENTLEMAN: If you haven't been you should go and check out a book by Robert Inman, an Oxy grad, about all of the staircases of LA. Those are the real narrow streets! And there's a huge network of them. You can talk a walk in Echo Park in Silverlake that will take you a full day and give you the workout of the elevation of the high Sierra pass and get over a 20 mile walk out of it. And Dan Capelle last year in the summer did what he called The Big Parade, taking all the staircases he could find between downtown and the Hollywood sign, and we camped out for two days. It was a 50 mile walk. And he's doing it again this year, and you wouldn't believe what you see. And it's narrow streets to the nth degree. I think staircases are the ultimate narrow streets.

There's a town called Onomichi, it's in between Tokyo and Kyoto. It's a little town, and it's almost all staircases — it's surreal. It's like an Escher print. They have this weird funicular.

GENTLEMAN: How do you spell it?

Onomichi. There's no real reason to go there. I think they have teacakes?

LADY: There's a town in Amalfi that's made up of stairs.

ME: I'm mostly doing [Narrow Streets] for fun because I wanna have more fun in my city. I would love to see more things like we saw with New York happening in LA, because, yeah, sustainability, blah blah blah, but it's more fun, right? It makes life more enjoyable. And that's really my bottom line, is making my day to day more fun. I try my best: I ride my scooter to work, I bike when I can. But it's not super pleasant. You know, I get a lot of crap from drivers and I'd rather be able to hop on a train and get a bagel from a cafe and chill out for five minutes before heading to work. Wouldn't that be great?

So I think visualizations are a really fun and interseting way to go, just to get the dialogue started. And it's an outlet for people, if you have some crazy idea about your vision of the city. It all starts with the vision, and the vision leads to: well, how can we make this vision happen?

LADY: Two things I would mention about our neighborhoods. No. 1, next Thursday, the community advisory committe of the Wilshire center/Koreatown redevelopment area will be meeting and talking about their new transportation circulation plan, and also about the cicLAvia. and some of us who have been on that committee for a very long time (in my case about 15 years) talked 15 years ago about closing Wilshire Blvd. between Vermont and Western and making it kind of like a Las Ramblas situation. And of course, to much eyeball rolling 15 years ago, however not so much eyeball-rolling today. And so those of you who would like to see something like that happen I urge you to come to the CAC meeting next Thursday.

The other thing is I live and work in the Los Angeles Eco Village. I don't know if any of you have ever been there, but we did a project with the city to redesign our Main street which is about 1000 feet long, to be a slow street, so we widened the sidewalks, narrowed the street, created some bulb-outs. I'm a very strong believer and I really support what Janette [Sadik-Khan] talked about. The greatest thing they did in NYC was essentially the rapidity with which they made the change, the radical changes that they did. So I talk frequently about deep and radical and rapid change. And so, building on what the city spent 300,000 dollars to do on our street, which we could've done 10,000,000 streets for that and done it ourselves, for a lot more real and slow street. But I wanna extend our bulb-outs, just paint the ilnes, just to narrow our street more, and put some of that fake grass right over the asphalt and some furniture there. So if anyone wants to come and help us do that, get on our mailing list. Hopefully we'll be able to do that sometime this year.

ME: I had a dream once that the streets were paved with grass. [laughter]

GENTLEMAN: I live on a narrow street and it's actually incredibly increased the amount of community — I live on on Venice Walk Street — and there's a battle right now between the height of our fences. And my side, which is closer to Speedway, which is slightly lower income, we have very low fences, and I have more relationship with every single one of my neighbors out of the three building area than I've ever had anywhere I've lived. And I grew up in a small town in the South. However, up the street slightly they have fences that are 5-8 feet. And we have no idea who lives behind those fences.

GENTLEMAN: And that's the way they want it.

GENTLEMAN: But it's really interesting how it's affected the community, being all together and living with each other.

ME: We have a tendency to mystify these phenomena, like, oh sprawl, where did it come from? It was legislated.

GENTLEMAN: Well, there's the aesthetic of the West, too.

ME: Yeah. Manifest Destiny and the sense of conquering the frontierland. But in your case, you could say "Wow, those people are so cold and aloof," but really, they're the High Fence people. And you are the Low Fence people. So, we're talking about three feet of material! And it's little moronic things like that that can wind up having huge ripple effects on our perception of each other and our relationship to each other. And that's why stripping out lanes — I mean, we were on Montana Street Walk, and they don't even close the street down. At Christmas! So you've got bands, you've got food stalls, you've got ten times the population and they don't close the streets down. So what happens? [mimics being squished in a crowd] You're standing next to a bassist trying to enjoy the music. Why would you not close the street? And why would you not see the business opportunity there? There's tremendous money to be made. Close the street down for one day, please. It's just one day. Put a bunch of shops, invite a bunch of vendors...

LADY: ...little kiosks with local handcraft vendors, give them a place to set up their wares...

ME: And charge them a setup fee! Tax 'em.

LADY: I live on the Eastside, and they recently put in a pleasant sort of triangle of grass and trees and a bench between Prospect and Vermont, just past Hollywood, and everybody was going in, like, this is a place where I have frequently almost been hit by cars because there's a lot of taxi stands there, and the crosswalk is a very dangerous crosswalk. And everyone was like, oh, this is a great little place that you can just enjoy for five seconds when you're walking across. Everyone was just mocking it so bad, like "what is this? it's stupid, this triangle park" And as a pedestrian I was thinking, It's huge, and you feel like you're not gonna die when the light changes in your favor. Those tiny little triangle plots. I don't know if anyone knows about this but I was commuting on my bike in Silverlake/Sunset Junction and at one of these little triangle things someone had put a park sign, like This is LA City Park, or something like that. I can't remember who it was but it was a great campaign, something the Center for Land Use Interpretation would do.

ME: Or the Museum of the Jurassic.

LADY: I think it's fascinating what just one tree and some hospitable area can do when walking in the heat.

ME: Right? Put some damn trees up! We live in one of the most perfect-weather havin' places in the world. Why not act like it?

LADY: I live in Westwood too and I've been biking to Hollywood and back, so I go through Santa Monica in West Hollywood and it's vibrant, there's people everywhere, and then you keep going down Santa Monica, and once you get to the temple and everything it's just huge, and out of scale, and dead. And there's really wide sidewalks with no one on them. And no benches for people that are older, to sit in the middle of these huge blocks.

ME: You're incredulous, and rightly so. Because again, the design does not match the reality. What were the design priorities? We don't really know. Was it taking advantage of a pork barrel 50 years ago? Maybe. Probably. But what we're left with is this bandaid of putting up a bike lane without any commerce to travel to. So if there's no reason to bike, and you don't feel safe anyway, good luck. I would love to have something like the Minuteman corridor in Boston, which is a bike boulevard, and there they've got a little lemonade stand, and even a little bike repair shop. You can get a bagel and hang out. You have to have business. You have to have a reason for activity. No one's gonna hang around a park — we learned that from Le Corbusier's radiant city gardens — no one's gonna hang out in a garden just to sit there. I would love to see more visualizations with business in mind.

GENTLEMAN: There is one aspect of the conversation I'm interested in hearing about. We talked about the rapidity with which New York changed. That also brought massive gentrification which forced out low income families and totally changed the econonic face of New York. Now it's extremely difficult to live inside Manhattan unless you make a lot of money, and that's changed the entire character of the city. The art scene actually produces less art than Los Angeles, which is awesome [laughs], but it has drastically changed the character of the city. I think that's an interesting debate to have: how can we talk about this urban planning without talking about this massive gentrification?

ME: I love those little sausage carts near Staples Center. Totally illegal, totally delicious. Just leave 'em alone! Chill out! It's really cheap, so you have people from all incomes buying sausages. It attracts different people. So we should just freakin' relax already. We tried to have an LA food truck fair in Santa Monica. There was some miscommunication. We all trekked down there because we were super excited — nothing like that happens on the Westside — and it got completely shut down because one city official was like, "Dude, you didn't sign this one paper and get a permit." The cops showed up, and they moved all the trucks out. I don't understand why they did that. They were citing that if you had food service in an outdoor area catering to more than X amount of people you had to have a permit. I don't know if it was traffic concerns, or whatever. I say just try it. If it sucks, don't do it anymore.

LADY: Overall, when we talk about sustainable communities, we have to talk about the macro systems of those communities. What are the social systems? What are the economic systems? What are the ecological and physical systems? And how do they integrate? When I speak about gentrification, I speak about both negative & positive gentrification. Because with positive gentrification, the value that is created ("upgrading" the community) is retained within the community. So if you don't have community land trusts, if you don't have limited equity co-ops, if you don't have community currencies and other types of sustainable economic systems in the neighborhood (and I consider real estate and housing as part of the economic systems of a neighborhood) then, of course, you're gonna have a lot of the negative gentrification. So at least in LA Ecovillage we try to integrate all those systems. So we have a community land trust, we have limited equity co-ops, we have community currencies. So that value we're creating is actually staying in the neighborhood and not involuntarily displacing people.

ME: Working with what we have. That's awesome. Okay, we're kinda out of time, so thanks you guys. If you want me to hit a location in the city, just send me an email and I'll probably get to it. I have a backlog, so it might take a while.

helms avenue at the helms bakery, culver city

2010-03-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

Let's start of the week with a little departure from the norm. Here's a shot of Father's Office at Helms Bakery from a year ago, when Helms Avenue ran straight through the bakery compound. Back then, shoppers squeezed themselves to the margins of the street and had to be ever aware of oncoming traffic. But since then, the Culver City Bicycle & Pedestrian Initiative has pedestrianized the area, closing the street to traffic and adding wonderful details like a fountain, benches, cobblestone texture, and these awesome solar-powered bollards.

Read the whole list of future developments. Big kudos to Culver City for taking the initiative to make their streets more livable! See it...pedestrianized!

2010 LA streetsummit: coverage wrapup

2010-03-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

Here's a list of all the fantastic coverage of the 2010 LA StreetSummit on the ever-awesome Streetsblog, in case you missed it — including tons of well-crafted video.

Streetsblog editor Damien Newton said people thought my workshop was "show-stealing"! Gah!

Anyway. I'm working on putting together an audio slideshow of my presentation. Stay tuned!

friday favorites — thursday edition! vintage los angeles photos

2010-03-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

Image via A Continuous Lean and Neat Stuff Blog.

I'm posting this week's Friday Favorite a day early because I'll be on hiatus tomorrow (it's mah birfday. Wahoo!). Anyway, here's Pershing Square in 1965, before it had been walled off as the elevated concrete plaza it is today:

Photo by Candice (Bessie Smith)

Every Friday I'll post a narrow or otherwise interesting street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday Favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

santa monica boulevard + century park west, century city

2010-03-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

On paper, Santa Monica Blvd. seems like a farily progressive street. It's got bike lanes, frequent bus transport, and a good number of businesses mixed with residential buildings. It connects Westwood to Century City to Beverly Hills — all major destination spots. But the boots-on-the-ground experience is very different.

In reality, Santa Monica is a beast. It is a composite road, comprised of the main boulevard and the one-way "little" Santa Monicas flanking it to provide access to shops + houses. In other words, its design exactly mimics a freeway, with feeder roads acting as a buffering interfaces between high-speed traffic and slower, local activity. The total width of this two-headed serpent can reach up to 17 lanes wide including 3 medians (count 'em!), an absolutely colossal swath that eliminates any sense of speed on the part of the driver — here, 55mph feels normal, and 25mph feels like an intolerable crawl. On foot, it is a truly awesome sight to behold: a freeway that thinks it's a local road; the ultimate collapse of form vs. function.

Narrowed, the street becomes unrecognizable and, amazingly, still remains far too wide (that rampart-like wall on the left doesn't help). It is a classic example of engineer-driven LADOT thinking, in which every street is a "regional conduit." I like to think of Santa Monica as a perfect candidate for infill — a potential real estate goldmine of new shops and apartments that would turn this corridor into not just an actually desireable place to live but also a river of cash for the city. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

2010 LA streetsummit: envisioning urbanism photo gallery

2010-03-23T07:22:00.000-07:00

Did I mention I put together a little group photo exhibit at the LA StreetSummit? Well, here it is! Lots of great folks agreed to participate:

CicLAvía, the group trying to get LA car-free days
Dutton Architects, repurposing LA's freeways as a "Greenway"
Torti Gallas & Partners, with their exquisite before/after renderings
Maggie Leighly, a contributor hailing from El Cerrito in northern California
Diane Meyer, with her portraits of Angelenos who live car-free
and...me!

The photo exhibit starts here on my flickr stream.

2010 LA streetsummit: what i learned

2010-03-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

My report from the wonderfully inspiring 2010 LA StreetSummit is up on Shareable.

There’s never been a better time to get involved. So much has been accomplished since those early efforts by a few lonely cycling activists. LA has run out of excuses, especially now that other cities — including not just New York but Minneapolis, Seattle, and Tucson — have quickly surpassed our City of Angels in the Great Public Space Race.

Read the full article over at Shareable.

grand avenue + 22nd street, los angeles

2010-03-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

As the 2010 LA StreetSummit drew to a close, I couldn't resist taking a parting shot of the LATTC campus. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

2010 LA streetsummit

2010-03-21T09:16:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the ingenious John Leung for the pic.

LA StreetSummit 2010 was a huge, huge success. Humongous congratulations to UEPI and Ramon Martinez for all their hard work. And my talk was big fun, too — lots of laughs and friendly banter. I'm taking a little break to rest up from all this exhilarating activity but I'll post updates soon. See you in a bit!

engineering bikeability for fun + profit: my article on planologie

2010-03-19T08:00:00.000-07:00

I wrote an article for the fabulous Planologie about the potential gold rush that could be had by infilling our megawide streets with new business, featuring this crazy photo mashup. Can you tell which two locations I used?

Why engineer for bikeability? The usual design approach is to paint a stripe, call it a bike lane, and watch helplessly as no one uses it. Bike lanes on [a] six-lane-wide [road] wouldn’t make it that much nicer for cyclists, what with cars routinely speeding by at 45mph. Engineering for bikeability isn’t just about providing traffic infrastructure — it’s about giving people a reason to bike. And the biggest reason people go anywhere? Commerce.

Read the full article.

meet janette sadik-khan

2010-03-19T07:39:00.000-07:00

The 2010 LA StreetSummit kicked off last night at Occidental College in Eagle Rock with a lecture by New York City's Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan: a bike advocate, complete streets engineer, and all around uber-sweet human being.

In reviewing the incredible successes of PlaNYC's pedestrian- and bike-friendly initiatives, Janette made sure to emphasize a few key points of her overall design philosophy. To paraphrase:

Urban reform doesn't have to be expensive or complicated. You can do a whole lot with a can of paint and some imagination to paint the city "green."
Urban reform doesn't have to involve huge sweeping changes. Instead, experiment bit by bit in small increments. If it doesn't work out, no bigs — change it back and move on. If it does (e.g. the awesomification of Times Square) make it permanent.
Safety is paramount. Use women + children as your benchmark, not spandex-clad cycling evangelists. If moms + their kids don't feel safe cycling on the streets, you've still got work to do.

She spoke to a packed auditorium that interrupted her talk with frequent fits of spontaneous applause, followed by a lengthy Q&A session propelled by a palpable hunger for advice and wisdom on how to achieve similar results — i.e. 200 miles of new bike paths in 3 years! — right here in LA. Janette's combination of idealism guided by pragmatism gives her an utterly charming small town sensibility, only applied to a massive, world class setting like New York City. An amazing person. Someone build a freaking statue of her already.

More pix of this inspiring night on my Flickr photostream.

friday favorite: the shambles, york, united kingdom

2010-03-19T07:11:00.000-07:00

Photo: VT_Professor.

Here's The Shambles, one of the most famousest streets in the UK and winner of Google Maps's first ever "Most Picturesque Street" contest. Oh, glorious narrowness. I die from charm.

The contest has inspired The Huffington Post to ask its US readers which street they think is America's most picturesque. I'm a big fan of Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia.

Every Friday I'll post a favorite narrow street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

venice boulevard + helms avenue, culver city

2010-03-18T06:06:00.000-07:00

Ah, Helms Bakery. It's like a home-making, feather-nesting Disneyland for grownups, complete with gourmet carnival food (Father's Office burgers, the Let's Be Frank hot dog truck). But few know the secret identity of Venice Blvd., the street adjacent to Helms. At first glance, it's just another product of LA's insane civil engineer clown posse: a crazy ten-lane wide airstrip of a road running rail-straight for miles, built as if meant to be seen from low orbit, with cars routinely reaching 50 or 60mph. But look closer: there's a bike lane! Trace it on a map, and you'll realize that it's the longest bike lane in all of Los Angeles County, stretching nine miles from Crenshaw Blvd. to the sea — in essence, it's the closest thing to a bicycle boulevard LA has. All that needs to be done is to make cycling on Venice an actually pleasant experience, instead of the freeway-like battle it currently is. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

reminder: the 2010 LA StreetSummit is this saturday!

2010-03-17T15:22:00.001-07:00

Hey kids! StreetSummit is this Saturday, March 20, at the LA Trade Tech College's new South Campus towers + quad at the corner of Grand Avenue and 22nd Street.

The summit begins at 10:30am. I'll be giving a workshop entitled Imagining a Narrower LA: The Everyday Impact of Urban Design from 2:00 - 2:50 pm.

There'll also be a photo exhibit featuring my work and some great visualizations by Colleen Corcoran at CicLAvia, Dutton Architects, Torti Gallas + Partners, and Maggie Leighly.

See you there! Don't forget to register before you go!

happy st. patrick's day!

2010-03-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

Photo: Sergiocruz.

A special favorite for today's holiday! Ireland's world-famous Grafton Street: narrow, alive, and full of wonder around every corner:

Photo: liamandagnieszka.

reader request: wilshire boulevard + westwood boulevard (I)

2010-03-17T06:55:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Donald Weller for the location request.

UCLA has never had a strong college town feel to me, and I suspect Wilshire Blvd. has a lot to do with it. Don't get me wrong: I love Westwood with all mixed-use fun. But just look at Wilshire. At an absolutely insane ten lanes wide, this rubicon effectively prevents the Village from expanding in any real way — indeed, head south on Westwood-past-Wilshire and you'll notice the bars vanish, and the restaurant choices get just a little more expensive (no chance of finding a Diddy Reese there, for example).

Here, lights regulate every kind of maneuver imaginable — crosswalk countdowns, No Turn On Red LED signage, double-lane controlled right turns, double-lane controlled left turns — instilling in drivers (and those on foot) an anxiety so utterly complete that all conversation momentarily stops. More equals less in a situation like this, something its traffic-engineers-gone-wild probably don't understand. Full of movement but empty of life, this intersection is a classic example of overdesign. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

TED talk: Gary Lauder's solution to pointless stop signs

2010-03-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Jennifer Stoeck for the tip.

Virtuosic, blustery 3-minute etude on the overwhelming safety of roundabouts, the pointless economic + environmental waste of stop signs, and a proposal for a delightfully new kind of traffic sign. Via CNN's TED Talk Tuesdays.

why i am obsessed with obesity

2010-03-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

Infographic from the original BBC article entitled "Slimming Sixties Not a Myth."

Charts like the one above fill my eyes with the wonder + curiosity that comes when facing the massive ironies of life. It makes me feel like I'm standing at a weird point in the timeline of humanity, a historical blip people will later snicker at with incredulity — much like we currently do when (say) looking at old cigarette ads featuring doctors. I argue that each of the lifestyle shifts above can be traced down to one common factor: a world increasingly designed around cars.

Sure, it's not the only factor, but hear me out. TVs obviate the need to walk to the theatre, which is now usually located deep within a shopping mall, accessible only by car. Longer, more frequent auto commutes mean less time for household chores. The death of the corner store by the hand of big box retail (always surrounded by a vast moat of parking) has transformed grocery shopping into weekly stockpiling affairs instead of the more manageable daily microchore it once was. The abundance of auto-driven takeout, drive-thrus, and food delivery makes it that much easier to skip cooking altogether.

Auto-centrism itself isn't just a Big Oil conspiracy. It's made up of many tiny, seemingly inconsequential ironies that work to enable our collective inactivity: garage remotes, power windows/steering/doors, controlled lefts, right turns on red, mother-may-I buttons for pedestrians at crosswalks, and so on. All of these "conveniences" (I call them "constraints") share a single obsessive common purpose: to help move as many cars as quickly as possible. Obesity is merely one wave in the fat-ripple effect caused by the car's impact.

I say "ironies" because the factors making up our car conundrum are so small, so arbitrary. We park as close as we can to an entrance. We park underground and take the escalator. We hop into the car upon the slightest hint of rain. It feels very Idiocracy, and I just want to shake people and tell them that just as they shouldn't water crops with Brawndo, they shouldn't reach for the car for every single task. I want to dare them to not use the car for 24 hours, to break the bizarre, daily habit of hurtling oneself along at 50mph in a 3-ton mobile living room.

My friend Ren would tell me this parable about a guy who would put a pebble in his shoe every morning and remove it every night. "No matter how shitty my life is," he reasoned, "I always have control over one thing: removing that pebble at the end of the day." The car feels like that pebble to me — but the difference is that everyone's walking around with pebbles in their shoes, the absurdity of the situation lost to them.

The problem of obesity wasn't caused long ago. It is a problem we fastidiously maintain each and every day, using all the advanced technology we can muster.And yet we behave as if it were some kind of spontaneous curse arising from nothing but the whim of god — an attitude that reveals a kind of egotism on our part, one that declares our problems too vast and mysterious to be broken down into clear design patterns.

But we've cracked more complicated codes than this. We're smart monkeys! We know, for the most part, exactly how we're causing obesity: how we're ignoring the good habits of our slimmer ancestors and are deliberately choosing to be addicted to and enchanted by our own technological complexity, even as we create nostalgic mementoes to simplicity in needlepoint. In other words, we seem to be very impressed with our own drama — distracted and unable to fully see the gravity of our potential tragedy. As a result, we wind up not letting ourselves have as much fun as we could during our short stints here on Earth.

And that is why I'm obsessed with obesity.

melrose avenue + westmount drive, west hollywood

2010-03-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

Don't let its egalitarian-sounding name fool you — WeHo's Avenues of Art + Design are a secret triangular enclave where the rich + famous go for spa days or nest-feathering excursions at ultra-high-end galleries and home furnishing stores (if you can call a $4,000 chrome vase a home furnishing). It's all charming enough, I guess, if predictably devoid of foot traffic (could you imagine the paparazzi?). Except for this little pocket of activity here at Urth Cafe, where I once got the ped-wave from Jason Statham as he strolled across the crosswalk in front of my car. Wahoo, star gazing! Right. So. I find there's not a whole lot to say about the wealthier parts of our fair city, whose coldly stylish streets would be just as frigid whether they were 2 or 200 lanes wide. Community + public space just don't matter to people with enough cash to create their own private kingdoms. Let's just enjoy the narrowed view then, shall we?
See it narrowed!
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friday favorites: nord alley, seattle, washington

2010-03-12T05:43:00.000-08:00

How nice is this? It's a shot of competition display night party for the recent Green Alleys Competition, in which architects took Seattle's alleys and made them livable. The one above is in historic Pioneer Square. Via MyUrbanist, who has a great 12-point list of urban "placemaking" principles with strong echoes of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language:

Emphasize an alluring focal point.
Use hanging green.
Use simple, green plantings and encourage ornamental building features in the path of view.
Where possible, enhance multi-level exposure to vernacular buildings amid the urban fabric.
Provide varied forms of encounter with surrounding commercial uses.
Celebrate exotic signage.
Provide for a multi-color, mixed use environment.
Together amplify angle, color and texture to highlight organic street life.
Enhance structural features to frame places enroute.
Celebrate the marketplaces of vending and dining.
Make angles magical.
Highlight iconic buildings.

Every Friday I'll post a favorite narrow street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

i'll be at LA streetsummit...will you?

2010-03-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

It's time for the 2010 LA StreetSummit! It's a gathering of community residents, activists, and researchers at L.A. Trade Tech in Downtown LA, coordinated by the ever-dedicated Ramon Martinez. It's on Saturday, March 20.

I'll be there, giving a workshop entitled Imagining a Narrower LA: The Everyday Impact of Urban Design at 2pm.

There'll also be a little photo exhibit featuring work by NS:LA, CicLAvia, and contributors to GOOD Magazine's 2009 Livable Streets photo contest. Come on by! It'll be fun!

rodeo drive + dayton way, beverly hills

2010-03-11T07:32:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned cartoon places (like The Grove) before, and to the left of this shot of Rodeo Drive there's one of the cartooniest places in LA: a little strip mall designed to look like a charming, car-free street straight out of Paris, complete with ornamented bollards, cobblestones, and even an incline for a dash of naturalism. Its artificiality is exacerbated by Rodeo Drive itself, a five-laner that, while well-appointed with street furniture like medians and bulbs, is otherwise your typical American drag strip: straight + narrow, with its cars all itching for speed. Narrowing Rodeo makes that little incline feel less like a one-off novelty and more like a properly integrated part of the city. See it narrowed!
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meet ramon martinez

2010-03-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

I'm honored to say that Ramon has been a fan of NS:LA pretty much from the start, and he's one of the most dedicated + driven people I've had the pleasure of encountering. He helps day laborers fix their bikes for free; he lobbies the city for bike- and walker-friendly urban initiatives; he's a tireless advocate for sustainable streets.

He also helps coordinate the 2010 StreetSummit, an annual gathering of community residents, speakers, and researchers devoted to complete streets on March 20 at LA Trade Tech in downtown LA. I'll be there too, giving my own workshop entitled The Everyday Impact of Urban Design. Everyone's invited! :)

Read more about Ramon at a recent LA Times profile article.

wilshire boulevard + curson avenue, miracle mile

2010-03-10T06:44:00.000-08:00

I have a thing for utopian placenames: Century City, Hawaiian Gardens, Universal City. They represent someone's relentless optimism, a brazen Ayn Rand-ian ambition that refuses to accept irony. Take "Miracle Mile": a strip of Wilshire deliberately designed for a once-new car age, first ever in the nation with dedicated left turn lanes, timed signals, and street signage big enough to be read at 30mph — a harbinger of car-centric things to come.

Giving a street such a grandiose name is of course fraught with disappointment given the plain, flat light of everyday reality, and the now-90-year-old Miracle Mile is not immune. It hasn't aged well; its one-note scale + aesthetic just feel like a bad habit. It's a traffic chokepoint, and hungry E! employees must wait forever just to cross the street for some Koo Koo Roo. So howsabout this: let's leave utopia to those crazy new-worlders in Dubai or Shanghai. Let's get over our grand visions of the future; let's get smaller + comfier. And then let's get lunch. See it narrowed!
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grand avenue + 1st street (southwest), downtown

2010-03-09T07:09:00.000-08:00

Despite being known for its innovation, LA can be a pretty monotonous city, with most buildings following a single, odd format: cars park in the rear and visitors enter from behind, causing street-facing facades to become dead spots with disuse. Even the Disney Concert Hall, one of LA's greatest monuments, follows this car-centric layout, creating an eerie lack of street life even on big show nights. This standard "Parking in Rear" layout, however innocent, has the unexpected effect of creating the isolated destinations our city is so famous for -- allowing contradictions like the drama of a sublime architectural wonder juxtaposed to the utter banality of a parking structure directly across the street. Narrowing this scene highlights this paradox; the left side of Grand suddenly begs for cafes, shops, and bars. See it narrowed!
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my parents’ house

2010-03-08T06:03:00.000-08:00

I remember when my family first moved out of the crime + noise of '70s LA and into the suburban havens of Orange County. Orange County had zero caché back then (no one called it "The OC") but it did have plenty of sun, space, and quiet. It was half rural, with most subdivisions still sharing land with nearby fields of bean, lettuce, and strawberry. I remember the huge, futuristic scale of its new-for-1977 homes, with their giant rooftop foreheads and facades dominated by garage doors: each house a rectangular prism formed by two large blank planes, with just the lower right corner reserved for a dash of faux-period styling. Turns out this minimalism was a great cost-cutting measure, a kind of artificially flavored, starch-heavy architectural recipe that becomes pretty evident when you narrow the sucker down — it's as if they took a somewhat normal-looking cottage and stretched out the cheap parts for the sake of volume. Still, I love my parents' house, and like the junk food of my tween years it inevitably has become a nostalgia-driven part of my aesthetic. See it narrowed!
High quality prints not available ;)

interview by openalex

2010-03-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

Alex Aylett posted a fun skype interview with me on his lovely blog openalex in which he calls me an "almost accidental activist," ha. :)

Alex also writes for the equally awesome WorldChanging, making him a super-duper double-threat urban sustainability ninja.

friday favorites: lucca, italy

2010-03-05T07:46:00.000-08:00

Depth, drama, and mystery, all packed into a street not 20 feet wide.

Every Friday I'll post a favorite narrow street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

culver boulevard + cardiff avenue, culver city

2010-03-04T06:38:00.000-08:00

I love Washington Square. Everyone loves Washington Square. Parking structures are tastefully hidden away out of sight; great food abounds, with outdoor seating placed away from traffic; and hey, there's a few theaters, too. This whole Asian-fusion enchilada is deftly bookended by an iconic Flatiron-esque hotel at one end (above) and the dapper Kirk Douglas theater at the other, clearly defining the district and giving it historical context.

It's just that every time I go there, I have an awkward time crossing the street. Everyone does. Washington's left turn lanes cut through the center planting strip at an angle, creating a confusing little web of crosswalks, controlled traffic signals, and mother-may-I buttons (as in, "mother may I walk across the street at the next green cycle?"). I'm not the only one who's mildly baffled — I've seen plenty of other people hesitate at curb cuts before skittering across with an awkward giggle and some sort of ironic declaration: "We're gonna get ourselves killed!" Stripping out that complicated median makes the act of crossing the street more what it should be: effortless. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

washington boulevard terminus, venice

2010-03-03T06:27:00.000-08:00

Southern California has always had an odd attitude about its beach towns. From Laguna to Huntington to Venice, beaches were once thought of as either crude campgrounds or not-so-nice places to live: makeshift shantytowns for dirty hippies + scary Hell's Angels types. Our attitudes since then have of course completely changed, to the point where the phrase "beachfront property" has become a cliché indicating the highest echelon of lifelong real estate aspirations — but the beach, no matter how you dress it up, still has a slapdash foundation rooted in the past. You can see it in the almost complete lack of amenities along the Strand; in PCH's eight lanes of freeway-speed traffic; in Santa Monica's big blacktop binge, with more space dedicated to parking than to her world-famous pier itself; and finally here, at the place where Washington Blvd. (LA's longest east-west artery) unceremoniously meets the ocean as a herringbone lot. Venice maintains its charm despite being saddled with legacy infrastructural oddities (i.e. the bike-hostile ~~Speedway~~ Pacific Avenue), and with narrower streets it starts to less like a truck stop and more like the scruffy, laid-back beach bum we all love. See it narrowed!
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jh crawford on carbusters.org: making today’s cities carfree

2010-03-02T09:52:00.000-08:00

Above: Crawford's 1997 plan for a carfree Lyon.

JH Crawford, author of Carfree Cities and personal hero, has an article up on Carbusters, kickin' ass + droppin' science. He rocks my little world.

I do not foresee that cars will completely disappear. Eventually, their use in cities will be largely or entirely prohibited, but a transport mode that reaches rural areas is required, probably involving some continued use of private cars. The interface between rural cars and the city thus requires careful planning. I propose simply to build multi-story parking garages (preferably underground) at the city’s edge for visitors’ cars and car-sharing vehicles. City residents who regularly need a car to travel outside the city could rent a space. These garages must be linked to the city by good public transport. This is, of course, less convenient that driving directly to a destination within the city and will discourage people from using cars unnecessarily.

Read the whole article »

main street + hill street, santa monica

2010-03-02T05:37:00.000-08:00

Main Street in Santa Monica is one of the rare streets in LA with a true mix of transportation modes: you've got respectable numbers of walkers, busses, cars, bikes, rollerbladers, skateboarders, longboarders, unicyclists — you name it — all movin' right along at very moderate speeds to + from a nice variety of retail ranging from high-end boutiques to the more utilitarian car washes + cafes. It's a less car-obsessed street than most (unlike its high-strung neighbor Neilson Way), despite still being five lanes wide. One bright day, while waiting for my jewelry-obsessed wife to finish gemstone shopping, I wondered: how would it look with more honest proportions — proportions that better reflect its actual character? Narrowed, Main Street's sidewalks begin to feel wider. Building details, like the ornamental brickwork to the right, come into closer focus. And with less black asphalt around, this already sunny street becomes that much sunnier. See it narrowed!
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sunset boulevard + virgil avenue (II)

2010-03-01T06:26:00.000-08:00

Another view of the reader request from a couple weeks back. That old Vista theater is just so cool, and dying to be paired with something other than the silly (and ironic) Blockbuster across the street. See it narrowed!
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friday favorites: hanbury road, london

2010-02-26T06:19:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my pal Jacob for the tip.

This week's favorite comes to you from London, UK, via a fantastic article from the Next American City that talks about the correlation between traffic speed and pedestrian fatality. Incredible stuff:

5 percent of people die when struck by a motorist going 20 mph
45 percent of people die when struck by a motorist going 30 mph
85 percent of people die when struck by a motorist going 40 mph
When cars exceed 20 mph, the comfort level of cyclists and pedestrians drops significantly

Eye contact between drivers, and between drivers and pedestrians, drops rapidly at speeds greater than 20 mph
Driving 20 mph requires a stopping distance of 150 feet, driving 30 mph requires a stopping distance of 200 feet, driving 35 mph requires a stopping distance of 250 feet.

Another gem related to this topic of street speed vs. safety comes from an article by the ever-awesome Streetsblog covering Toyota's recent hearing in the House oversight committee. Within, this juicy "rule of thumb" from a 2007 AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety study:

When travel speed increases by 1%, the injury crash rate increases by about 2%, the serious injury crash rate increases by about 3%, and the fatal crash rate increases by about 4%. The same relation holds in reverse: a 1% decrease in travel speed reduces injury crashes by about 2%, serious injury crashes by about 3%, and fatal crashes by about 4%.

Compelling proof that even the smallest changes in traffic speed can make the biggest difference for the safety of pedestrians. (I still hate the word "pedestrians." There must be a better alternative. "Walkers?" "People?")

Anyway, back to the photo: its photographer, Alan Stanton, has a very nice (and obsessive!) collection of street photos covering not just the bad & the ugly but also the good, including this lovely shot of the car-free Green Lanes Harringay Festival. Definitely worth checking out—do click through for a visit.

Every Friday I'll post a favorite narrow street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

melrose avenue + gower street

2010-02-25T06:18:00.000-08:00

You know why LA is so full of paradoxes? Because it's so paradoxical! Seriously, look at this street. There are well-known, if few, signs of life: the moderately-famous Astro Burger, right across from the world-famous Paramount studios. We see a hip home furnishings store; we notice a cocktails sign. And yet, most of the sidewalk is "dead" space: no buildings interface with those walking; most pedestrians (man, that word bugs me) won't be able to see the globe atop Paramount, which is built at car-scale, like a roadside castle. With billboards. These buildings-that-are-not-really-buildings (i.e. where are the entrances?) are the kind of thing that gives LA its confusing quality, like that one Twilight Zone episode where a couple finds themselves marooned in a suburb entirely built out of fake props: real, but not; substantial, but empty; ostensibly built for humans, but almost devoid of them. I say it a lot, and I'll say it again: Ballardian. Curiously, narrowing this part of Melrose doesn't help its livability but does reveal what it actually is: a back alley. See it narrowed!
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crenshaw boulevard + martin luther king, jr. boulevard (I)

2010-02-24T06:13:00.000-08:00

MLK Boulevards around America get a bad rap. They run through poorer areas, forming scar lines across neighborhoods with histories of gentrification and racial tension. Chris Rock has cracked jokes about the street name, saying "it ain't the safest place to be." All this criticism seems unfair + overly harsh; just minutes from the location in this photo, for example, you can find The Jim Gillian Recreation Center, of LA's nicest parks featuring tennis courts, soccer pitches, baseball diamonds, and putting greens, as well as the massive Crenshaw Plaza shopping mall. Here at street level, however, it's a tough sell — seven lanes flow fast + furious past long, "dead" stretches of buildings that either lack interfaces for foot traffic or sit aloof behind intimidating parking setbacks, effectively killing street life. And everyone knows that a lack of street life breeds suspicion + fear, like the street crosser hiding his face in the before photo, or the mistrustful bus-watcher to his right. I'm just a photographer, people — and if I were one among hundreds of people on another, better-populated street, you wouldn't even give me a second glance. See it narrowed!
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reader request: colorado boulevard + mount royal drive, eagle rock

2010-02-23T05:45:00.000-08:00

Thanks again to Ramon Martinez for the location request.

Eagle Rock prides itself on being LA's hometown, a cozy village just a few minutes away from the bustle of Los Angeles proper. But it was tough for me to get that sense while snapping pix along its main thoroughfare, Colorado Boulevard: a speedy + sometimes fatal dragstrip (four people and an unborn baby died on this "small" local road in August 2008) that is a never-ending source of frustration for local traffic enforcement officials struggling against that classic paradox of sprawl — a city that tries to act country, with denizens pretending their hardest to enjoy a stroll alongside six lanes of 50mph traffic. Colorado, which at Townsend represents the historic core of Eagle Rock, once boasted streetcars linking it to the rest of the Southland — streetcars that once justified such a wide street. But why pretend? Why not re-imagine Colorado at a human scale, to bring it back to its Mayberry Street roots? See it narrowed!
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reader request: eagle rock boulevard + yosemite drive, eagle rock

2010-02-22T07:18:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Ramon Martinez for the location request.

It's easy to imagine the famous Red Car trains running along this stretch of Eagle Rock Blvd., like they once did back in the day. In fact, a train line down the middle of this road would make sense, given its width. Without the train, however, it feels lonely + placeless; the dedicated left-turn lane flanked by an extra-wide lane buffer to the left and double-double yellow lines to the right seems like overkill, as if street painters had too much canvas to work with. How great would it be to bring back the trains and return this street to its original sense of scale? See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

friday favorites: sitges, spain

2010-02-19T05:45:00.000-08:00

Peek-a-boo! That's me popping out of a tiny secret passage in the sunny seaside village of Sitges, Spain.

Every Friday I'll post a favorite narrow street snapshot from somewhere around the world. Got a Friday favorite of your own? Send me your photos!

reader request: huntington drive + san marino avenue, san marino (II)

2010-02-18T05:49:00.000-08:00

Here's another view of last week's reader request from Allison Achauer.

Huntington Drive becomes all but unrecognizable when narrowed down to a single lane, and little details (the clock tower, City Hall's flagpole) all begin to make a little more sense for this quiet, cozy suburb. That cyclist would be a happier camper without cars whizzing by at 55mph, wouldn'tcha say? See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

reader request: sunset boulevard + virgil avenue

2010-02-17T06:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks to NS:LA regular Andy Hurvitz for the location request.

It's tough to tell at a glance, but this little crossroads is chock full of goodies: Acapulco Mexican restaurant, Rudy's Barbers, El Chavo Restaurant, Uncle Jer's curiosity shop, and the historic Vista theatre. On paper, it's the perfect place to get a haircut, dinner, and some window shopping fun before a movie. Reality's a little more challenging, with each zig and/or zag across Sunset requiring interminable waits at the huge paralellogram intersection. Narrowing things thrusts street life to the foreground, transforms streethopping into a more sprightly affair, and obviates the need for heavy-handed formalities like that dedicated left turn signage looming above the road like a giant staple — which, when abbreviated, could serve nicely as gateway to let people know they've entered a new + unique neighborhood.See it narrowed!
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6th street + park view street, macarthur park

2010-02-16T05:38:00.000-08:00

Another angle of reader Herbie Huff's location request from a few weeks ago, this time with a nice view of Macarthur Park. Currently Park View is an oddball little low-traffic space devoted solely to parking. Narrowed, it practically begs to have kiosk vendors running along that wide sidewalk on the right. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available

larchmont boulevard

2010-02-15T05:33:00.000-08:00

Why does angled, head-in parking make any shopping strip suddenly feel like Main Street, USA? For some mysterious reason this simple design pattern has a cozy-ing effect, making you feel like you've stepped out of your car and into a small upscale village retreat. Larchmont's width, however, is still prodigious enough to elicit a single odd design choice: notice the little red dot in the photo's dead center? It's a stop sign, and it marks the only officially sanctioned spot to safely cross back + forth — a telltale clue that city planners deemed the street too fast for safe jaywalking. Weird to build a shopping village in such a way, no? If I were a store owner, I'd love to be located on a the street narrow enough to encourage more traversing by shoppers, all zigzagging back and forth along dozens of impulsive desire lines. See it narrowed!
High quality prints available