Building Smart Neighborhoods
Once again this year, the Los Angeles region has been named the most congested in America. But Los Angeles is finding more and more challengers for that title. Communities all across the nation are struggling with increased congestion. According to the Texas Transportation Institute, traffic congestion is "growing across the nation in cities of all sizes, consuming more hours of the day, and affecting more travelers and shipments of goods than ever before."
In response to this challenge, we have heard the familiar refrain that the answer is to build more roads. But the problem of congestion cannot be solved just by building roads and adding buses.
Too often, we look at transportation issues in a vacuum, as if none of our other decisions about economic development, housing, or zoning have any impact on congestion. But all these issues are inter-related. We need to start looking at the links between how we get from place to place and how we build our cities and our neighborhoods. If customers get stuck in traffic and can’t get to stores, those stores lose business. If workers can’t afford homes near their jobs, they end up driving for hours each day, losing time with their families.
The good news is that there are some very good new ideas sprouting up—many from Southern California—about how to build communities that reduce congestion and support economic growth. My office is trying to bring some of these ideas together in an agenda we call "Smart Neighborhoods." The goal is to find new ideas that bring together transportation, housing and economic development strategies to try to reduce congestion and create jobs.
Some of these new ideas include:
- The reform of our zoning laws in LA, to permit more mixed-use development. This means more neighborhood stores, more shopping options close to people's homes.
- The project to revitalize Santa Barbara Plaza along the Crenshaw Corridor. The new project, known as Marlton Square, is designed to bring new housing and new businesses together into one neighborhood. And it can be easily accessed from the Crenshaw Transit Corridor.
- Crenshaw is currently served by MTA Rapid Bus, but I am working to try to get federal funds to expand the rapid bus service into a true Bus Rapid Transit corridor.
- Transit-Oriented Development: The MTA has become a national leader on this concept. The idea is that you give incentives for new development close to transit stops, and give people options other than cars for visiting these destinations. Rather than building new projects in places where you can only get to them by car, let’s encourage people to build near transit.
This is not about taking away people's cars. Instead, it is about providing choices. We have always associated cars with freedom. But too often today, we have become trapped in our cars. We want those cars to provide freedom again for people, and that means thinking about building our neighborhoods in ways that give people other options for how they get around.