MetroRiderLA

So walking home tonight from my grocery, I see the lovely sign above. My Korean is poor (hey, at least I have some Korean now, thanks to the wonderful folks over at the Korean Cultural Center of Los Angeles), but it’s obvious that this is about the meeting on May 24th.

Lovely. So basically, in their “rail is racist” message they expect to drag along residents of Koreatown, a district that, in my view, is the best example in LA of what can happen to an area after you add rail service. My hope is that most fellow residents and boosters of Koreatown recognize this nonsense for what it is. It’s interesting to see them try to pull along Korean residents, when anyone who watched TV in the 90s could tell you how poor relations were between the Korean parts of town and the traditionally poor sections that the BRU tries to represent. Well, that they try to represent when they’re not driving expensive cars or throwing parties at the Biltmore, that is. But that’s neither here nor there.

I do wonder if the reason that the fare hike “debate” is so muted may be the BRU - they’ve basically sucked all of the air out of the room, and it’s hard to come back with nuanced, well-thought ideas when they’re at these meetings shouting like five-year-olds who haven’t had their afternoon snack yet. I know I’ve certainly shied away from the issue - I put in my written comments and went about my day.

So it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’ll be curious to see if the meeting makes the news. But I won’t be there - if I wanted to see or hear a bunch of five-year-olds throwing tantrums, I’d go to my local McDonalds.

So, seeing as the peanut gallery back here is going to have to pick up the slack, let’s have some “fun” at the expense of LADOT today.

Many of you know that I’m in a wheelchair, which makes the whole car-free thing interesting at times. I moved here from Boston, where ADA access seems to only be a suggestion, and have largely done well here; the two primary systems I use, Metro and Santa Monica, are both very much on top of things.

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Anyone picked up that “Green Line Destinations” brochure yet? I grabbed one after work a couple days ago because, sadly, I needed a good laugh. It’s great to know that I can take over an hour to get to a McDonalds or an El Pollo Loco, if I’m ever feeling deprived and in need of a pleasure tour along the Century Freeway.

What do people know of the green line? My understanding is that the travel industry lobby (e.g. taxi drivers, LAX garages, area hotels) advocated for the green line to stay out LAX, in order to keep it from being easy to get out of the area. So that makes that part of the Green Line kind of useless. But my further understanding is that, when it was built, there was a hope that the aerospace industry would be a huge employer on the western edge, and that folks would commute from the eastern edge of it, and thus create independent demand for the line. I’ve also heard rumors that the BRU advocated for the line, which would explain why it’s the runt of the MTA litter.

But instead, the military-industrial complex collapsed under its own weight after the Cold War, and now I have trouble seeing the use for it. It follows the freeway medians, which isn’t exactly the most comfortable way to wait for a train, Hollywood/Vine it ain’t. Frankly, I fail to grasp why we didn’t simply split the blue line into two branches, west and east, so that you could at least get a one-seat ride to LAX and Norwalk. A flying junction at Imperial/Wilmington would be annoying but not impossible, and by the time you’re building a flying junction, you could put in switches that would allow the Norwalk-Redondo service that currently exists. Sort of like the NY/NJ PATH, where at peak hours you can go from almost any station, to almost any station, in a single ride.

So, any thoughts on the green line in its current state?

Photo by Peter Ehrlich, hosted by the NYC Subway fan site.

So this post is for general discussion, and contains a couple gold-related themes.

1) The Gold Line. So I experience for the first time the “express” service to Pasadena. First, and though this is partially my fault for not noticing immediately, it’s pretty confusing that it only stops at Memorial Park going one way. Guess who had to walk to Colorado Bl. from Del Mar. *raises hand*.

Why are they doing this? This isn’t New York, they’re not clearing up tracks by running express trains. It cuts an astonishing 5 minutes off the trip to Sierra Madre Villa, and has to leave some pretty torqued off people who are going to the other station who suddenly find their rush hour service cut back. Why is this a useful service? I’m having trouble seeing it. They’d do the gold line more of a service telling the people on Marmion Way to get a grip than they are with this one.

2) Where’s the gold? I spent 2 weeks here in August, and got stopped by a Sheriff checking passes probably every 2-3 days. I’ve been here 3 weeks, and haven’t been on a train that’s been checked. Do I just have fantastically bizarre luck, or is LASD on permanent vacation? I ask because, in all of the noise about that Pershing Square fiasco a few months back, I’d hate to see that MTA really was losing money because LASD had abandoned checking tickets, and people had noticed and relied on this abandonment.

(Picture taken by myself, hosted by Facebook.)

For myself, a recent transplant from Phoenix via New York by way of Boston, I’d had a great deal of trepidation about being car-free in Los Angeles. I mean, what’s the first thing Zonis think of when they think of their distant cousin, six hours to the west? Cars and crime!

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Modern Continental, not content to bring Boston’s Mass Pike to a halt with shoddy construction work, apparently decided to take their mal-construction stage show on the road.

From my favorite procrastination reading material, the LA Times…

The concrete bridge was designed by HNTB Corp. of Santa Ana and built by Modern Continental Co., the Massachusetts-based company that was the contractor for Boston’s Big Dig highway tunnel. (A motorist was killed in that tunnel last year when her car was crushed by falling concrete ceiling panels.)

Thankfully, Metro has stepped in with safety measures and we don’t look to be repeating the Milena del Valle tragedy.

On Aug. 23, 2005, two years after the Gold Line opened, transit workers noticed fallen concrete, after spotting a child holding chunks of it in her hands, according to internal MTA documents obtained by The Times.

Though we apparently came close.

A visual inspection at that time revealed that Modern Continental deviated from the plan, building the affected shear key 6 inches short of its 18-inch design. The significance of that is unknown: “We don’t know if that 6 inches is the total reason for the cracking or if there is some other reason,” Thorpe said.

Wow. All I can manage is “wow.” It’s hard to fault Metro here, Boston didn’t realize that they had a lemon until after this particular bridge was constructed, and it sounds like if it was built to spec, we probably wouldn’t be having concrete showers. We hope that the MTA and the Pasadena GoldBlue Line Construction Authority can stop squabbling for long enough to jointly [threaten to] sue the construction company and recover appropriate repair costs and any other possible damages, assuming a determination that construction methods are to blame.