MetroRiderLA

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.

The Taj Mahal gets romantic today. Photo courtesy of Metro.

Metro is celebrating the February 14th holiday by lighting up the Metro Headquarters Building  (aka the “Taj Mahal”) with a heart on all four sides. You can see the luminous ode to love today from 6pm - 10pm if you’re in the Downtown area.  MetroPhotographers, grab your sweethearts and make sure to capture this adorable architectural gesture on digital emulsion and share it with us on the MetroRiderLA Flickr Pool.

Taking your significant other to see lights on a building, no matter the shape they produce, does not a Valentine’s Day make.  However, is it even possible to have a Transit Oriented Valentine’s Day in Los Angeles without the day ending in a nasty break-up?  Does a Metro Bus really set the mood for love?  Is a 4-car Red Line train entering a dark tunnel a clear enough euphemism for the physical act of love without being so overt as to offend? Does the number of cars a train has even matter?  Or has your car-free lifestyle left you riding solo?  We all just want someone to sit with us on the bus, if only to avoid having that vagabond with personal odor issues take the seat next to you.

In the spirit of the holiday, I’d like for everyone to upload their favorite romantic Transit Oriented Picture on to the MetroRiderLA Flickr Pool so that we can prove that a car-free life isn’t a love-free life!  Plus it will be really cute… even cuter than Metro’s glowing heart building.  You can check out my contribution right here, adorable isn’t it?  So, please, if you’ve got a picture (and I know you do) of you and your significant other riding the bus, rails, or just being transit oriented in general, share it with us.  Just keep it PG please, ya freaks.  And then tell us your Transit Oriented Plans for this Valentine’s Day!

Image courtesy of whalt via Flickr.

Although the presidential candidates don’t really have much to say when it comes to transit (you can check out Street Heat LA’s presidential round-up here), that doesn’t mean you can’t take transit to get the LAist’s Super Tuesday Celebration at Seven Grand in Downtown LA.

Starting at 7pm bloggers will congregate at the whiskey bar and discuss the presidential race and other issues facing our world today. Or they will just get wasted. The first 75 peeps who show up wearing their “I Voted” sticker will, unbelievably, receive a free drink! Sounds like a pretty good reason to vote, hell just Christmas Tree the ballot if you don’t care and grab some free booze (jk).

Seven Grand is located in the transit hub of Los Angeles meaning there’s no good reason to drive. Especially since drinking and driving is not only illegal, it’s dangerous as well. I know most of you bloggers are a bunch of pinko green libbed out Obama supporters anyways, so don’t let me catch you being hypocritical! In fact, MetroRiderLA will help you out with transit access info. See ya there!

Oh, yah: Sorry guys, Seven Grand is 21+. I know you’re legally allowed to vote and fight in wars, but you can’t have a sippy sip. Sowwy. And yes, we can blame the car-culture for this. The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 held states hostage, like a dealer to a junkie, by withholding federal highway funds from states that did not enforce a minimum drinking age of 21. So although technically the drinking age is set by the states, it was actually coerced by the Feds! Go big gov! I often wonder why my fellow libertarians claim the car-culture offers freedom…

HOW TO GET THERE:

Seven Grand is located at 515 West 7th Street and is served by rail and bus. Click the above map for transit stops near Seven Grand from Public Routes. You can also check the Metro Trip Planner for the best route from your location.

South Park welcomes you this Sunday.

My neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles is called South Park. While South Park does have a great little park (Grand Hope Park), I think it really gets its name from the sheer amount of parking lots in the neighborhood. Of course as a MetroRider and an urban dweller, my opinion of parking lots is generally negative. Thus, I’m always happy when someone discovers a more interesting use for these otherwise lifeless expanses of concrete.

Phillip Dane, founder of the famous Melrose Trading Post, has done just such a thing with a massive parking lot sandwiched between Grand and Olive and just north of 8th Street on the far edge of South Park. This Sunday he is introducing the South Park Flea Market in the hopes of bringing the unique finds and bargains of the Melrose Trading Post to Downtown. Thanks to its Downtown location, this flea market is one of the most transit accessible yet.

I was so excited about the prospect of the flea market, I offered Phillip some free banner ads in MetroRider’s new Sponsor section on the sidebar. Unfortunately the South Park Flea Market website, in typical L.A. fashion, neglects to mention just how transit accessible the location is. Even the blog Angelenic noticed this missing element in its write up about the event. I took the liberty of adding the transit access to the banner ad (and to the end of this post), but I encourage you to contact Phillip yourself and let him know how important it is to include transit access information on the site.

On more shameless plug… occasional MetroRiderLA contributor and good friend, JustMyNipples, will have a booth at the flea market (you can also see his banner ad on the page… obviously sponsors will be freebies for the time being) selling all sorts of great records and handmade stuffed animals among other things.

So if you’re looking for something different to do this Sunday, hope on a bus or train and ride down to South Park and check out the new flea market.

Metro Access:

• Rail: Red, Purple, Blue Lines via 7th Metro Center
• Bus: 14, 27, 36, 38, 66, 70, 71, 76, 81, 96, 484, 485, 490
• Check out the Metro Trip Planner for specifics.

[tags]metrolink, public transit, orange county, los angeles, riverside[/tags]

It seems Metrolink riders know how good they’ve got it.

According to the Riverside Press-Enterprise, commuters on the Metrolink 706 train on the 91 Line are a wild bunch. A recent article describes how passengers in the last car of the 706 behave like reckless, uninhibited teenagers although most are creeping past middle age. It all started 8 years ago when a conductor would repeatedly nearly miss a stop (La Sierra in Riverside). The passengers found it amusing and decided to let the conductor know when the stop was coming, in the most immature way possible, by screaming like banshees when they passed the Magnolia Bird Farm.

In past years the group of commuters have also thrown toga parties on the platform, started whiffle ball games, crammed 13 people into the bathroom, among other bits of tomfoolery. What makes these grown adults feel that they can act like children while real commuters are idling out on the 91 Freeway? Maybe because they’ve got a sweet subsidized ride and they’re not afraid to use it. And I say, more power to them.

Apologies to underground indie hipster comedian Johnny Pemberton for the headline.

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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