MetroRiderLA

OK, so I’m basically hijacking the Metro news release and shilling for expensive phones.  All at once!  Basically, Metro has created a mobile-friendly website, according to the news release.

So I proceeded to try it with my Helio Ocean, which has previously struggled with the SoCal Transport trip planner.  This time, however, once I viewed the pages in HTML, it worked like a charm.  The trip planner worked well, the user interface was no more clumsy than any other mobile website, and it was generally easy to use.  I’m favorably impressed.  I have the Opera browser on my phone, as Metro suggests using, but did not have to use it - the regular Helio browser sufficed.

I might add, I bought the Ocean in no small part for use as a regular transit rider.  The Ocean’s GPS function helps me a great deal when I’m lost (which sadly happens much more often than it should), and now that Metro’s website is mobile-friendly, it’ll be much easier to both a) Find the nearest Pinkberry with Google Maps and b) get directions to that yogurt-yet-maybe-not-yogurt goodness from anywhere in Los Angeles.  So I’m going to give Metro’s new mobile website an unequivocal  two-thumbs-up as yet another way to bring along people who may not traditionally be transit riders in the Southland.

It’s good to see Metro looking for more ways to help people connect with them, as their phone lines are difficult to get through to and not open terribly frequently.  Now we’re just looking forward to getting proper information on real-time arrivals on mobile devices - hopefully this website is the backbone to getting the high-tech Holy Grail online.

(Image courtesy of the folks over at Helio, an LA-based provided of high-end mobiles)

[tags]gold line, accident, los angeles[/tags]

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From the LA Times: Gold Line crash near Mt. Washington injures 6. Gold line delays. Interesting how they say that, despite the fact that it appears undisputed that the collision occured because a foolish driver ran around the barrier, that it was the Gold Line train doing the hitting. If a person walks off a cliff, are you going to blame the cliff? Probably a poor choice of wording, but still, I’d hate to see this blamed on the evils of rail transit.

And people complain about Boston drivers… if Bostonians ran into the Green Line twice a month, there wouldn’t be a Green Line left to speak of.

From Metro:

Due to an accident involving the Metro Gold Line and a vehicle at Avenue 50 and Marmion Way, Metro Gold Line service had been delayed with no through service in the area. As a result, Metro has deployed Metro Buses to transport Metro Gold Line patrons between the Highland Park Station and the Southwest Museum Station. This service delay will remain until further notice. Metro apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause to our patrons.

It took me two hours tonight to get from Hollywood/Vine to Wilshire/Normandie. I think I probably could have walked it in that time. Not kidding. Two hours.

I leave H&V at roughly 10pm, maybe 10:15. Take the red line to Wilshire/Vermont, try to get on the elevator, and find that the cleaning crew has taken over the elevator with a large piece of equipment. Wanting to make the transfer, we try and fit on but the cleaning folks refuse to make room, breaking the outer door to elevator WVL-1. WVL-2 has been broken in its entirety for weeks now. I make it downstairs, see two Hollywood trains go by until Metro finally has the courtesy at about 11:15pm to tell the folks via loudspeaker at Wilshire/Vermont that the Koreatown trains are leaving from the upper platform. This is news to some 20 or 30 people, who crowd the stairs and the only remaining elevator.

Thanks for putting notices up, for putting it on the rail status page, and for making announcements on the train. Any of those things could have saved all of those confused people from waiting so long.

I finally go to the upper platform, and leave W/V around 11:30. I get to Normandie, go to the lobby level, and find the sole elevator from lobby to street, WNL-1, out of service. Great. I tell yet another cleaning lady, and say that I’ve probably missed the last train - she informs me that there’s one more train back downtown. So back to W/V I go.

I get to W/V again around 11:50, only to find that now BOTH elevators WVL-1 and WVL-2 are out of service. I call Metro (thank God that Helio has a strong signal in LA, I usually have cell phone service in subway station lobbies), only to be told that the elevator is being manually held in emergency mode on the Courtyard level by… wait for it… the incompetent cleaning people. She apparently pages the cleaning people via the elevator, who send it back down. I get upstairs at about 12:00 and proceed to walk home, getting home about 10 minutes ago. At 12:10. After leaving my friends’ apartment near Hollywood/Vine at 10pm. Had any of this information been made available to me while I waited on the platform at Hollywood/Vine, I simply would have walked home from Wilshire/Vermont and been home in time for the 11pm news.

This will all be going in an angry letter to Metro. It’s inexcusable that they would pay so little attention to elevator maintenance, inexcusable that a cleaning crew would insist on priority over the elevator over a disabled passenger, and even more inexcusable that they would allow their same moronic cleaning crews to hold the only functioning elevator at a major transfer station out of service for their own convenience. The whole mess was unacceptable on more levels than I can count.

I’m usually a huge fan of Santa Monica’s historic bus system. They provide great service with polite drivers, a comfortable ride and easy-to-understand schedules, along with surprisingly frequent and reliable service for a community that’s debatably a suburb. They’ve also managed to provide debit-style fares, along with the other “MetroCard” systems in LA, while Metro is still using tokens, which even Boston and New York have finally given up, and at that for some bizarre purposes to this East Coast kid.

Having said that, their “modernization” of the Little Blue Card has been a Big Blue Mess.

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At any rate. The New York Times reports a great real estate deal in NYC: Look what you can get for merely $225,000:

A parking space.

All of this talk about transit-oriented development and NIMBY obstructionists and everything else, and at the end of the day, this article explains why what should be patently obvious to basically everyone in the Western Hemisphere: LA is not New York.

We have two separate issues, which often mistakenly get conflated into one.

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Yeah, so say that three times fast.

[Update, 6.14.07: Word reliably from Upon High is as follows. (1) It is incorrect, it is, indeed, a recitation of the old service cutbacks a year or so ago; (2) It's a known bug, and a driving reason behind replacing the current signboards (which, incidentally, Boston just spent a ton of money installing these defective items, ahh, my former home is full of geniuses); (3) If you see something equally weird, call Metro and let them know, they meant it literally when they they told me that they would send someone out to repair the signs - repairs currently require a live human to go out there.]

In any event. I haven’t been on the Metro Rail lines recently, as I live in Koreatown and am studying for the bar at Loyola (hello, Local #66).

So a couple weeks ago, I went up to Wilshire/Westlake for the Metro Purple Line instead of taking the bus, around the time that the fare increases went through, and saw a notice on the electronic signboards saying that service on the “Red Line Wilshire Branch,” Green Line and Gold Lines would be cut back an hour. Suffice to say that I was not a happy camper. So I called Metro and after spending nearly an hour on hold (argh?) was told that it was an error. I sigh in relief and move on with my life.

But then I go through there again today. The sign’s still up. I call again. They still say it’s an error. They again say that they’ll send someone over there to take a look.

Here’s to hoping that it really is an error, because if we’re going to eat a fare increase, cutbacks on the rail lines are hardly the way to retain customers.