Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., goes for a bike ride in Chicago, Sunday, June 8, 2008.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon) Presidential candidate Barack Obama took a relaxing Sunday bicycle ride with his family to a friend's house and then on a beachside ride. It's sexy that he's sporting a helmet, too (even if some say it was an unflattering choice). Republican blogger, The Cycling Dude, plans to vote for McCain, but always is on......

"I don't know if I'm more sad or more angry," Treesavers founder Jerry Rubin said this morning as he witnessed Santa Monica workers cut down 23 ficus trees on 2nd and 4th Street. He stood on a stump where one of the trees used to stand for over 40 years -- it only took a matter of minutes to cut it down. "We'll be back again, and we won't get caught with our pants down......

Photo by An Tran/LAist The Silver Lake reservoir has been drained for sometime now due to rare photochemical reaction that created carcinogens. In June, the Department of Water and Power plans to fill it back up, but its use as a place to hold drinking water is being phased out -- it will now become purely eye candy by 2015 (as well as the nearby Ivanhoe Reservoir). So if the water aspect has no......

Simon Pastucha is the kind of city government employee Los Angeles needs more of. Why? He walks the talk and the Daily News tagged along for a day of his car-free, public transportation life. The Pasadena resident is an urban designer and planner at the Urban Design Studio, a two-person office charged with making the city a more community oriented, walkable and people friendly one. With his salary, Pastucha used to lease a Mercedes......

Making the fight that "Los Angeles is not Manhattanizing," William Fulton of the School of Planning, Policy and Development at USC lays down the groundwork on what LA was supposed to be and why it never happened in one of the single most informative articles about Los Angeles that we've read in recent months:In the 1970s, when L.A.'s suburbs began sprouting, the city adopted, in 1974, an innovative general zoning plan that called for......