Forty years ago today, at 6:01 a.m., an earthquake near San Fernando measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale rolled across Southern California, leaving at least 65 dead and staggering structural damage. While the Northridge Earthquake of 1994 is the largest shaker in recent…
Category: All Posts
All Posts
1,000,000 And Counting: Metro Library’s Historic Photo Collection On Flickr Hits A Major Milestone
Today, we achieved something extraordinary: Our online photo collection has been viewed more than one million times on Flickr since implementation. Just over two years ago, we began uploading the first of what is now more than 7,000 scanned images from our historic…
Research Roundup: Which High-Speed Rail Corridors Are Poised For Success? How Does Smart Growth Promote Wealth? Why Is Intercity Bus Travel The Fastest Growing Transportation Mode?
The United States has embarked on a program of building high-speed rail corridors in the nation’s most urbanized corridors and regions. This is a bold step toward meeting the infrastructure needs of the coming century, including providing capacity for economic…
New And Notable: Reinventing The Automobile Through Personal Urban Mobility, Sustainable Urban Development Reader & Urban Design For An Urban Century
Reinventing The Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility For The 21st Century provides a long-overdue vision for a new automobile era. The cars we drive today follow the same underlying design principles as the Model Ts of a hundred years ago and…
20 Years Ago Today: Groundbreaking For The “Fully Automated” Metro Green Line…But Why Doesn’t It Go To LAX?
Today marks the 20th anniversary of Metro’s Green Line groundbreaking. The 23-mile long rail line connects Norwalk in the east to El Segundo and Westchester in the west. Speakers at the groundbreaking ceremony held at the future Aviation / LAX…
Reading L.A.: The Los Angeles Times Takes On The Literature Of L.A.’s Architecture & Urbanism Throughout 2011
Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne has announced a new year-long project titled “Reading L.A.” Each month, Hawthorne will be examining Los Angeles through the lens of classic writing in the fields of Southern California architecture and urbanism. He…
New And Notable: L.A. As “Smogtown,” Ethics Of Metropolitan Growth & Integrated Transport
Following the retirement of the MTA’s last diesel bus and our post about the 1943 “birth of smog” in Los angeles, we wanted to highlight the recent acquisition of Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History Of Pollution In Los Angeles. Encapsulating the…
“Angeleños?”: You Say AN-jell-ease, I Say AN-juh-luhs
People who live in Los Angeles may find themselves asking a deceptively simple question more than residents of other cities: Who are we? Los Angeles’ history is shorter than most major American cities, but it is vastly complex and obviously…
New & Notable: Language Of Towns And Cities, Urbanism And Climate Change & History Of The Paris Métro
Weighing in at more than 800 pages, Dhiru A. Thadani’s new work is destined to be the final word on the language of urban planning and design. The Language of Towns and Cities: A Visual Dictionary is a landmark publication…
Los Angeles’ First Diesel Buses: A Look Back At The Fleet & The 1943 Birth Of Smog
Today, the Los Angeles County Metrpolitan Transportation Authority retired its last diesel bus from its fleet of over 2,200 vehicles. This historic day marks Metro’s claim to be the first major transit agency in the world to operate only alternative-fuel…