Six months after Gov. Jerry Brown called for a special session of the Legislature to fix the state’s crumbling roads, the potholes are just as deep, the motorists are just as irritated and the multibillion-dollar cost is just as high.
This year, the state allocated just 20 percent of the water requested by California water districts. For the second straight year, the federal government cut off most valley water districts entirely — including the Westlands Water District, which supplies the farms around Mendota.
This state, forward-looking on other environmental issues, has been stymied for decades over how to upgrade its plumbing system, an immense but aging network of reservoirs and canals that move water from the mountainous north to the drier south.
The largest container ship ever to call at a North American port is scheduled to arrive at the Port of Los Angeles on Dec.26th. French shipping line CMA-CGM launched the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin on Dec. 10. The vessel is scheduled to make her maiden call at APM Terminals-Pier 400 at the Port of Los Angeles. The ship has a capacity of nearly 18,000 Twenty Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs), which is about a third larger than the biggest container ships that currently call at the San Pedro Bay port complex.
Introduced by the League of California Cities, California State Association of Counties, and Association of California Water Agencies, the measure comes eight months after an appellate court struck down a Southern California city’s method of charging water users based on a tiered-rate system – essentially charging larger users a higher per-unit rate. . . In the case out of San Juan Capistrano, the 4th District Court of Appeal ruled in April that tired rates must correspond to the cost of delivering the service.
To meet the city of San Diego’s goals for fighting climate change, a lot of people will have to get out of their cars and start walking, biking or taking public transportation to work.
If motorists do pay more in taxes and fees, they may be disappointed to hear that the money will do little to improve their biggest complaint about roads — traffic. The money under discussion is primarily to keep roads, bridges and related infrastructure like culverts from falling apart, not relieve traffic.
The median commute distance for people who work in San Francisco and earn less than $40,000 jumped from 9 miles in 2008 to almost 15 miles in 2013, according to a study by Zillow. The commute for those making more than $40,000 remained relatively unchanged over that period.
Since then, the California High-Speed Rail Authority has been unable to attract outside investors and doesn’t have even 40 percent of the money it needs to complete the initial 300-mile, $31 billion segment — much less the $68 billion needed to build a rail line linking San Francisco and downtown Los Angeles. This has led bullet-train advocates, starting with Robert Cruickshank of the California High Speed Rail Blog, to repeatedly urge Congress and the Obama administration to provide more federal dollars. In planning documents from three years ago, state officials said they were hoping on $42 billion in federal help.
In its first year, the approximately $300 billion bill increases spending on highways by $2.1 billion above current levels. By the final year, in 2020, the bump will be $6.1 billion above the approximately $50 billion that has been spent in recent years.
Despite the prospects of heavy precipitation from El Niño, the Department of Water Resources said major reservoirs remain well below capacity and water must be used sparingly.
A new study released today by the American Highway Users Alliance identifies America’s 50 worst bottlenecks and finds that the very worst bottleneck, as measured by hours of delay, is in Chicago, IL. Los Angeles, CA owns the next six of the top 10.
Land retirement is coming to California agriculture. The drought will end someday, maybe even this winter, but farmers will still face long-term shortages of water. The driving force: a new state law regulating the extraction of groundwater.
A study released Monday by the American Highway Users Alliance, a nonprofit group that lobbies for interstate highway investment, examined which routes in the United States are the most continuously crowded, 24 hours a day, rather than during peak periods. Eleven of the 30 worst bottlenecks are in Greater Los Angeles.
Little has changed since 2010 despite all the talk about “peak car” and a supposed massive shift towards transit. Single occupant driving remains by far the largest mode of transport to work in the 53 major metropolitan areas (with over 1,000,000 population), having moved from 73.5 percent of commutes to 73.6 percent.