![]() Check that, Colbert’s coverage was actually restrained comparatively. From ABC 7’s bizarre campaign encouraging people to download a phone application to “beat” a highway closure and drive wherever they wanted, to their celebratory “We Beat Carmageddon!” coverage on Sunday it was hard to tell if I was watching local news or the Colbert Report. The big losers have to be the local media. team did a great job this weekend and the months leading up to Carmageddon. Whether you thought the coverage was overblown or not, this p.r. They used every media trick in the book, both old and new, and there was pretty much nobody in the area that didn’t know what was happening. team at Metro for doing a masterful job of getting the word out about the closure. The silver medal for the weekend has to go to the p.r. Did the Carmageddon sub-plot of this race have anything to do with Angelenos leaving their cars at home for the weekend? We’ll never know but more than anyone else this unlikely team were the heroes of the weekend. Thousands were entertained, a city’s spirits were raised, and cycling in Los Angeles was portrayed in a positive light. ![]() ![]() Never have so many watched a “race” on twitter and a webpage with a GPS map. While the warnings of the upcoming Apocalypse were everywhere, the Wolfpack Hustle, Gary Kavanagh, Ezra Horne, Joe Anthony and Jet Blue Airlines gave Angelenos something fun to do on Saturday. People keep saying this picture, and one's like it, are "pretty." Yeah, except for the asphalt. Streetsblog this weekend, you can catchup on the story here, here and here. If you’re not one of the 20,000 people that visited L.A. Of course, I was home in time to watch the now legendary flight v bike (v Metro v in-line skater) race that took place. anchor joked that after the re-opening of the 405 “we can all go back to being miserable.” On Saturday morning, I took a bike ride to Culver City with my son and my Mom and we commented how it was one of the more pleasant rides we had had on surface streets (without a police escort.) One Fox L.A. The flight path for the Jet Blue flight in #flightvbike flew 145 kms = 90 miles. Reporters interviewed more people extolling the virtues of the day and talk about how great the city was with less cars mucking up the system. In fact, most people seemed to think this was a great weekend, even better and more relaxing than the usual two-day break. on Saturdayĭespite all the warnings, media induced panic, apocryphal visions and ABC 7’s constant messaging that we needed to “fight back” by downloading a phone application to help you drive somewhere else Angelenos made the smart choices this weekend. After all, while the city and surrounding area benefitted tremendously from the closure of the 405, the reason the project was closed was so that they could expand the freeway, creating another pipe to flush our car traffic through. The sad thing is, most transportation planners, especially ones working in Greater Los Angeles, still seem to believe the first theory. If you believe the second, then everything should have been fine. There should have been drivers everywhere stuck on surface streets and gridlock should have clogged up all the freeways as people used their high-tech Waze application to “Beat Carmageddon” by exercising their God-given right to drive wherever they want to. If you believe the first theory, this weekend’s temporary closure of the I-405, “the most driven highway in the country,” should have been a disaster. Under that theory, if you spend a disproportionate amount of resources building and expanding highways, people will drive, even for short trips that could easily be completed on bike or foot. The other theory is that people make choices based on what they believe makes the most sense at the time. This theory got kicked in the shins over the last weekend. This theory has dominated traffic and transportation plans for years. If you add more space for it to flow, it will flow more smoothly. If you block it in one place, it will flow someplace else. One theory is that traffic is like a raging river. There are two theories to transportation engineering and traffic. ![]() This banner appeared over the I-10 briefly on Saturday morning.
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