MetroRiderLA

Yesterday, Mayor Villaraigosa gave his State of the City address, and although the majority of the speech was about gang crime, he did touch on transit.  The Mayor plans on encouraging Metro to look for private funding sources to “build and operate an expanded transit system in Los Angeles.”  I don’t know if all that is possible,  but there are certainly avenues to get private money into our system, advertising being the most obvious.

In Japan, a monorail train in Kobe has been taken over by Ikea to promote the opening of a new retail store.  And when I say taken over, I mean it.  The exterior of the train is painted in bright patterns found on Ikea fabrics and the inside of the train has been converted into a mobile Ikea showroom.  The seats have been reupholstered with Ikea fabrics and colorful Ikea curtains adorn the windows.  It sends an unmissable message, both inside and out.

Could something as wild as this work in Los Angeles?

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Last month, Siel over at the Emerald City blog wrote about the Google Transit Earth Day Challenge first proposed by the folks over at World Changing. The idea of the challenge was to get transit agencies to get their systems onto Google Transit by Earth Day 2008, which is on April 22nd. With 8 days to go and no word from Metro, it’s unlikely that LA will be on Google Transit any time soon, but let’s look at what Google Transit could do for us.

By now everyone is aware of the ubiquitous Google Maps and its fantastically innovative way of providing driving directions, simply input a start and end location and Google calculates the best route with turn by turn directions, time estimates, and of course a corresponding map. It’s likely that Google Maps made the once neccessary Thomas Guide a bit irrelevant since its release. Unfortunately, for those without cars, the directions provided by Google Maps are for the most part useless, and transit users have had to rely on proprietary programs created by the cash-strapped transit agencies to get transit directions. These programs, like our own Metro Advanced Trip Planner, tend to be clunky, unattractive, and often teeter along the fine line of usable and unusable. And when compared to most modern web applications, especially the ones created by Google, the agencies programs just can’t compete.

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This Thursday, April 10th, Metro will be hosting poetry readings at Union Station during rush hour. Starting at 4pm, three poets from the Poetry Society of America (Elena Karina Byrne, Suzanne Lummis, and Marisela Norte) will read selections of their work to commuters. This special event is being held to commemorate 10 years of Poetry in Motion, a program created by the Poetry Society of America that places poetry on our buses and trains where ads might typically be found. Poetry in Motion was first introduced in New York City in 1992, and came to Los Angeles in 1998. There are over 60,000 poetry placards on the interiors of Metro buses.

Of particular interest is poet Marisela Norte, whose work is not only featured on Metro buses, but is written on them! According to her artist statement, Marisela writes most of her East Los Angeles inspired poetry while riding Metro Line 18[PDF] from East LA to Downtown. She doesn’t drive and considers her poetry her vehicle, which is cool enough for me to actually give poetry another chance and check out Marisela and the others Thursday at Union Station.

Image courtesy of iZENstein.

Image courtesy of PhotoDu.de.

According to Permanent Campaigns, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is investing $24 million to expand a pilot program that provides real-time bus tracking data to its customers via web and digital signage at certain bus stops. The program, called the CTA Bus Tracker, has provided real-time date for one bus line (the #20 Madison route) since 2006. The expansion will make real-time data for all 154 CTA bus routes available on the Bus Tracker by spring of next year. Starting next week, 13 bus routes will be added, with the rest coming incrementally.

I loaded up the Bus Tracker to check out the interface and it’s very nice - bold and simple, with no fluff. Metro has implemented a similar interface, for non-real-time bus tracking called NexTrip Beta, and the CTA Bus Tracker, aside from actually being real-time, blows it out of the water in terms of interface design. The CTA interface is still a pop-up, which sucks, but it removes one superfluous element that Metro’s interface has… the need to input your destination stop. The CTA Tracker has 3 inputs: choose your route, the direction of that route, and the bus stop you will be starting at. The CTA Bus Tracker instantly updates with an easy to read list of the routes, bus numbers, and estimated arrival times. The interface is far more responsive than Metro’s NexTrip, which seems to have a unnecessarily long load periods after a selection is made. The CTA Bus Tracker also has a map option, which shows your bus stop on a map and the locations of the buses on your chosen route, updated in real time! It’s really cool to see the buses move along the map toward your location.

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Last night in West Hollywood the first of seven community meetings scheduled to discuss the Metro Long Range Transportation Plan took place.  Streetsblog LA’s Damien Newton was there with over 60 other Westsiders to report on and contribute to the discussion about the LRTP and what it means for Los Angeles and the West Side in particular.  In journalist mode, Damien reports that support for rail was unanimous among the 20 people who spoke.  In citizen mode, Damien gave a stirring testimony  encouraging Metro to place more emphasis on biking and pedestrian improvements, and less on highway expansion projects.  Check out his full report on Streetsblog LA and read his testimony in its entirety on Street Heat LA.

If you were hoping to find out what the folks out Metro thought about the first meeting, you won’t find it on Metro’s own Imagine… blog, which hasn’t been updated since its first impersonal post over two weeks ago.  That post has collected 43 comments so far, and there’s yet to be one response from Metro, so it’s likely the blog is little more than window dressing, created just because websites are supposed to have blogs now.

The next community meeting is tonight at Metro Headquarters, aka the Taj Mahal, adjacent to Union Station.  The fun starts at 6:30pm on the 3rd floor Board Room.  Take the train, bus, bike, or walk tonight and share your thoughts on the future of transportation in Los Angeles.

Image courtesy of bruceley.

The headline is my impression what a Valley Girl might say if the youth of America felt the same way about cars as the young people in Japan. According to a recent article in Newsweek, in Japan the car has lost its cool.

Last year car sales in Japan fell 6.7 percent and since 1990 sales have fallen over 30 percent. The reason? According to the article, demographics play a part, but there’s another factor as well: kuruma banare, or demotorization. To the young people of Japan, cars are just another gadget, and in a country of a million gadgets, cars are low on the “must-have” list. Status is defined by the coolest cell phone or gaming device, not your mode of transport. An increasing number of people in Japan live in urban areas, and the urban areas are served by extensive mass transit, making the expensive prospect of car ownership unnecessary. Why spend so much money on cars when you can get around just fine with out one? That money can be spent on cool gadgets, as is evidenced by the increase in spending on internet and mobile phone subscriptions (up to $1,500 since 2000 according to Newsweek) and the decrease in spending on automobile expenses (down to $600 since 2000).

The article opens with a quote from a young Tokyo-based businessman who no longer owns a car, and gets around instead using mass transit: “It’s not inconvenient at all…having a car is so 20th century.”

Like sushi, karaoke, and anime, it’s time for Americans to embrace the newest Japanese trend: kuruma banare.