June 2009 Archives

Who are we? Not a trick question or an existential one. The question is: What do we call ourselves? In April 1882, the Los Angeles Times named us Los Angelenos. But what did that sound like? With a long e after the l or with a long a? By early the next year, the paper misplaced the Los, and we were collectively Angelenos.

Then briefly, we were Angelinos (as in Angelino Heights and the city’s first real suburb, dating from 1886). That spelling didn’t stick. But did the sort-of Italianate pronunciation – Anne-jell-EE-no – linger? Easier to master than the “enye” in the proper Angeleño?

The two-part name – Los Angelenos – comes and goes in later news items of the paper – accounts of marriages, trips, back East, a murder victim. The Times is uncertain exactly who we are . . . or it’s just a case of bad copy editing and no stylebook.

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The RAND Corporation recently produced a study dealing with two concepts of interest to drivers and moral theologians: Congestion pricing for highway access and the equity (or lack of it) for different categories of drivers when congestion pricing is implemented.

The equity of congestion pricing is discussed in a paper written by Liisa Ecola and Thomas Light. Their paper, which is relatively brief, can be downloaded here.

I won’t reprint their paper with my commentary (too long for this setting), but a close reading of the paper’s “executive summary” may be of use.

From my experience with elected officials and other decisions makers, it’s these summaries that are only part of a report read by non-specialists. Summaries such as this one are the only part of a technical discussion that appears in the general news media.

I’ve edited the summary’s key paragraphs (I hope fairly). My notes and comments are in brackets [ ] and in bold face.

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The Times is endorsing the MTA’s experiment with pay-to-drive toll lanes. When the high-occupancy lines along portions of the 10 and 110 freeways are converted in December 2010, “Carpoolers, vanpoolers and transit users would not be charged a toll, but solo drivers would be allowed to use the lanes if they pay a toll,” according to the Times.

The editorial notes that the pay-to-drive option wouldn’t be available when the pace of traffic in the new lanes falls below 45 miles per hour. The implication is, of course, that when they slow with high-occupancy vehicles, the lanes wouldn’t be available for a solo driver willing to pay for access. That seems counter intuitive. Would solo drivers pay for access when they’re less likely to need it?

But the MTA understands the psychopathology of driving. LA motorists – compelled by the OCD qualities of driving – would spend up to $15 dollars for access, even if toll lanes offer only an illusion of greater forward momentum.

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Leonis C. Malburg abruptly retired on June 8 from his seat on the Vernon city council. A fact unremarkable in itself. Elected officials resign all the time. And some of them, like Malburg, resign without explanation, without a whisper or a rumor. But Malburg had been a city council member for 53 years. Until last month, Malburg had been mayor of Vernon since 1974. His grandfather had founded the city in1905 and on his death had turned it over to his grandson.

Malburg’s departure has more in common with the passing of the Doge of Venice or a Russian tsar than the regular processes of civic life.

Former Council Member Malburg’s colleagues were, until a few months ago, four old men like himself who earned gold lapel pins for their decades of elected service. In nearly all of the election years during those decades, they all had run unopposed.

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Is this the “Land of Sunshine?” You don’t need a weatherman to tell you it isn’t so.

A veteran Angeleño (that is, anyone here at least a year) knows the disappointment of waking to skies as transparent as freshly poured concrete, of noons that appear filtered through a dome of dirty glass, and of afternoons that play out in miserable dullness until, like a cruel gift, sunset roars through a slit on the western horizon in colors of magenta and gold.

The climate people say we have only two seasons in Los Angeles: wet and dry. But we know, depending on where we live, many more seasons of light.

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Matt Welch at Reasononline calls out some distinctions between Long Beach at the end of big aerospace in the 1990s and Detroit at the end of General Motors and Chrysler.

Although Welch asks why Long Beach isn’t Detroit, the two cities aren’t really his subject. That’s because the two cities don’t have much in common.

When the Cold War ended, Long Beach, unlike Detroit, hadn’t been hollowed out by 30 years of decline before the collapse of its signature industry. Long Beach was (and is) an appendage to a regional economy larger than aerospace and more diverse than auto manufacturing.

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