Dateline>City of Angels

Just a housekeeping note to advise readers that Dateline>City of Angels will take a short hiatus over this week’s 4th of July holiday while I attempt several upgrades to the PHP code. Considering my feeble tech skills, this is always dangerous. For all I know, I could either crash my entire blog or, in a worse-case scenario, create an artificial singularity that swallows the planet. Either way, try to ignore any strange blips here over the weekend. Hopefully, we’ll all be safe and the blog will be up and running again by Monday.

According to Angelenic and other downtown blogs, the denizens at the heart of L.A. are growing restless. They want Hail-a-Cab, and they want it now.

The plan, which would allow taxis to pull over and pick up fares outside of currently specified zones, sounds like a good idea on paper — and downtowners are probably justified in their impatience to see it implemented. Still, I don’t begrudge city leaders for taking their time to fully consider the plan’s longterm effects on safety and congestion.

No matter how much urban boosters may wish for it, L.A. is not like any other city, nor can we merely snap our fingers and make it so. Taxis and public transportation may reign supreme in Chicago, New York, Boston or even San Francisco, but those cities have always been more geographically compact and were never built for and around the automobile as this place was. (Freeways, “Miracle Miles,” big, street-front department store windows and backlot parking malls were, after all, Angeleno innovations.)

Rushing to copy other metropolitan templates isn’t necessarily “farsighted.” Our region’s transit woes call for distinct, imaginative solutions that honor our unique character — not to mention the creativity and “out of the box” thinking that have traditionally demarcated the Angeleno “sense of place.”

That said, I’m not against the plan, except that judging from most of the comments on the local blogosphere, its biggest proponents seem to be: (a) cabbies who stand to make a profit, (b) tourism officials, and (c) transplants who come to L.A. to live its dream and then do nothing but complain about how it’s not the place they escaped from.

The cabbies and visitor bureaus I can get behind. The transplant whining is just getting old.