It won’t be easy: The stereotype linking dedicated pedestrianism and mental instability has proved remarkably hardy in Los Angeles. Maybe, along the way, she can help retire the idea that you have to be crazy to walk in this city. Gabel-Luddy, whose office produced a new “Walkability Checklist” for engineers and developers in January, doesn’t just want to make the streets safe from that kind of vehicular chaos. Spectacular crashes happen almost weekly. Although the young families and the new businesses that have moved into the neighborhood during the last decade are clearly anticipating the boulevard’s great potential as a pedestrian enclave, motorists still drive 60 or even 70 mph along certain stretches. It’s one more way in which gridlock might actually strengthen a sense of neighborhood in this city.Ĭolorado Boulevard, which is six lanes wide in some places near my house, is essentially a roaring highway lined with shops. Once the cars slow down, the walkers will come. of the future is if the city makes them dramatically less efficient-at least as automotive arteries. The only way major boulevards are going to work for the L.A. planning was all about moving cars: How can we move them faster, more efficiently, and if we have a bottleneck, can we widen the street to move them faster and more efficiently?”īut in many neighborhoods-in Eagle Rock, for one, where I live-even laypeople are coming to the conclusion that the old approach is outdated and needs to be turned on its ear. “In the past,” she told another interviewer earlier this year, “L.A. “What we’re trying to do is reverse-engineer decades of thinking about the city,” Gabel-Luddy told me as we walked through downtown recently on a scorching afternoon. has never paid much attention to anyone who wants to move around on foot instead of on wheels. The toughest challenge? Probably to make Los Angeles work for pedestrians. Its broad mission is to take the city’s reputation as an unplanned, unreal and unwalkable place and erase the “un” from those adjectives. Gabel-Luddy, who trained as a landscape architect and has worked for the city for nearly 30 years, was appointed last year by Planning Director Gail Goldberg to lead L.A.’s new Urban Design Studio. If you made a list of the most daunting job descriptions in Los Angeles, Emily Gabel-Luddy’s would rank near the top.
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