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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Steve Boland is a Northern California based transit planner who spends a fair share of his time in our fine city. He runs the website San Francisco Cityscape, which used to be a blog, but is now a repository for beautiful high resolution desktop wallpapers of the Bay Area and even more beautiful high resolution transit maps. These are basically the best non-agency transit maps I’ve ever seen. They are simply stunning.

Steve’s most recent creation is a map of what he imagines to be a realistic portrayal of the Los Angeles rail system in 2030. Subway, light rail, high speed rail, and busways are all included in his fantastic map. He developed the map before the release of the 2008 Long Range Plan, but I think it seems pretty accurate. What’s more I think the design of a map is an improvement over the current Metro Rail map, because as Steve notes, simplified Tube-style maps make sense for complex systems but not so much for our rather sparse and spread out system.

What do you think?

[tags]planning, congestion, traffic, public transportation, bicycle[/tags]

Click to see full image.

The above image is from a poster in the City of Muenster Planning Office, August 2001.