Mayor Talks Transit Projects, Future of L.A.

LOS ANGELES-Historically horizontal and car-crazy Los Angeles has to veer quickly toward vertical growth and mass transit if it wants to succeed as a habitable, sustainable city of the future, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told more than 600 professional planners, city officials, lenders and community leaders in Downtown Los Angeles Thursday. Speaking at the ULI Los Angeles 10th Annual Urban Marketplace gathering at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the mayor focused on the benefits of an initiative called 30/10 that would accelerate the construction of 12 big-ticket transit projects due to be completed from 10 to 30 years from now.

Villaraigosa, just back from a trip to Washington to push for federal support of the 30/10 transportation plan, said that 30/10 would not only help clean up the city’s air and reduce traffic, it would be an economic stimulus that would aid recovery in the region by creating jobs. Despite L.A.’s reputation as a capital of cars and congestion as well as a city of sprawl, Los Angeles “is a city that can remake itself” through initiatives like the 10/30, Villaraigosa declared. He pointed out how the city has already remade parts of itself by way of projects like L.A. Live, new Downtown housing, Hollywood transit-oriented projects and other developments.

There is clearly a new Los Angeles already, the mayor said, a city that is more densely populated but in a positive way. “We are trying to define density not as a bad word, but as a word that can have elegance to it, and be green, and be smart,” the mayor said. Yet the city needs to change even more, he said, and the 30/10 plan is one of the routes to that change. “Four years ago, when I talked about the subway to the sea, people laughed,” Villaraigosa said. “But we are going to build it. All of these transit plans will happen.”