How We Roll, Feb. 8: climate change, P-22, Second Ave Subway

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Credit: Gordon Parks Foundation. Click above to visit the Foundation’s website.

Things to look at whilst transiting: the online galleries of the photographer Gordon Parks. For sure, check out the “Segregation Story, 1956” gallery. It’s sad and poignant anytime and especially worth a look during Black History Month.

Reminder #1: the parking lot at the Expo Line’s Culver City Station closes Feb. 14. More here.

Reminder #2: bus service replaces Expo Line service between Culver City Station and Expo/Bundy from 9 p.m. Friday through close of service Sunday night. More here.

Reminder #3: a new round of community meetings is underway for the project that will extend the Eastside Gold Line to South El Monte and Whittier, among other cities. More here.

Art of Transit 1: 

Decking work at Wilshire and Fairfax for the Purple Line Extension begins soon — we’ll have a post will all the details up later in the week. Decking allows the street to remain open while excavation of the Wilshire/Fairfax Station will continue below. Decking work is already complete for the Wilshire/La Brea Station.

Dept. of Weather: 

It’s still coming down rain and snow in the Eastern Sierra, which provides some of the water used by the city of Los Angeles.

A conservative case for climate action (NYT)

A coal-fired power plant on the Ohio River near Cincinnati. The op-ed proposes getting rid of the Clean Power Plan that would force coal plants to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide. Photo by Steve Hymon.

This op-ed represents the work of several prominent conservatives who worked for several Presidents, including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, along with others. They make the case that the best way to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions is to impose a carbon tax, return those tax revenues to Americans with quarterly dividends, impose tariffs on imports from nations without comparable climate pricing and to repeal the Clean Power Plan.

Interesting stuff. The comments are worth a read, too. There’s some support, some skepticism and some suggestions on how to improve the plan. Obviously, these are controversial topics — but it’s good to see a willingness to do something.

As I’ve written before, generally speaking a good way to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to take transit instead of driving alone. More here.

Related: A crack in the Antarctic ice shelf grew 17 miles in the last two months, as reported by the NYT.

Related: At the other pole…

The Second Avenue subway is here! (New Yorker)

Opening day on the Second Avenue Subway earlier this year. Photo: New York MTA.

Fun read on the new subway segment that opened in Gotham on Jan. 1. Excerpt:

The Ninety-sixth Street station, situated in shallower ground, was cut and cover. The ground in a tunnel section just south of it was too soft for the boring machine, which was engineered for schist, so to solidify the ground the engineers had to freeze it, which they did by drilling holes and inserting a web of more than a hundred refrigeration tubes, averaging around seventy feet long.

This took four or five months. Each lateral twenty-foot segment of excavation required the insertion of slurry walls and a system of horizontal struts to support them so that the surrounding earth, and therefore the sidewalks and buildings, wouldn’t collapse into the excavated pits. All the utilities—asbestos-shrouded steam pipes, old cast-iron water mains, electricity cables, natural-gas lines, and the Empire City ducts containing cable and telephone wires—had to be diverted as well. At one point, a diver had to descend into a slurry wall—a frogman Santa wielding an underwater welding torch fifty feet down a chimney full of muck—to free up some steel that had got caught.

Also a good read if you have a long day of transiting ahead. Related:

A week in the life of P-22, the big cat that shares Griffith Park with millions of people (LAT)

It’s a good media week for the mountain lions of the Santa Monica Mountains. This article is accompanied by an aerial map that shows different locations in and near Griffith Park where P-22 showed up. Favored locales: Beachwood Canyon and Forest Lawn.

As Tom Curwen writes, no one really knows how P-22 got into the park. In this article he floats an interesting theory: Carmageddon in 2011 paused traffic on the 405 freeway for a weekend and perhaps that allowed the lion to cross from west to east. Hmm. Of course, the lion still would have needed to get over/under the 101 to reach the park.

One note: long before P-22 became well known there were rumors of lions in Griffith Park and park officials in 2004 said they found evidence of a lion in the park. But it wasn’t until 2011 that photographic evidence of one (P-22) verified it.

 

 

 

Categories: Transportation Headlines

6 replies ›

  1. I know of a reliable sighting of a lion in Griffith Park from the late 1990’s or early 2000’s.

  2. Great article on P-22. I learned so much more about his travels. Thanks for posting.

    • Thanks for the link! I think that has been well-covered and the reason for the Liberty Canyon crossing: inbreeding may kill the cats long-term if this population can’t reach other populations to the north!

      Steve Hymon
      Editor, The Source