UCLA Luskin’s Complete Streets Initiative was involved in three sessions during the Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2012 Conference at the Long Beach Convention Center. The convention, September 10-13, brought together cities across North America searching for ideas in bringing healthier, more equitable, and more vibrant economic solutions to their communities .
Madeline Brozen, Complete Streets Initiative Program Manager, was featured on a panel and during one of the mobile workshops. Ryan Johnson, a Lewis Center Graduate Research Grant recipient, had his capstone project featured during a poster session.
Brozen spoke about tranportation system performance during the panel, “The Power of the Performance Metric – Getting Your Jurisdiction Back on Track.” Specifically, the session described a collaborative effort to calculate new performance metrics for the City of Los Angeles. Traditional metrics have only considered cars, but modern metrics should capture bikeability, walkability, effects on public health, and disparities.
During the mobile workshop, called “Reclaiming the Right of Way – Implementing and Designing Parklets,” participants visited the first parklet constructed in Southern California in front of Berlin Bistro in Long Beach. Brozen spoke about parklet implementation and the UCLA Parklet Toolkit. The toolkit, “Reclaiming the Right-of-Way:A Toolkit for Creating and Implementing Parklets,” is a Complete Streets Initiative project that debuted last week. It includes parklet case studies from around the country and parklet designs, which it encourages users to adapt to their own communities.
Johnson’s poster, titled “Bringing New People to the Open Streets – Results of a CicLAvia Participant Survey,” presented findings from a survey he conducted about CicLAvia, Los Angeles’ open streets event. The findings focus on the differences between first-time and repeat attendees of the event. For example, first-time attendees were more likely than repeat attendees to have accessed the route via public transit.