Contributed by
Lennartz1 on January 19th, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Los Angles is going through some stormy weather. Due to the sparse amount of underground metro lines, almost all transportation in LA is exposed to the elements. Normally the weather in LA is picturesque, but in the instances of severe weather that are bound to occur from time to time (i.e. heavy rain as we have had this week), driving is quite hazardous and accidents occur with more frequency.
So what is to be done? There is a fair amount of weather-proofing that needs to be done to ensure the city does not grind to a halt when there are extreme weather conditions. The infrastructure upgrades need to tackle a number of areas to handle inclement weather and increase public safety.
The first thing that needs to be addressed is the electricity grid. As one of 6,800 people who lost their power for the better part of a day, it is obvious that the power supply is prone to weather-related shut-downs. Outages can also halt mass transit lines as they did in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino. Add the yet to be built electric vehicle charging station network, new energy hungry buildings and the every growing population, emphasis needs to be put on building new lines and fortifying the old ones against the wind and rain.
With some degree of certainty in the reliability of the power network, the attention should then be shifted to building more track and fixed transportation infrastructure. Bring back the streetcar! A rainy day is not that bad when you do not have to drive and can take in the city through a rain-splashed window pane. Permit me to use this post to throw my support behind the Los Angeles Streetcar Inc. (LASI) and any effort to bring back streetcars to the city. They are reliable, durable and less affected by weather conditions than cars. More can be written about streetcars here, but that will be another post for another day.
It bears repeating that the subway is the way to go when the weather gets a bit rough. It is no coincidence that London’s has such a complete underground network that is suited for a city that needs to often move in wet weather. Subterranean protection from the cold is a big plus for New Yorkers, Muscovites, and millions of other urban citizens throughout the world. Though it is not a huge factor in LA, protection against the weather can be added to the list of reasons for building underground lines like the Subway to the Sea and the Pink Line through West Hollywood.
For the vast majority of the year the weather in the Los Angeles area is beautiful, but the problems in the city’s transit network and infrastructure are exposed when extreme weather manifests itself.
The old cliché goes hope for the best and prepare for the worst. As metro grows and new projects get put into motion, the city would be well served to factor in how the new additions would hold up under severe weather conditions.
Contributed by
Lennartz1 on January 7th, 2010 at 8:03 pm
These aren't racing flags
Yet another good idea we can steal from the Old Continent: the income based speeding ticket. Already the law of the land in Finland, where a 2002 fine to a director of the Nokia Corporation cost him €116,000 ($103,600 at the time) for doing 75 km/h (47 mph) in a 50 km/h (31 mph) zone. The man charged, Mr. Anssi Vanjoki, was charged a fine equivalent to 14 days of his €12.5 Million annual income.
What prompted this post was the news on Yahoo! on January 7th that the record for a traffic ticket has been broken by a Swiss speeder to the tune of $290,000. This may seem harsh to the offender until you realize that he is worth over $20 million and will definitely not be rolling pennies for gas.
Now for those Angelenos living paycheck to paycheck, a speeding ticket really hurts. They have the feel of a harsh penalty and getting a speeding ticket definitely affects their driving for months after a citation. Say an individual makes the minimum wage and works 40 hours a week. The net pay on the check is about $300. After a fine and other ancillary costs (e.g. traffic school), that person has lost at least a full week’s wages. For a person worth $20 million in LA, a $300 fine is laughable and no deterrent to speeding at all. With a toothless monetary deterrent to hundreds, if not thousands of drivers, what is to stop them from speeding? There is a point system in place to punish repeated offenders, but this means someone has to get caught time after time to have their driving privileges curtained. Not the best system that requires the multiple offenses before behavior is punished for a particular segment of the population.
A copy-paste of the income-based traffic fines used in Finland and Switzerland would bring many positive benefits:
- Rich people would drive better. It levels the rules of the road for all drivers by implementing a fairer system of deterrence that would make even the wealthiest of people think twice before speeding.
- Since some people will speed anyway, the city would raise a lot more cash. The money raised by the city should entirely be used to fund public transportation. After a few years of this, the city might have enough money to fund European-quality mass transit.
- Not to bang the egalitarian drum too loudly, but implementing such a system would be a fine example of ending the cultural phenomenon of being able to buy your way out of things in this country. Think of the children.
If you are driving multiple $500,000 cars and are worth millions, there is not much of a defense in arguing against such a proposition on monetary grounds. Those people have the money to pay two weeks of their annual income should they be found exceeding the speed limit. If there are any millionaires that read the metroriderla blog and would like to mount a defense of the current system and how it keeps them in check, contrarian views are most welcome.
Contributed by
Wad on January 1st, 2010 at 12:01 am
We’ve made it through 2009, and before 2010 is bound to give us another round of motion sickness, let the Year in Transit be your Dramamine. The Year in Transit gets you to the destination directly, and unlike Metro Rapid, the Year in Transit catches green lights all the way.
The Transit Coalition, a rider advocacy group pleasantly short of kooks and cranks, has graciously volunteered to maintain the Year in Transit archives. Look back at the years past and see how frighteningly true these predictions have come.
With the pre-trip inspection complete, let’s roll this bus out of the division.
Metro once again shows it can make quick decisions, and once again, it shows the quick decisions only leave riders confused and angry. A week before the June shake-up, Metro decides to transpose the colors on the two busways. Riders and bus drivers are baffled, but Metro says the confusion is worth it because it was stupider to have silver buses on the Orange Line and orange buses on the Silver Line.
Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach wins the hearts and minds of locals with his new solution for the OCTA funding crisis: Cancel all bus service, then round up Orange County’s transit-dependent population to be ground up and fed to the hungry.
Los Angeles’ bicyclists evolve from a community to a fierce, hardy tribe when they acknowledge Ubrayj as their leader. The announcement catches Brayj by surprise and he decides to learn leadership methods from a weekend of watching “Braveheart”. He is then inspired to lead bicyclists on a siege of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation headquarters in downtown L.A.
Californians are getting so sick of the state’s raids on transit to balance its own budget that a group is now circulating an initiative petition to stop it once and for all. The wording of the measure says that if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or any state official attempts another raid on funds, their punishment shall be to strap all their campaign contributions to them and then have a transit agency representative be able to keep all the money they can obtain from turning the politicians upside down and shaking them.
The Metrolink board is unable to decide on either raising fares or cutting service to meet budget shortfalls, so it instead decides to allow passengers to get free passes if they mail in a manila envelope filled with gold coins or jewelry they no longer use.
The Expo Line is so desperate to get any part of the problem-plagued light rail line in service by the end of 2010, the best it could do is scale back Phase I to operate peak hours only between 7th Street Metro Center and Pico stations in time for the service shake-up in December.
Metro decides fare gates are a failure — we can only hope — after an experiment to try actual fare collection ends miserably when riders stare glazedly at the turnstiles because they aren’t sure how they work.
California’s high-speed rail plan wins federal funding, but the state doesn’t even get beyond the $1 billion mark. The federal money we get is just enough to buy higher-speed service powered by adding sails to existing Amtrak trains and locomotives.
Long Beach pours water on a councilwoman’s ambitious plans to introduce modern streetcars in the city. The City Council instead votes to spend the equivalent amount of money that would have gone into a steel-wheel system and spend it on buying battery-powered faux trolleys and use the money left over to “paint” tracks into the street.
One of the last acts of retired USC president Steven Sample is to announce that the University of Southern California will be vacating the campus and leaving Los Angeles the Friday before the weekend the Expo Line will open. He put a few professors in the School of Policy, Planning and Development in charge of the transition team, and they settled on an ideologically correct campus near the junction of the 133 and 241 toll roads in Orange County.
An investigation reveals Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s vow to have a subway extension completed within 10 years relies heavily on a speculative extension beyond Santa Monica to the Moon. Villaraigosa figured an extraplanetary extension would make the Purple Line extension eligible for NASA funding.
Southern California transit systems become the test markets for a new federal initiative to get on-the-ropes carmakers General Motors and Chrysler back into health by building transit equipment. The yet-to-be-named end product has the looks of a Pontiac Aztek combined with the reliablity of a Chrysler.
While we’re on car companies, the latest conspiracy theory to raise teabaggers’ hackles the way chum does in shark-infested waters is a Drudge Report post claiming the Obama administration deliberately bankrupted GM and Chrysler in order to weaken the auto industry and force everyone onto transit. Teabaggers claim they are victims of the “Reverse Roger Rabbit Conspiracy.”
RobDawg, who has been noticeably quiet for much of the last year, will resurface in a big way after he completes his move to the Inland Empire. He says his heart will always be in Ventura County, but the houses he scored for cents on the dollar at an auction was a deal too good to pass up. He will relaunch his blog as Methburban Nation.
And speaking of relaunches, Fred Camino will be coming back to MetroRiderLA full-time, only this time, he knows the haters are the only ones that get readership. So starting April 1, MetroRiderLA will keep the same name, except content from then on will be a daily candid photograph of a transit user that Web users can laugh at without the fear of putting themselves in danger — transit’s answer to PeopleOfWalMart.com.
There you have it, the Year in Transit.
Continue Reading…
Contributed by
calwatch on December 15th, 2009 at 12:55 am
This morning and afternoon, I rode the Silver Line. The morning trip was non-notable for the first day of workday service for the route, aside from an amusing discovery that the bays at El Monte Station don’t accommodate two 45 foot buses at one time, at least not without one bus backing up. Trip time was surprisingly within the stated 59 minutes from El Monte to Artesia Transit Center, although the bus only had a dozen people on it. The driver was proactive in stopping at all Silver Line stops and asking individuals who were just standing around what bus they were catching, and encouraging cash customers to purchase day passes instead of paying for the extra fare and then for the transfer. Metro staff, including high level ones like Transportation Manager John Hillmer, were out directing traffic and staffing booths at El Monte and Artesia, and a few folks in yellow vests were out at some of the other major stops. Of course, when I got to Artesia Transit Center, I witnessed several failed connections as a result of the shortlining (where buses on the Silver Line were “scheduled” to transfer to one of the shortened local buses, but arrived just a minute or two too late), which is annoying for those riders, but unfortunately routine to passengers of Foothill Transit Silver Streak and the former MTA lines 446 and 447 since those lines were shortened some time ago.
After traversing the city, I arrived back at Metro Center at 6:40 pm, where the yellow vests, booths, and other things have disappeared. Unfortunately, I got into an argument with a driver over the Silver Line fare. The Silver Line, for better or worse, has a unique fare structure that benefits the occasional or workday rider and penalizes the daily rider – day passes are valid for full fare on the Silver Line, while all other forms of regular prepaid media (Metrolink passes, EZ transit passes, MTA weekly and monthly passes) are not. The statement in the schedule is clear, and the Silver Line only has one fare. However, the driver stopped the bus for three minutes I stated I would not pay the surcharge, even though I showed a receipt stating that the fare media on my card was a day pass (obtained from using the “validator” mode of a TAP fare machine earlier that day). After keeping the bus stopped for a few more minutes thinking it would make me change my mind (it didn’t, and there were only a few other riders on board so I wasn’t really delaying anyone), he made a snide comment and pulled away.
Two things were more disconcerting, however: the fact that the driver convinced another rider to pay the surcharge, even though I showed her in the schedules which were available on the bus that she did not have to pay the surcharge if she had a day pass, and the fact that 323-GO-METRO, customer information, actually stated back to me when I called to confirm my position that day pass holders had to pay the extra fare – contrary to the information available on the Metro web site. The other customer justified paying it by stating that she was riding on the freeway, so it didn’t apply, which is not true, as the same fare applies whether you are going from Union Station to 7th Street or the entire length of the line.
After I got home I reported the incident to the web site, so I assume that corrective action will follow shortly, but this raises larger issues about the quality of service for the choice rider – since choice riders are likely going to be the ones using the day pass on the Silver Line, to try out the service. With the large potential of missed transfers at each end to previous through service (and the fact that, unlike at other busy intersections where one can cool their heels by grabbing a cup of coffee or a burger, there is not much within walking distance of interest to the transit rider near either El Monte or Artesia), inability for a new rider to get a TAP card at Artesia on site (at least at El Monte one could buy a Foothill TAP card for $7 – $2 for the card and $5 worth of cash credit), and confusion relating to the fare structure, is this enough for the service to fail? Fortunately, the MTA has time to perfect the service in the year before tolling begins on the I-10 and I-110 corridors – but it must address these issues now before drivers decide that paying $6 one way for a toll is better than paying $6 for a day pass (2011 prices) to ride the Silver Line into work.
Have any of you experienced fare issues on the Silver Line, especially occasional riders that use the Day Pass? In the meantime, print out this fare flyer as it could come in handy if you are a day pass holder and the fare information on the schedule doesn’t help you get your point across.
Contributed by
Wad on November 25th, 2009 at 2:32 am
Photo by neighborhoods.org on Flickr; used with a Creative Commons license
The day after Thanksgiving, known in recent years as Black Friday, has been the time when bovine Americans stampeded to shopping malls and general merchandise stores. Yes, that remark has a kernel of truth.
That was before the alcohol-induced spending binge of most of this decade led to a brief coma and the hangover gripping most Americans. Unfortunately, 70% of our economy depends on people buying crap.
If you do join the herd Friday, remember MetroReaders, keep your money in Los Angeles County. We have to feed the Measure R kitty.
If you choose not to, you can see where the Measure R money goes by joining the Southern California Transit Advocates on its Day After Thanksgiving study tour. This year, Socata’s train-hopping aboard Metrolink. The Socata folks are going to use Family 4-Pack tickets to explore almost every line in one day.
Participants are asked to shake off the tryptophan somnolence and arrive at Union Station by 7:50 a.m.
Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!
Continue Reading…
Contributed by
Wad on November 23rd, 2009 at 3:10 am
The route names, rationales for the changes and service frequencies are on the Google Map for this series. Click on a line and look.
This map covers route suggestions for services between the Santa Monica Mountains and the 10 Freeway. There are DASH proposals for East and Northeast Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley as well.
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