LA stories

In a watershed moment, the LA Times ran "How To Fix Traffic" in last Sunday's Opinion section. The piece included the sensible views of Jim Moore, Don Shoup, Joel Kotkin, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Ted Balaker, Joel Reynolds and Brian Taylor.

No reports (yet) of widepsread fainting spells among the readership.

Alas, the Times also included a book review of Witold Rybczynski's "Last Harvest" wherein reviewer Judith Lewis cited Harry Richardson and me as the source of a"bizarre statistic" (she also added her patented description of us) that Rybczsynski includes, that LA is America's densest urbanized area. But the source we were citing was the US census and they had been noting LA area's highest average density since 1990. These stats had been repeated widely, notably in Robert Bruegmann's highly regarded "A Compact History of Sprawl" (p 62-63). Writers like Lewis live by cliches.

But, flush from having just read their Opinion section, I had thought that there were real editors on the job.