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ChineseTransit Bloggers Blog About Transit Bloggers
The transit communications blog, Permanent Campaigns, recently posted an article targeted at transit agencies about a topic very close to home here at MetroRiderLA, unofficial transit blogs. Entitled “Beware of the Blogger: A Guide to Dealing with Unofficial Transit Blogs“, the article lists some guidelines transit agencies can take to develop a positive relationship with bloggers. It has a list of different transit blogger archetypes to look out for:
- The Fanboy/Fangirl: the purest geeks of the geeky world of transit advocacy, these guys have nothing but love and passion. I don’t know if L.A. has one of these, the closest I’ve found is the Go Metro MySpace page.
- The New Urbanist Wannabe: ultra critical intellectual bloggers with a background in urban design for whom nothing is ever good enough. I might put the L.A. Metro Mole in this category.
- The Journalist: news hounds with only one beat: transit. This is the realm of Streetsblog LA and in a less traditional way, The Bus Bench.
- The Crank: nutty types who rant endlessly about nothing much in particular. Although it’s not updated any more, I’d put the What’s Wrong With L.A. Public Transportation blog in this category.
- The Hater: these people just be hatin’. Hmmm… are there any pure haters out there?
I think MetroRiderLA is a little bit of all of these. I’m probably a reluctant fanboy at heart, why else would this site exist? While I don’t have anything near formal training in urban design, I sure like to pretend I do. Every once in a while I’ll try to be a journalist, but my lack of formal training in those arts is obvious. And often, I can be a cranky hater. Luckily, I’m not the only one who writes for MetroRiderLA, and the other contributors help create a somewhat balanced blog that Permanent Campaigns kindly listed as an example of a good unofficial transit blog, and even quoted The Big Lebowski by calling the blog “very thorough”.
All of this inspired me to revamp MetroRiderLA’s links to external sites. I’ve created a new page, the Links Index, which has a fairly extensive list of some great blogs, websites, and resources relating to the transit oriented lifestyle. It’s nice to note that Los Angeles has at least 15 transit oriented blogs that are currently active, let’s hope Metro is listening to Permanent Campaigns and establishing positive relationships with all of them.
Discussion
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LA actually has it pretty good, this is an excellent blog that I haven’t seen compared in other cities. I have close ties to Phoenix, AZ, which will be opening a starter segment on its LRT program in December, and recently tried to find a blog or transit advocacy organization for the Valley in order to get recent news – there is none that I could find. Maybe there’s one out there, but if so, they’re not exactly winning any visibility awards.
Btw, you got my link right, but you listed me as 296bus (which I have ridden once, at least).
One more blog you might want to add to the outside-of-LA list: http://vtawatch.blogspot.com , representin’ for SJ in the transit blogosphere.
Thanks 295, I’ve fixed your link and added VTA Watch.
This is a great listing of transit blogs, glad we could encourage you to get it together. We’re big fans of MetroRiderLA.