Despite fierce opposition from residents and concerns by two City Council members, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has ordered Los Angeles transportation officials to implement a plan to make Pico Boulevard mostly one-way eastbound, and Olympic Boulevard mostly one-way westbound.
Under the mayor’s plan, which had stalled earlier this week in a City Council committee, parking would be forbidden on all but a few stretches of Pico and Olympic during rush hour beginning March 8.
JOE EMAILS:
You should cover this.
There are new signs up in some shops on Pico, including Delice bakery and a printer across the street from them, about this, with a website (sorry, I forget the URL). There appear to be several groups opposed to the plan, including this one:
http://wilshirehighlands.org/Given that this is an ongoing issue, with meetings, etc., you could do some local reporting, which I know you feel is important (as in your discussion of the Jewish Journal’s reportage).
Here’s a good link from the LA Times, with quotes from Delice’s owner about it–with a bit of Googling around every week (e.g. for these terms: Pico Olympic Traffic), you can blog on this without even having to do any original work or, if you choose, with a mix of original work + linking to articles like this one.
And you could get some mileage out of asking locals what they think, in terms of comments, etc. By the way, with video, you could get some nice stuff—Delice is a photogenic location, the owner of Delice seems like an articulate guy, and you could make it a bit funny by doing a final summation (as
newscasters do) after the interview by staring seriously into the camera while summing it all up…while chowing down on a Delice pastry. And, you could use this to interview (and thereby get to know) the politicians supporting the move and so on.And: traffic in LA these days is a big deal. There might be a whole blog just in that topic, between measures like this, technological fixes in the works, future plans on the drawing board, etc. And, it’s not even just an LA thing–many cities are grappling with fixes for it.
Joe, it just seems so mundane compared to the weighty religious matters that normally preoccupy this blog — faith, hope and love. Out of all of them, the greatest is love.
