If someone had asked me to picture a stereotype of Los Angeles prior to my trip there at the end of last week, I might have imagined sun bouncing off the Hollywood sign, towering above huge highways where massive cars roared by, conveying wannabe starlets through the smog to their latest audition or waitress interview. If there is one thing I didn’t imagine, it was a city of people making a really impressive effort to look after the environment.
Romel Pascual, Deputy Mayor of LA, convinced me how wrong I was in our very cheery discussion on Friday. It turns out that LA met Kyoto targets for reducing greenhouse gases 4 years ahead of schedule. The City already gets more than 10% of its energy from renewable sources and the plan is to increase LA’s use of renewable energy to 40% by 2020. Water security is a priority, and so – despite an increase of more than 1 million people since the late 1980s – LA’s water consumption has remained steady. And there is an aggressive plan to reduce emissions from the Ports of LA and Long Beach, in addition to switching the public fleet of vehicles (street sweepers, rubbish trucks, buses etc) to alternative fuel vehicles. A million trees will be planted during the Mayor’s Administration (I suspect finding enough grass to plant on may be a challenge, mind you). I must admit I was surprised.
But not as surprised as I was to hear that despite the city’s penchant for fast cars and huge highways, biking is genuinely a viable option in LA. To my joy, the Mayor has recently announced his plan to bring a bikeshare scheme to LA. The initial plan is to have 4000 bikes on the roads within the next 2 years. There will be 400 stations, in areas around downtown LA, Hollywood, Playa del Rey, Westwood and Venice Beach. And that’s quite apart from the fact that – every now and then – cars are banned from the streets of LA in what sounds like a very jolly event. And so it was that I very unexpectedly found myself swopping stories of the joys of biking with Deputy Mayor Pascual in an over-enthusiastic fashion and planning a return trip (with a bike!).
The US is a place that constantly surprises me. Thank goodness I’m here for another 3 years 7 months…