By Robin Heffler Urban planning and public policy experts, transportation leaders, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gathered downtown at the Japanese American National Museum on Friday, March 19, to share research, observations, proposals, and recommendations at a conference on “Changing Lanes: Bold Ideas to Solve L.A.’s Traffic Problem.”  The event was the second of the School of Public Affairs’ Rosenfield Forums, which bring together UCLA scholars and national and local thought leaders for discussions on innovative approaches to formidable national policy challenges. “Los Angeles is one of the areas that is thinking most progressively about tackling the traffic problem,” said Dean Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., who welcomed some 150 participants to the conference. Richard Katz, member of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) Board of Directors, and a former California Assembly member, sees signs that L.A. residents are beginning to embrace the idea of public transit. One, he said, is passage of Measure R, the 2008 Los Angeles County[…]

The Chester Rapkin Award for the best article to appear in this year’s Journal of Planning Education and Research goes to Professor Donald Shoup for “Graduated Density Zoning.” A shorter version of the article has also been published in Zoning Practice. According to the awards committee the article “presents a potentially very important innovation in zoning, which could have significant application in practice. It also constitutes a theoretical advance in the idea of zoning, which remains a key part of land use planning. In form, the paper is a model for how to write an academic paper within a professional domain. It is persuasive, elegant, and economical. The author uses examples and ingenious figures to make its message clear, and it is beautifully written. In sum, this paper provides lessons for all of us, both in our search for ways to improve planning, and in how to present our work.” The award will be presented at the annual ACSP awards luncheon which will[…]