bloomberg should implement congestion pricing from about 6pm on friday to 6pm sunday and have it start at delancey street and stretch north, not south. he’d make a mint for the city, lol.

i remember people would do this sort of thing in the duboce tunnel in san francisco. i walked through it once with a friend. amazing graffiti.

great post! thanks!

That’s how you manage, build, lie, cheat, and deal with the consequences later. The MTA does too much of the lying and cheating, but with no buiding and managing, if they did all of their sneaky stuff in addition to building very quickly we could have rails.

Don’t ask, just do it. No more silly meetings. The Metro and all of their meetings reminds me of my French Club in high school. We had all of these darn meeting and never accomplished a thing, I think we just had fun having meetings. So what is it, is METRO run by 16 year old girls?

Keep in mind I’m not necessarily for rails, but I could get them built if I were head of the MTA. I’d probably end up doing jail time, but they would get built.

Browne

I’m obviously sort of joking with this post, but I won’t say which parts…

There’s gridlock at all hours ;p. Maybe not as bad as Manhattan, but compared to any other US city, there’s gridlock at all hours. My father does highway design and other transportation civil engineering for a living (I’m sure he’s laughing inside somewhere at the fact that I’ll never drive) and he said that he’s never seen anything as bad as LA, not even NYC. He makes his living designing highways, and yet he said that, at least as to Downtown and the Westside, that building more highways is pointless, that more roads will no longer solve LA’s traffic issues.

But the day will come. And when it does, if there is not a train to save people from themselves, the city will shut down. It will cease to be competitive.

Yes, BUT when you are trying to get people to stop using their cars and use public transit, speed is important.

Sadly, speed is a factor that makes people choose the car for their trips

This is true, and this is a challenge transit faces when it comes to getting people out of their cars and onto trains. As I’ve noted, even fully grade separated subways are significantly slower than cars on freeways without traffic, so speed will always be an issue. Transit is not and will not be as fast as cars. For example, your North Hollywood to Redondo Beach trip takes 30 minute by car… that’s an average speed of 56mph. That’s almost twice the speed of the Red Line and almost 3 times the speed of the New York and London subways. So if there was a subway directly from NoHo to Redondo Beach it would have to go 56mph, with no stops, to get there in 30 minutes. Not gonna happen. At the Red Line’s average speed (30mph) the trip would take 56 minutes. If you have a need for speed, get a car my friends.

Houston’s METRORail is only 7.5 miles and takes 32 minutes; that’s an average of 14MPH; I can bike close to that speed. And for comparison, my everyday commmute to work consists of a Rapid bus, the Orange Line, and the Red Line – all 17.5 miles together, I usually do that in 1 hour, but sometimes I can do it quickly in 47 minutes or slowly in 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Sadly, speed is a factor that makes people choose the car for their trips. I go to a swapmeet that occurs near the Redondo Beach Green Line station and I take my friends with me; after trying the Metro route of taking the Red Line from NoHo and following my way to the end of the Green Line for about 90 minutes, my friends told me not to take the trains anymore, so I would drive them. Following the apporoximate routing using the 170/101/110 (Harbor Transitway)/105/405; I make the trip in 30 minutes, and that is starting more north than the NoHo station; lest this is a Saturday morning so traffic is light.

The need for speed is a creation of the car-culture. The need to go everywhere at 75mph is ludicrous.

Yes, BUT when you are trying to get people to stop using their cars and use public transit, speed is important. They have to feel like they are going fast. On the subway, the train is moving fast enough and you don’t have landmarks to guide you on how fast it is going (unless you are going really slow, like BART through the Oakland Wye switches). The New York subway feels fast primarily because of the old track, which clickety-clacks through tunnels and on elevated segments. I think when people bitch about the Gold Line’s lack of speed, they are mainly thinking Highland Park, even though that segment is only maybe three minutes long. The freeway segments tend to skew the average speed calculation as well. Still, when that bike is passing you, it’s the longest three minutes in the world.