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ChineseRide report: Metro Rapid Line 770
[tags]los angeles, mta, bus rapid transit, san gabriel valley, el monte, rosemead, monterey park, east los angeles[/tags]
Do not attempt to adjust your monitors. This is a real photo of Metro NABI #7637, in the mid-1990s livery, on one of its two new Rapid lines, 770. Remember how Metro promised Rapids to have every amenity of rail except the steel wheels and tracks? Seven years later, it can’t even produce the red buses.
And it’s not just on this trip. No 770 trip Monday afternoon had a red bus!
Besides Metro mailing its effort in, the trip leaving El Monte Station at 2:45 p.m. had a surly driver and very poor first-day ridership — only 28 passengers. This is a sad start to a fascinating line.
The trip wasn’t as barren as this, but 28 passengers is a poor showing for a street with robust local ridership.
Line 770 has a great international flair. Heading out of El Monte, 770 runs through the bustling Chinese communities of the western San Gabriel Valley. Monterey Park is the most prominent, but the ethnic businesses carry over through Rosemead and El Monte. Line 770 also provides a fast one-seat connection between the San Gabriel Valley and the Eastside.
Atlantic Boulevard serves as the transition between the Chinese restaurants, professional services and banks along Garvey Avenue to their Spanish-language counterparts along Cesar Chavez Avenue. The transition can be seen west of East Los Angeles College, one of 770’s most important trip generators when most students return for the spring semester. Also along the line are a county-run health center (Maravilla), Evergreen Cemetery and White Memorial Medical Center. Cesar Chavez has many automotive repair businesses, more than on First and Fourth streets or Whittier Boulevard, so the pedestrian activity isn’t as busy on Chavez as on those other streets. Yet ridership was busier on Chavez than on Garvey.
East Los Angeles College is one of the busiest community colleges in Southern California, and the students have a new option for getting there. The haze is from the bus window.
This service is a considerable improvement for Line 70 riders on Garvey, who ride long distances on a frequent-stop local line but are shut out of riding the busway along Interstate 10 because there are no stops between El Monte and Cal State Los Angeles. Line 770 does not even come close to meeting the busway’s 20 minute trips between El Monte and Los Angeles — and 770 caught more red lights than green — but it’s still about 15 minutes faster. Line 70’s long-distance riders should familiarize themselves with the new routing and use it to their advantage.
Noobs, though, should avoid this particular trip, especially if today’s driver is not on the extra board. On two occasions, when passengers were grazing at the front door for longer than three seconds, the driver channels his inner troglodyte and screams “Get out of the way!” Sorry, y’all, I didn’t bother to take down the driver’s badge number.
Ralph Kramden’s dyspeptic kindred spirit drove the bus imagining he was in a NASCAR qualifying race. He certainly had the right machine. Never mind no red buses, 7637 hauled serious ass. Hey, maybe the driver didn’t want passengers lollygagging and blowing his shot at a land-speed record.
Your tax dollars at work: An ornate Christmas tree on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall. This can also be seen from a Line 770 bus. City maintenance crews shall have this tree dismantled by May.
This trip from El Monte to Grand Avenue and Seventh Street took 50 minutes, faster and more palatable than a comparable trip on Line 70. And Metro’s most interesting Rapid lines are ones like this, where they combine the meatier parts of unrelated local lines such as 720 and 780. Plus, it’s cool when a bus line can have a cultural narrative, the kind that The Militant Angeleno does with a long essay and pictures.
For a great Chinese or Mexican meal, or a class at East L.A. College, take a trip on the new 770. Just don’t stand in the door too long.
Customarily, the Ride Reports close with a photograph of the bus at the final destination. But 7637 was just too quick. The 770 stop sign, however, just stood there motionless and thus was easier to photograph.
Discussion
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At least it was a NABI low-floor!
First day glitches. You should see plenty of red buses on Line 770 today.
Interestingly enough, as of Monday, new Rapid Line 728 (Olympic) had the red bendy buses and line 740, 745 and 760 upgraded to the bendy buses.
So within a block of where I live, there are now 4 rapid bus lines with bendy buses and 1 local line (4).
Hopefully this trend will continue.
I saw a red 770 (no bendy) today at City Hall.
You know what gets me is that the South Bay division runs red buses on the 440 lines (444,445,446..) It just makes no sense when it comes down to trying to make things easy for riders to distinguish what bus they’re supposed to take. If anything those 440’s should be using the blue express buses.
Rapids do it right. Start easy and build a following. Care to comment on the failure of the LACMTA* buses?
http://www.metro.net/news_info/ridership_avg.htm
* Apparently LAMTA isn’t good enough for KR and while I don’t see any problem I respect her efforts and will try to remember.
Bendy = Articulated
And yes the Harbor Transitway buses should be blue.
(Or drop the whole colored-buses thing altogether!)
Rapid 780 is now using the 45ft CompoBuses.
Only the 450X should be blue, since they are scheduled off a different paddle. Not sure why 770 wasn’t running red since Division 9 usually has quite a few red buses, although the ones that used to run on the 484 and 490 have been replaced by normal white and orange buses.
The actual idea for the 770 might be Gloria Molina (or her staff’s, or County Public Works’). During the 2003 strike, a bus using the 770’s current route operated between Union Station and El Monte Station for about a week, before that idea was abandoned and they ran the bus on the regular 70 route instead (probably because of the confusion). I think I still have schedules from the strike 70 somewhere, they printed a few of them out. The schedule was wholly unrealistic (an hour trip? Hah!) but it was better than nothing.
Bad part about the 770 is that it doesn’t stop in front of East LA College. The Rapid anal-retentives insist that their red bus must not stop more than once a mile, whereas the main ELAC stop is about half a mile from Atlantic Boulevard. When you have to get to class on time and you have to run from Atlantic Boulevard, every second counts.
I’ve seen them using the Red buses on the 439 express route quite a bit recently as well. Better using the red buses on express routes than local routes though.
It’s not like they don’t have other places with stops less than one mile apart…
The 704 Rapid Buses are now articulated and the 920 is back to a 40 foot bus.
This makes sense. The 704s are full and the 920s were half-empty.
Yes, Rob, according to the figures released by LACMTA, bus ridership year over year, has gone down approximately 1%.
How about that rail? November to November:
Blue Line ridership up 3.78%
Green Line ridership up 13.9%
Red Line ridership up 6.7%
Even the “lowly” Gold Line is up 6.9%
Is the Blue Line then a “failure” since it “only” went up 3.8%? Hardly. It’s pretty well saturated. It’s the second most ridden light rail line in the United States. Not much room there for expansion. I only wish that all our rail lines were doing as well as the Blue Line.
Oh, yeah, Orange Line ridership was up too.
I like the colored-buses. It’s really helped give Metro an updated identity.