A full house of people at Coalition to Preserve LA’s weekend “Save Your Zip Code” Workshop were the first Angelenos to see our exclusive Mapping Tool created for us by geographers at CSUN.
It allows YOU to see if your home, school, business or park is being swept into a “Transit Priority Area” – zones the City of LA is/will be using to approve high-rises next to homes, digital billboards in quiet areas, and apartment buildings with zero parking.
The Los Angeles Planning Department illegally withheld this FULLY PUBLIC mapping data from the Coalition to Preserve LA for eight months. City Planners told us they “didn’t have it” and then gave us Radio Silence. The Transit Priority Maps made public by the City Planning Department are, not surprisingly, USELESS to people.
CSUN geography professor Davide Deis made us USABLE maps for the public, after finding the mapping data hiding in plain sight on an obscure government open-source website, where it sat for a long time!
Prof. Deis created the fantastic Mapping Tool from that data. Click here to access the Transit Priority Area Mapping Tool.
To use the map at that link, type into the search box your neighborhood, or zip or address. Zoom right down to your own building’s level, voila!
BTW, the giant pink dots in the Mapping Tool, covering most of LA, are Transit Priority Areas. The skinny orange tubes covering the entire city are “High Quality Transit Corridors”– a concept backed by Jerry Brown and state Sen. Scott Weiner to allow massive development and huge complexes without parking, even if your neighborhood is NOT close to good transit.
The Mapping Tool was a key highlight of four Sunday “Save Your Zip Code” workshops by experts who challenge bad planning and bad design in the City of Los Angeles.
Our experts were so good that Angelenos DID NOT GO HOME when the workshops were over! Our workshops starred: California Environmental Quality Act attorney Jamie Hall, former city planner and widely published expert Dick Platkin, urban planner/Neighborhood Council consultant on open space Carrie Sutkin, and road diet/transit expert Ken Alpern, co-f0under of the Transit Coalition.
The packed house focused on robust Q & A from a diverse audience drawn from every part of L.A.
The day wrapped with the roll-out of two CRUCIAL TOOLS for Angelenos who don’t think Los Angeles City Hall is involved in good planning and good design:
- The incredibly easy-to-use mapping tool by Prof. David Deis at CSUN. Click here to access the tool which allows anyone to find out if they live, work or play inside a “Transit Priority Area”.
- “L.A.’s True Growth, 2010-2020”: Coalition to Preserve LA hired an independent demographer to assess fresh U.S. Census information about LA, to get at the truth. We have learned: LA will grow by only 8% between 2010-2020 and has not passed 4 million as the Downtown boosters and the media have claimed for months.
We are including links to all four power point presentations below. At the end of each PowerPoint you will find the chart: “L.A.’s True Growth, 2010-2020” with each neighborhoods’ true growth rate.
Dick Platkin’s “Pushing Back Against The Cheaters”
Carrie Sutkin’s “Case Study: How the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council Mobilized 2013 to present”
Ken Alpern’s “Vision Zero Fail. Case Study: A Great Street Turns Road Diet”
Jamie Hall’s “How to Organize Against Bad Development and Win in Los Angeles”
The Coalition will hold its second Save Your Zip Code day of workshops in March! If you’d like to attend or learn more, contact us at [email protected]