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Today’s rider profile by Zocalo Public Square: I find crazy stuff no matter where I am, Abbott Road to Slauson Avenue.

People of CicLAvia in the Valley (Randomness from Unbored Hands) 

Nice series of portraits of CicLAvia participants taken with a medium format film camera — very old school! Wish I had run into this blogger Sunday to talk photography.

Peter Zumthor’s plan for LACMA undergoes makeover (L.A. Times)

Plans continue to evolve for the expansion and renovation of the LACMA campus, which in 2023 will also be served by the Purple Line Extension’s Fairfax Station. Excerpt:

Another major change comes in reducing the number of public entrances to the museum from seven or eight to two or three. To ease circulation and make ticketing easier, main entries will now be positioned on the southern and northern ends of the museum, closer to parking lots and the subway. Stairs on those two ends will lead to large, open-air landings under a roof overhang.

The entrance/exit to the subway will be on the southeast corner of Wilshire and Orange Grove. So having the museum actually extend over Wilshire brings it closer to the train. Cool.

In reversal, Boston 2024 wants vote on Olympic bid (New York Times) 

The organizing group looked at recent poll numbers that show only one-third of area residents want the Summer Olympics held in Boston. And, thus, a pivot: the group now says it welcomes a statewide voter referendum on the games, hoping to demonstrate area voters really want to play host. It’s not clear when the election will be but the International Olympic Committee is scheduled to make its decision on the ’24 Games in 2017. The American host city will compete against Paris, Rome, and Hamburg.

And what happens if Boston is a no-go? Hard to say if another of the cities that competed against Boston — including Los Angeles — would be back in the game and whether they could compete with the likes of such venerable European cities on short(er) notice. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that while Americans seemingly like to tune into the Games on television and the internet, a lot of people seem to think hosting them is simply not worth the trouble or expense.

What roads have wrought (New Yorker) 

The gist: if you want to screw up an area from an ecological and biogeographical perspective, build a road through it. That’s not new knowledge but scientists continue to drill deeper. Excerpt:

The new study, led by Nick Haddad, a professor at North Carolina State University, and co-authored by Laurance and others, found that fragmented habitats lose an average of half of their plant and animal species within twenty years, and that some continue to lose species for thirty years or more. In all of the cases examined, the worst losses occurred in the smallest habitat patches and closest to a habitat edge. The study also demonstrates, using a high-resolution map of global tree cover, that more than seventy per cent of the world’s forest now lies within one kilometre of such an edge. “There are really only two big patches of intact forest left on Earth—the Amazon and the Congo—and they shine out like eyes from the center of the map,” Haddad said.

Attentive Source headline readers will recall that a wildlife crossing of the 101 freeway is being studied in Ventura County to help connect the Santa Monica Mountains with habitat to the north, including the vast and relatively untrammeled Sespe Wilderness.

The quietist and noisiest spots in the West (High Country News)

City of Rocks National Reserve in Idaho and Great Sand Dunes National Monument in Colorado are basically as quiet as they were in pre-colonial times — if that’s your kind of thing (and it’s mine). California’s Sierra Nevada does okay, but not as well as areas to the east such as the mountains and deserts of the Great Basin and parts of the Rockies. The Sierra backcountry has its moments of quiet, for sure, but also has a significant amount of airplane traffic overhead. Check out the cool graphic.

These states will take your license for not paying student loans (Bloomberg) 

Actually two states: Iowa and Montana. And efforts are underway to repeal both laws, the thinking being that if you can’t get to work (not a lot of transit in either of those places), it’s kind of hard to get paid and pay down those loans.