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It is comical that people think taxis get regular safety inspections

Not true, for example lists safety inspections criteria for the City of Los Angeles

It is comical how Slashdot posters present easily verified falsehoods as the emphatic truth.

Trying to make excuses for Nazi style registration.

Not at all. Just correcting a mistaken assumption made by someone who couldn't be bothered to read the regs. Oh, and Godwin, by the way.

Where is bicycle registration? rc car rego?

Pretty sure the FAA has no authority in those areas. I do recall having a city-issued bicycle license (Los Angeles) when I was a kid, a long time ago; but the city stopped enforcing that in 2009.

The entire council should be Latino before then...
http://council.lacity.org/Dire...

But we can't coordinate sensors across the city to prevent me (and 30 others) from having to stop at a red light so that one car can pass, and then watch the intersection go unused for another 90 seconds

I'm not too far from you. I emailed the all-our-lights-are-synchronized LADOT about this last year and after a few months the reply I got was a short comment saying the system "worked as it was designed".

This LAPD memo explains why LAPD is not on board.

For more details, try council file 09-1714.

This LAPD memo explains why LAPD is not on board.

For more details, try council file 09-1714.

Take your kids out of nature, grass, trees, clean air... and pack them into a filthy concrete jungle full of extreme poverty and extreme wealth.

There's six and a half square miles of nature, grasses, and trees an easy walk from my house. I'm also three miles from downtown LA. (BTW, the walk includes a footbridge over a river populated by fish, ducks, geese, and coots. It's lovely.)

It's not either/or. There are urban areas people are happy to escape from when they manage it, and there's urban areas that are great places to be. It sounds like this project hopes to "prune" the really awful parts of certain cities, allowing people subsidized relocation to the vibrant areas. Sounds like a great idea.

If your in Los Angeles traffic and traffic signals are monitored by http://trafficinfo.lacity.org/html/atsac_1.html

Only somebody NOT actually from any of these areas would write this. First, just because a lot of people make X dollars doesn't make X dollars middle class. Middle class is not defined by the number of people making the same amount of money. In Los Angeles, less than 20% of households can afford to purchase a median-priced home. 8% of city residents have some of their housing costs subsidized (how do you like the corporate welfare where the taxpayers foot the bill for worker housing so Wal-Mart can get away with paying less?). Hell, 43% of renters are paying MORE than 30% of their income towards rent. I make just barely over $60k and I can't even afford RENT any where near my job. I have to commute for an hour each way every day. The worse part is that I make much more than my friends. Lastly, no you cannot "pull down" $60k being a garbage collector in Los Angeles despite the common urban legend.

Fantastic post. I have one quibble: Your assertion that police are poorly paid. Of course things vary a lot from one place to the next, but here in LA average police salaries range from $52,638 to $70,679 (source: http://www.lacity.org/PER/recruit1.htm). That's hardly a king's random but neither is it a pittance. I also note that the same site says that anyone with a college degree is likely to start at a salary above the minimum.

It seems the controller in L.A. suggested the same thing years ago. (pdf)

http://www.lacity.org/ctr/press/ctrpress18616087_1 2152003.pdf

California has implemented something like this already.

http://www.boe.ca.gov/sptaxprog/ewfaqsgen.htm

I think the fee is only collected on displays, but you are allowed to drop off/recycle most electronic goods and unsafe chemical items. I don't know if the fee is covering this service.

http://www.lacity.org/san/solid_resources/pdfs/saf e-ucla-flyer_english.pdf (pdf)

I've dropped off my old 386/486 computers, CRT, and accessories (mouse, joysticks, floppy disks, dead HDs).

The City of Los Angeles ATSAC system does this.

And of course, you'd need real-time information on accidents, weather variables and road closings to complete this model. I suspect we will have this information within the next 10-20 years as cell phones are tracked and we have real-time information about road conditions available centrally.

Yeah, but the darned thing would be so overloaded with terrorists looking for places to drill holes in the ground that people with legitimate needs would usually just get back "server too busy, try again later".

Actually, isn't the accuracy of consumer level GPS is insufficient for this task?

For some reason I find it neat that I can go onto the City of Los Angeles web page and find a lot of stuff like where sanitary sewers run, the construction type of the sanitary servers, where the sanitary server access and hookups are, where street trees are planted and what type they are, where the fire hydrants are and what type they are, where the street lights are, where easements on property are, where storm drains are, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Of course, the info is inaccurate in my neighborhood so one would be ill advised to start digging holes based on anything there!

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=113222911236 7 http://atheism.about.com/b/a/220978.htm http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jul2001/fait-j23 .shtml http://mediastudy.com/articles/av3-28-02.html http://ethics.lacity.org/EFS2003/index.cfm?fuseact ion=lobreports.clientbyfirm&year=2001 Search for Salvation Army, check later years too. http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/legislative/b_thr ee_sections_with_teasers/clientlist_page_D_E.htm Search for Salvation Army

It took me 3 clicks from google using "los angeles "computer recycling"" to this link http://www.lacity.org/SAN/ewaste.htm

The city also sends notices around when they are having a collection event near our home.

Judging by the prevalence of old computers at garage sales and my city's program, I'd say not as many as you might think.

On the heels of Austin, Munich, Vienna and entire countries e.g. in South America, LA City Councilmembers have unveiled plans for an extended transition to FOSS in their press release conspicuously labelled "FREE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE MEANS MORE POLICE ON THE STREETS - COUNCIL BETS THAT OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT CAN SAVE CITY MILLIONS".

Despite the telling omission of "AND" in its caption, the statement actually does look beyond the "...as in beer" part of the equation.

A spokesman also explained the project and its inspiration in greater detail to German heise online news.

For Ballmer and Gates, the good news is that they won't have to travel quite as far any more to try and win back their latest defectors.

The "bad" news (for them!) can be summed up as "Tux ante portas": their arch-enemy and worst nightmare already knocking (or should we say: pecking?) right at their porch now.

As mentioned above, Denver is behind the curve on this type of system.

Heck, in Los Angeles, we even have such a system for city streets.

But the idea that it will really help with congestion is pretty much a pipe dream. Congestion happens because of something called latent demand -- there's always more people who *want* to be driving than there are actually out on the road. Therefore, for everyone who leaves the road because it's "too congested," someone else joins because now, it's at an acceptable level for them. This is also why increasing road capacity has no long-term effect on congestion. It's simply not feasible to provide enough road to meet demand, because when you think you have, you find out there's more demand.

However, if we get a really coherent system that can predict your travel time on a route, and at the same time have dedicated bus lanes and report the bus travel time for the same trip... maybe we actually can do a little something ;-).