MetroRiderLA

Sometimes naughty bus riders get yelled at.
Crying baby image courtesy of dawnhops via Flickr.
Remixed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Today I discovered that riding a Metro bus can make you feel 20 years younger.

How can riding on a rickety, dirty, scrachiti-covered bus make a 26-year-old man feel like a 6-year-old boy you ask? The answer is quite simple:

When a Metro bus driver scolds you like a child, it’s easy to feel emotions you haven’t felt since kindergarten.

The whole sad stowy after the jump…
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These two words sum up Valley Glen resident Martin Korn. In his letter to the editor published January 24 in the Daily News … well the whole letter is not as important as this one single sentence:

Finally, the suggestion to take a bus to public transportation is insulting.

WOW!!! This really ought to be an internet meme, and Korn should be nominated for a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

To preserve this wisdom for the ages, the entire letter follows the jump.

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Saturday was beautiful with just the right amount of sun and the right amount of breeze. So my girlfriend and I decided to head on out to Pasadena, however, instead of taking the easily accessible Gold Line I convinced her to take the bus with me instead. I told her I was in the mood to write up a new ride report and that as far as I knew the 79 had not been done yet. Plus I wait at a bus stop that shares with the 79 and the majority of people at the stop seem to get on that bus and I had always been curious where it went. Thrilled, she said ok.
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Oh that’s just the windows… or the seats or the, well just about everything really. Have you ridden in a bus that tops twenty-five miles an hour as of late? Though not likely a normal thing, if ever, the past couple weeks with the winter hiatus of most production work and therefore mass exodus of thousands from Los Angeles streets, travel time during rush hour is down over a 25%, and at other times even more! However, is faster really better? (more…)

It crossed my lips without even knowing it, but as soon as it came out I knew I had betrayed LA. It hurt and still does. How could I? How could I speak so passively and negatively of something I’ve championed so much since its inception in March? Well, if you were on that Blue Line train from O’Hare airport in Chicago going straight to the city then you would too.
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This month marked a critical anniversary for me, one that has prompted me to look back on the past decade of my life and ask myself how things came to be as they are today. How did I become a person who was content to live without a car and who felt so strongly about that decision that he would take time to advocate that others follow suit? What could have happened ten years ago that would prompt such introspection?

In December of 1996 I was given the legal right to drive a car.

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