{"id":2243,"date":"2014-05-14T06:45:21","date_gmt":"2014-05-14T13:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2243"},"modified":"2014-05-28T14:49:10","modified_gmt":"2014-05-28T21:49:10","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e36-through-los-angeles-by-rail-with-ethan-elkind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2243","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E36: Through Los Angeles by Rail with Ethan Elkind"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-2244\" style=\"border: 0;\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/ethanelkind.jpg\" alt=\"ethanelkind\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/ethanelkind.jpg 300w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/ethanelkind-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ethanelkind.com\">Ethan Elkind<\/a>, an attorney who researches and writes on environmental law\u00a0and the author of\u00a0<em>Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail System and the Future of the City<\/em>. They discuss the reason visitors and even some Angelenos express surprise at the very existence of the city&#8217;s subway; the roots of the assumption that Los Angeles would always have a 1950s-style &#8220;car culture&#8221;; why something as essential as a rail system has required a &#8220;fight&#8221;; the persistent\u00a0<em>Roger Rabbit\u00a0<\/em>conspiracy theory about the dismantling of Los Angeles&#8217; first rail transit network; why so may, for so long, failed to consider\u00a0the city&#8217;s inevitably dense and increasingly less car-compatible future; Los Angeles&#8217; long-standing anxiety about joining the ranks of &#8220;world-class&#8221; cities, and how\u00a0the absence of a subway fueled\u00a0it; how Californian rail systems, Los Angeles&#8217; especially but the San Francisco&#8217;s Bay Area&#8217;s BART as well, physically embody the compromises of consensus-based politics; what some Angelenos mean when they talk about &#8220;Manhattanization&#8221;; the similarity between a city&#8217;s expectation that its citizens all own their own cars and an expectation that they all own their own power generators; how much the conversation about rail in Los Angeles has to do with, simply, density in Los Angeles; why Metro pretends not to know about its own problems and resorts to &#8220;corporate PR-speak&#8221;; whether those who lament the limitations of Los Angeles rail can blame individuals (such as Henry Waxman); whether anyone can change the minds of Angelenos who want the city to return to 1962; the demoralizing effects of such far-flung completion dates as 2036 for the Purple Line subway to UCLA; and how every voter\u00a0can come to\u00a0consider the Los Angeles Metro rail system &#8220;a precious thing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Download the interview\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/colinmarshall\/NCC_S4E36_Ethan_Elkind.output.mp3\">here as an MP3<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">\u00a0or on\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"color: #555555;\" href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law with Ethan Elkind, an attorney who researches and writes on environmental law\u00a0and the author of\u00a0Railtown: The Fight for the Los Angeles Metro Rail System and the Future of the City. They discuss the reason visitors and even some Angelenos express surprise [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2243"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2275,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2243\/revisions\/2275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}