Everyday Living

Newsflash: LA Times like cars

By Eric Richardson — November 23, 2004

I read ”Lunch in L.A.? Car Beats Train as Meal Ticket” in today’s LA Times and thought pretty much the same things Will Campbell did. He posted his thoughts on blogging.la, while I contented myself to just sort of scoff and move on. But here I am, commenting… The author of the article has ticket machine problems. I’ve never had...


streetscaping... it's like landscaping, but for streets

By Eric Richardson — November 23, 2004

So I went to a meeting last night about streetscaping on Spring and Main. Now if you’re like me you hear the word “streetscaping” and say “They’ve already got trees out there.” Turns out the CRA thinks streetscaping is a little more than I did. The process of drafting a set of guidelines for streetscaping on these streets...


Downtown: heading east

By Eric Richardson — November 22, 2004

I’ve been downtown for six months now, and I’ve explored a lot of downtown, but one area that I haven’t much ventured into is the east side: Central City East, Little Tokyo, etc. Today I took a very small step in remedying that. First I needed to pick up some DLANC business cards from our office on 1st street, so I grabbed my skateboard and...


formation flying

By Eric Richardson — November 15, 2004

Driving down Fig an hour or so ago I saw a large formation of helicopters heading east to west. Some chopper I didn’t recognize in front, then five or six LAPD birds, and finally five or six Sherrifs department choppers (which I don’t think I’ve seen before). I’m suspecting it was for filming; there’s something going on over on the...


36 Hours in Downtown LA

By Eric Richardson — November 12, 2004

New York Times writer Janelle Brown today has a piece on 36 hours in downtown LA (found via LA Observed). The choices are good… I don’t really understand why the NYT has thrown so much love to the Golden Gopher, but whatever, it’s a trendy choice. I absolutely concur with the recommendation of Conservancy walking tours. That’s something...


626, 727, hike

By Eric Richardson — November 11, 2004

Can I just say now that for how creative they’re all supposed to be, some of the gallery people around me are getting pretty lazy with their naming schemes. Across the street from me and appearing out of the blue Tuesday is 626 Gallery (ok, they probably didn’t show up out of the blue, but I left for school Tuesday morning and when I got back there...


Better get in line now...

By Eric Richardson — November 08, 2004

This Daily News article talks about a shared-cost plan for sidewalk repair. The “WHA?!?” moment is at the end, when we get this gem: This year, the City Council set aside enough money to replace 52 miles of sidewalks, but with a 4,600-mile backlog of damaged sidewalks, the average wait is about 80 years, Robertson said. See, here’s the thing...


ah, that 710 gap

By Eric Richardson — November 05, 2004
1 Comment

The Pasadena Star News today has an article about the MTA studying the possibility of a tunnel to complete the 710. When I first started working up here at JPL two years ago I was confused by the short little dead-end spur of the 210 that I would get onto off of California. I later read that this spur had been intended to connect to the 710 (and occasionally...


LA Times on NextBus

By Eric Richardson — November 02, 2004

The LA Times today has an article on NextBus in Ventura. Basic gist is that GPS sensors on the buses allow people to hop online, see where the bus is, and see a dynamically computed time for the bus’s arrival at their stop. That’s cool stuff, and it’s something you have to have for buses that have long headway times. For example, this morning...


big city efficiency

By Eric Richardson — October 29, 2004

I was driving into work this morning when all of a sudden I had a very “doh!” moment. It occured to me that I had a wedding to go to tomorrow, and that suit that I really needed to take to the dry cleaners was still sitting rumpled in my closet. No fear, though. A quick look at the now useful google local (dry cleaner near 90014), a few phone calls...