MetroRiderLA

In East London, an innocent young man is nearly killed by the horrors of at-grade rail. Watch the footage here.

Well over a year ago we featured the now infamous picture of a group of anti-rail B.R.U. members posing and smiling in a Red Line Station.  Today, courtesy of a MetroRider with a quick wit and a quicker shutter, we present to you a new picture of B.R.U. members riding that which they hate the most.  This time it looks like work instead of fun if the clipboards are any indication, but what could the yellow shirts be telling all these affluent white people on this Red Line train?  Best caption wins mad propz from your peers.  Let ‘em rip.

Metro slowly inches forward in providing its customers with essential transit information.  At Union Station, the fancy new Transit Passenger Information System (TPIS) displays have been updated at long last to include a tiny bit more transit passenger information.  The displays now show a message specifying which train on the platform will be departing next.  This information has the potential to help the somewhat minor passenger conundrum of trying to guess which train to get on if there are two trains waiting on the platform.  Unfortunately this information is only of use to those who are not traveling beyond Wilshire/Vermont as the displays do not inform passengers of whether the next departing train is a Red Line train or a Purple Line train.  As you can see in the photograph, the signage still implies the the train is headed to both North Hollywood and Wilshire/Western, and in fact in my mind the visual hierarchy implies that North Hollywood and Wilshire Western are the next upcoming station stops.  Criticisms aside, it’s nice to see Metro attempting to do a little bit more with these pricey displays, it may seem like a tiny step forward now, but it’s a step forward nonetheless.

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?

(more…)

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.