If you asked anyone to put the notion of “cable cars” and “California” together, they would undoubtedly imagine San Francisco and its long history of cabled transit. But Los Angeles enjoyed its own cable car era, roughly between 1880 and 1890. When Andrew…
6 Years, 2,000 Posts & 1 Million Emails Later: The Top 5 Reasons You Should Be Following The Los Angeles Transportation Headlines
Our social media outreach consists of numerous online properties ranging from resource sharing to social networking, but five years ago, it all began with our Los Angeles Transportation Headlines Blog. In late 2005, taking a cue from the transportation…
How We Travel: A Sustainable National Program For Travel Data
The U.S. transportation system serves hundreds of millions of travelers and handles millions of tons of freight each day to help ensure the efficient movement of peopl eand goods in support of personal goals and domestic and international commerce. A…
A Closer Look At Failure To Act: The Economic Impact Of Current Investment Trends In Surface Transportation Infrastructure
The nation’s surface transportation infrastructure includes the critical highways, bridges, railroads, and transit systems that enable people and goods to access the markets, services, and inputs of production essential to America’s economic vitality. For many years, the nation’s surface transportation…
Movin’ On Up To Incomplete Streets: “Ultimate Traffic Relief” Through The 1946 Elevated Sidewalks Proposal For Los Angeles
How do you solve traffic congestion downtown? By removing pedestrians, of course! In our never-ending quest to collect, organize and provide access to Los Angeles’ historic traffic proposals, we have repeatedly run into some eye-popping proposals worthy of a…
How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, And The Environment In Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
A notable new title about Los Angeles’ struggles with oil drilling, air pollution, flooding, and water and power supplies exposes the clout business has had over government. In How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, And The Environment In…
Streetcar In The Sea Update: More About The 1950s “Transit Reefs” Of Los Angeles
Back in May, we wrote about old Los Angeles Transit Lines streetcars being dumped off the coast of Redondo Beach to create artificial reefs. That post was inspired by photo essays in the New York Times and other publications published…
60 Years Ago This Week: Los Angeles Gets Its First Publicly-Governed Transportation Planning Agency
A few days ago, we marked an important milestone in Los Angeles’ transit and transportation history. The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority (LAMTA) was formed as the city’s first publicly-run transit planning agency by the State of California on July 24, 1951. Sometimes referred…
Follow Me: Tweeting Transit News Builds Community, Knowledge & New Information Tools
We hit a milestone today: we acquired our 2,000th follower on the Metro Transportation Library & Archive Twitter account. Earlier today, Thousand Oaks Transit followed us on Twitter, pushing us past the 2,000 mark for the first time. Launched just…
Mapping Los Angeles’ Transportation Legacy: Metro Library & Archive Brings History Alive As A Global Launch Partner For Historypin
This month, we’re proud to announce our role as a Global Launch Partner in Historypin — a new multi-platform technology that strives to share photographs from around the world and the stories behind them — in bringing together people and…
The Big Roads: The Untold Story Of The Engineers, Visionaries, And Trailblazers Who Created The American Superhighways
A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escape — the U.S. interstate system changed the face of our country. The Big Roads: The Untold Story Of the Engineers,…