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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup for 5/23/08
Contributed by Fred Camino on May 23rd, 2008 at 9:12 am
- Okay, so MetroRider didn’t go, but blogdowntown has massive coverage of the Los Angeles Streetcar workshop in one, two, three, four, five parts!
- The Viper Room gets transit oriented! On Monday nights, if you flash a Metro pass (daily, weekly, or monthly) you get in for free!
- Friends for Expo responds to Fix Expo on CityWatch.
- If it weren’t for all these drivers, traffic would be great!
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
Glad to see hipsters who don’t think they are “too cool” to ride the bus.
The Regency Fairfax has a public transit display in their lobby, since they have no parking of their own. Having businesses see transit riders as desired patrons rather than just the undesired poor and marginal is an important part of moving away from the “transportation welfare” idea of transit that conservatives prefer.
It makes business sense. Higher gasoline prices and ever-worsening congestion means fewer customers willing to take the time to travel for entertainment and fewer customers having the extra cash for the cover charge.
I know there isn’t an endless supply of money, but with more people working nontraditional work schedules, I think it is really important to have a strong Owl bus system. (It also has the social good of having an alternative to drinking and driving.) When I lived in London, I went clubbing deep into the night and their amazing Owl bus system assumed I could always get home (eventually
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There have been occasions where I’ve had to shelve plans due to lack of Owl service and taxi cabs being expensive. I second the need for a strong Owl transit system in LA.
The lack of options for weekend excursions especially in the evening is the reason I drive on the weekends unfortunately. Taxis are to expensive in this city.
Nice to see you dating the Daily Transit Links; it was hard to see which recent comment went to what day.
Last link dealing with drivers being the cause of traffic congestion couldn’t be more true. It may sound dumb to eliminate drivers to ease congestion, but it’s eliminating each individual’s control of the vehicle and grouping them into buses that would make a corridor like the I-405 Sepulveda Pass more efficient. The next best thing to that is to have a computer control a group of vehicles since everyone’s different driving abilities conflicts with each other causing people to cut each other off, slow down traffic, accidents, and road rage. Currently, a professional bus driver moving a group of people is a simple example of that.
I posted some images and links about Thursday’s Streetcar Workshop at LA Visions.
Tony, the problem with automated highway systems is that they are still terrible at dealing with merging and lane changes.
Owl service is one of those things that falls under the category of “you’re lucky to have it at all”.
During the service change public hearings this year, figures were released for the owl service on Lines 10, 14, 37 and 38 which showed that the total ridership for all four lines over the entire owl service period (11pm to 4am) was 169. That is an average of 8.45 persons per hour per line, which means it cost Metro just under $10.00 per person transported.
http://boardarchives.metro.net/ServiceSectors/Westside_Central/20080312OtherSectorWES_Item6D.pdf
You cannot make anything other than an emotional argument for expansion of owl service, and with operating funds so difficult to come by now (you may have heard that the state is again talking about diverting some of the sales tax on gasoline sales away from transportation) it doesn’t matter if you second, third, or fourth the need for more owl service … it just isn’t going to happen.
It took an extraordinary effort by the Metro Board, including the use of funds which are available one time only, to prevent the cancellation of some owl service. There simply isn’t enough money to go around, and with those ridership numbers there is no incentive to fund an expansion of the owls.
Sorry, Dan and Osc. Reality trumps dreaming again.
How much does it costs to operate the entire owl bus network?
You expect Owl service when some buses that connect with Metro Rail shut down at 10PM? It seems that any bus that connects to the rail system should at least run until the last train. I know many people who want to take Metro Rail but they can’t because the bus they take to the nearest station stops running at a certain time.
According to the Metro staff report when the Board was undoing all of the service cancellations, it costs $608,000 annually to operate the four owl lines that were referenced earlier.
There are, in total, 33 lines listed on the Metro website as having owl service. Most of those are hourly service with trip lengths of one hour so you can presume it is another $608,000 for each group of four lines.
A few of the owl corridors run more frequently than hourly, though: Lines 20 and 204 all run half-hourly and therefore each counts as two lines’ worth of resources for purposes of this calculation. Line 4 runs 20 minute service until 2:00am and then goes to half-hourly (which makes it almost count as two lines, but not quite), and a couple of the owls are interlined or hybrid lines (2-217 and 51-53) so each of those count as using one line’s amount of resources each. That all averages out to being one more “line” over the count of 33.
So there are the equivalent of 34 hours of service operating each hour of the owl service period; divide by four (the number of lines in a group that we have a cost figure for) and multiply by the $608,000 cost figure … for an estimated total of $5,168,000 per year to operate the present owl network.
Is that close enough to an answer?
But that’s not realistic either, because to run every line that connects to a rail station would result in many lines running so close to empty on their last trips that the productivity would be even worse than owl service.
At least owl service has a predictable ridership base to calculate service upon; most of the ridership that would come from these lower-service extensions would likely be sporadic and not projectable.
Do you ride the owl service? Because I do [4 and 33/333] and it is usually filled with people. Get rid of the unnecessary ones and bump ones the connect to rail lines. tada!
All I’m asking for is a last bus of the night. For example, there is a bus on Slauson that connects with Slauson station. It shuts down around 10:30. Schedule one last bus for the last train after midnight. It helps with what I think is the number one fear about mass transit, getting stranded.
I had a graveyard job for two months a couple of years ago and I concur that the Line 4 buses were filled with people deep into the night. Some of those people were obviously homeless who didn’t have anywhere else to go. Some of those people were early/late workers, and some were clubbers and hipsters doing their partying. It’s quite an eclectic crowd.
Obviously there isn’t the money to provide London level Owl Service. I realize that at this point it is just dreaming.
One advatange of eventually having an extensive owl network, is allowing for TFL (London) to do its rail maintenance at night, meaning less construction/maintenance interruptions during the daylight hours.
The bus stop signs indicate when there is rare 24-hour service. It might be nice to put on those orange stickers pasted on the bus stop posts the time of the first bus of the day for that stop and the time of the last bus of the day for that stop. (As in San Francisco, there should an MTA map posted at every bus stop, to help the casual user with the system.
I really like the 12-minute map the MTA has. We need to, when possible, come up with ways of disseminating transit information without people having to carry dozens of little schedules, but that’s another issue.)
If you were to read the testimony of passengers at the public hearings when those four owl lines were proposed for cancellation, there is no such thing as an “unnecessary” owl. All of them have significance to the people who depend on them.
And inevitably, as soon as that is done, there will be another person who fears missing that bus. The cycle does not end easily.