The city of Santa Monica has recently nudged further into implementation of the Bike Action Plan with green paint that arrived on Main Street and Broadway getting new paint, currently still in progress in some areas and completed in others.…
In Santa Monica’s local politics, there is a camp, one of the more active and vocal, sometimes loosely refereed to as “slow growth”, or “no growth”, or sometimes just “anti-development.” There is variation within the generality of the characterization, and…
With the state of California experiencing it’s driest year in record keeping, water, which has always been one of the central defining feature of California politics, is back in the foreground. It may be raining heavily right now, but our…
When it comes to mobility beyond the private automobile, bus systems preform a lot of the heavy lifting. They are spatially efficient, carrying dozens of people in a fraction of the space otherwise distributed in cars, are more energy efficient…
I am excited to see the Michigan Avenue Neighborhood Greenway (MANGo) proposal move forward with council approval, along with the connecting Safe Routes to School plan for Santa Monica High School. It has been quite a process, including some innovative…
In the time that I have participated and written about local political issues in Santa Monica, one of the nuances that I’ve increasingly become acutely aware of, is the deceptive manner in which the word “residents” is frequently employed. Most…
I’m accustomed to seeing the Santa Monica Daily Press littered with largely petty and baseless characterizations of bicycling as some plot to ruin the city on a regular basis, ever since I began living here after college in 2006, but…
There is little doubt that the Expo station adjacent Hines mixed use project proposal (at the site of the long shuttered Papermate factory), which has undergone a number of revisions through out it’s years of public process, will receive a…
The Santa Monica city council voted to scale back the Twilight Concert series in 2014, due to potential risk factors to public safety outlined by the city manager, the fire chief, and chief of police. This will include removing the jumbo-tron…
For my first post of the New Year, I’d like to talk about the concept of bounded rationality, a phrase introduced to me recently upon reading Donnella Meadows book Thinking In Systems. It’s one of those concepts that is quite…
This past Sunday members of the Expo Bicycle Advisory Committee (Expo BAC, of which I am a member), and a few members of Santa Monica Spoke, rode the length of the Expo phase II corridor led by Stephen Villavaso, an…
At this week’s Virginia Park meeting for the Michigan Ave. Neighborhood Greenway proposal, a slightly clearer picture of what we might see for the project emerged. There was particular controversy in the neighborhood over the proposal for a diverter at…
This Saturday city staff will be giving an update on bike plan implementation, the “MANGo” Michigan Avenue Neighborhood Greenway project, and the proposed cycle track for the Colorado Esplanade. Former Santa Monica council member and mayor Richard Bloom, now the…
Broadway and Main St to have their standard bike lanes upgraded to green lanes with more “buffered” width spacing. The budget and contract are on tonight’s council consent calendar agenda. [Lookout, Agenda Staff Report] Also up for council discussion this…
The Expo Line Phase II construction is halfway completed, with many of the bridges nearing completion and the first segments of rail laid into the ground. (Daily Press, Mirror) SMMUSD joins push to reform Prop 13 and loopholes commercial companies…
