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ChineseMetro Live Television Chat Far More Informative Than Metro Live Online Chat
Last night, Metro Board member Pam O’Connor answered questions and spoke about the Long Range Transit Plan on Los Angeles Public Access Television. I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch the live show last night, but watched it on the web this morning. You can check out the show on LA36′s website, right here.
The hour long show proved to be a much better medium for Pam than her monthly home on the Metro Interactive online chat, which is pretty much universally panned for its inability to be either interactive or informative. Metro Live, despite its obviously public access level production values, managed to keep my attention for the entire hour. Pam’s answers came off a lot more candid and sincere than they do on the online chat, which for the most part seem like copy-paste clippings from Metro press releases. That’s not to say she didn’t paint a rosy picture of Metro when faced with some hardballs, from hearing her talk you’d think the TAP card is the second coming and fare gates are neccessary, well, just because.
Here’s some highlights (and lowlights):
- The motion graphics that begin the show really set the technical tone: this is gonna be Wayne’s World quality stuff. Hard to believe we are in the heart of the movie industry with production values like this.
- Pam talks some good game about congestion pricing, noting how we pay variable prices for virtually every resource we use but our roads . “We’ve not valued, or put a price, on what’s really a rare resource… our roads”
- A Santa Monica woman calls and asks if job growth should be regulated until an expansive transit system is in place, Pam keeps it real and says Los Angeles is growing no matter what (mostly from new births) and there’s going to have to be jobs for these new Angelenos.
- “The pattern of driving, alone, in a single occupancy vehicle… even if it’s fueled by alternative fuel, you still need a place to park it… that takes carbon emissions to build. So we are going to have to, as a society, start making some choices about how we travel.”
- Ricky from Woodland Hills asks about fare gates, Pam responds by repeating Roger Snoble’s lie that LA is the only subway in the world without fare gates, a lie that LA Weekly exposed on the day the Long Range Plan was publicly released. She claims there is a “range of reasons” to go to a gating system but only gives two reasons: “safety” and stopping fare evasion. Both of which have been disputed here on MetroRiderLA.
- My favorite momment was when an angry bitter bus driver called in asking for Metro to fix the current system (mostly, make the buses run on time) before moving on to the future. Pam was reasonable when she noted that buses must ride in the same traffic as cars, and also implied that a real-time GPS bus tracking system was on its way. Still, the dude had a point.
For a hoops based look at the Metro Live Television chat, read Damien Newton’s entertaining take over at Streetsblog LA.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
Pam reasonable when she noted that buses must ride in the same traffic as cars, and also implied that a real-time GPS bus tracking system was on its way.
It is bizarre that this is seen as a “reasonable” answer.
Buses being forced to travel in car lanes is an absurd situation that points towards the automobile-centric design goals of our transit system.
The MTA (and every traffic engineer I have met) counts a bus load full of people as the equal of a single occupant car. This is an absurd situation. If we were to take transit seriously in more than a rhetorical sense, the road measurements that determine that buses actually decrease “mobility” (by getting in the way of cars) would be done away with. I don’t think Pam’s answer is very reasonable at all.
Again, did the chair of the TRANSPORTATION commission give any time over to the 99.44% of the LACMTA mission that isn’t transit? S’okay, I’m not starting a fight or complaining just getting a feel for the tone of the board.
That’s not entirely true. They are both single vehicles and when vehicles counts are the metric then yes. In terms of congestion LA buses are the equivalent of 5 maybe 6 POVs which is 7-8 SOVs. Those MTA engineers should be fired.
It’s reasonable in that it’s true. She did go on to talk about bus only lanes as a solution to the problem. But as long as buses remain in traffic with cars, schedules are unlikely to ever be adhered to. This is why, short of bus lanes (which take a certain amount of political will in this car centered city, you must admit), I do support things like doing away with schedules and getting real time bus tracking and other things listed in this article from Wired.
I didn’t watch the whole thing, even I’m not that boring. But I’m commenting to remark that I was most disappointed by her reference to distance-based fares. I was really hoping that the concept was just nerd paranoia. I guess I’m OK with them for single fares, but if Metro abolishes the monthly pass a la BART, I’m going to be *pissed*. That’s the kind of thing that will drive people back to their cars, especially because unlike SF there’s still an abundance of heavily subsidized parking in LA.
Yeah I really dislike distance-based fares. I understand the reasons for them, but when LA has a real, comprehensive system, maybe then they can nickel and dime us. In my mind, transit is a basic public service and the further distance we keep from libertarian/conservative visions of everyone wearing GPS emitters that count how many feet their car drives or how long they’re on a bus and then charge them accordingly, the better off we’ll be.
Unlike a lot of folk around here, I don’t really have a problem with the MTA or whoever. I shake my fist at them in a general way for their mistakes and screw ups in the past (if the red line’s construction had been handled better, maybe the NIMBY’s would’ve had less ammunition to kill everything), but on the whole I think if they had the money they’d do the things that need to be done, but they don’t, so it’s not as effective to get mad at them as it is to work at trying to get funding and support for projects we want completed.
i personally think that GPS bus tracking is one of the most immediate and best selling points metro should get on. its marketable as fuh and could get people out of their cars faster than a lot of other ideas, simply because it would make people confident in metro, which is lacking across the board. many times i’ve told people to “take metro” and “give it a try” and they come back with horror stories about how the bus was 45 minutes late or never showed up at all, etc. and they never try it again. if we all had a real time GPS tracker such negatives would never happen and first time users would be blown away as to the simplicity of taking public transit. not to mention how great it’d be for us that already take it regularly.
so yah, there are endless things we could request from metro, but this one is simple enough at this point (along with finally get the damn arrival times on the monitors at rail stations– i know i know, july, be patient) that it should be at the top of the list.
Yeah, it’s a great concept, but does any city do it for every bus? SF does it for rapids.
In DC I tried to use their “NextBus Beta” system that was advertised on one or two lines but it just said “Sorry the trial has ended, please leave feedback at blah blah blah”
in my experience with metro’s “nextbus beta” has been hit or miss. just 2 days ago it was on point, the day before, well off. so its not the answer but its better than before. it still has a lot of generally bad lay out problems; having to put in an end destination, among others. still, GPS on every bus would be outstanding, starting with rapids and going from there.
So true. This needs to be something that Metro considers. If one of their goals is to get and keep people out of their cars, even if for just one day a week as Pam says, the first impression has to be flawless. You can’t expect someone who is entrenched in the car culture, but looking to move to transit for whatever reason, to think of a bus coming 45 minutes later than schedules as acceptable. They will not ride again, it will confirm an suspicions they had about transit, and they well share the experience with their peers.
It’s not Metro’s engineers that miscalculate the impact of a transit vehicle. It’s LADOT’s.
And that is the reason for the Long Range Transportation Plan. What always seems to go unnoticed is that this is the “master plan” of projects that get the priority once additional funds become available.
If you read the LRTP, nothing has been moved to the constrained plan (the projects for which funding is already identified) that wasn’t there in the last plan. That alone confirms what Simon said. What is important, therefore, is that everything we feel should be built in the future is included in the strategic plan. Because even when funds come, they won’t go towards anything not in the LRTP. That’s a legal requirement.
Nothing that is already being done (like monitors at stations) as a minor upgrade should be in the LRTP. Major projects only. No, the GPS upgrade is also not a LRTP-eligible project.
Kymberleigh,
Are the coming bus-only lanes on Wilshire considered an MTA upgrade or something the cities are doing through their planning departments? Would additional bus-only lanes on other streets need to be in the LRTP?
[...] are neccessary, well, just because. Here’s some highlights (and lowlights). —> http://metroriderla.com/2008/03/28/metro-live-television-chat-far-more-informative-than-metro-live-o... [...]
[...] Anti-Pam Chat” (not that we have anything against Pam per se, she did a bang up job on public access television) to coincide with Metro’s oft maligned experiment in interactive communication. The idea was [...]