MetroRiderLA

It’s been quite a while since we last caught up with the Los Angeles Metro Mole and his intrepid quest to expose the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the wasteful, inefficient, mess that it is.  Suffice it to say, the Mole is no Metro fanboi.  Our furry friend returned at the end of March with a brand new scathing review of Metro’s operations coupled with reports from the road and flights of fancy.

Here’s a sampling of what you’ll find in the complete posting:

• The Culver City Bus pwns Metro with new technology that makes it clear who’s driving.
• Signage at the LAX Bus Center improves from 0% correct to 33% correct.
• At long last, the Mole find his next transit Dulcinea, in the form of an Australian tourist hoping to find a bus to Venice Beach.
• A 780 bus driver, when faced with the Mole’s truth serum, reveals that the Automatic Stop Announcements are never updated.

Image courtesy of xero79.

The dust has settled from the Dodgers historic reunion with the Los Angeles Coliseum this past weekend. Over 115,000 people showed up for this game, and many of them were hoping that the mass transit alternatives offered by both Metro and the Dodgers would spare them the parking and traffic nightmare they’ve grown accustomed to at Dodgers games. According to the L.A. Times, 35,000 people showed up at Dodger Stadium hoping to take advantage of the shuttles to the Coliseum provided by the Dodgers. Unfortunately, the shuttles turned out to be a colossal failure. Apparently most of the shuttles were just that, smaller van-like buses that could hold a very limited amount of passengers, and according to people who were there, the whole process was very chaotic and unorganized. Some fans were still stranded at Dodger Stadium while the game had been going on for an hour some six miles away. These people will likely never attempt to go to a baseball game without a car ever again.

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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?

Metro San Fernando Valley Sector Council member Kymberleigh Richards is known for her outspoken defense of Metro when it comes to criticism about bus stops and the lack of comfortable benches/shelters. Kymberleigh makes it clear that since Metro doesn’t own the shelters, benches, or anything else at a bus stop other than the signs, they have no control over the comfort level of the stop. In a recent rant, inspired by a Daily News article about revenue loss due to residents fighting against new bus shelters (provided by an advertising company) that they claim would bring blight to their neighborhoods, Kymberleigh draws the line between improved bus stop conditions and advertising. In the current reality, the two are correlated and you can’t have one without the other. So which is it going to be, comfier bus stops and more money for the city’s dwindling coffers, or neighborhoods free of corporate noise? Kymberleigh sides towards the former, and offers this bit of advice for those on her side:

I am offering a bit of advice to everyone who has ever wanted a shelter placed at their favorite bus stop: Write your elected member of the City Council. Tell him or her that you disagree with the perception that these shelters are advertising blight and should be restricted. And then make an official request for your favorite corner to receive a shelter.

Read Kymberleigh’s entire rant here.

Aus-car the Transit Grouch is a Seattle based transit blogger and family man. It seems that he, much to his wife’s chagrin, enjoys taking his kids on “bus adventures” in Seattle. Whether or not this counts as child abuse these days, I don’t know, but he does it anyways. On a recent trip to Los Angeles though, he did the unthinkable… suggested to his family that they take the bus to see a movie at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood. Not surprisingly, the only person who took him up on his offer was his 5-year old daughter. His story of a ride to Hollywood on a Metro Local 2 with his daughter offers a charming and insightful look at our buses through the eyes of an outsider on an adventure.

Here’s one of my favorite bits:

My wife called via cell phone as we walked — she’d just arrived in line and was hoping and praying that we wouldn’t be too late. Apparently, some of her relatives had been laying side bets on how late we would be. The consensus was that we had no chance to get there by showtime. We got there 10 minutes early. Ha!

Read Aus-car’s story here: “A Bus to Hollywood”

The transit communications blog, Permanent Campaigns, recently posted an article targeted at transit agencies about a topic very close to home here at MetroRiderLA, unofficial transit blogs. Entitled “Beware of the Blogger: A Guide to Dealing with Unofficial Transit Blogs“, the article lists some guidelines transit agencies can take to develop a positive relationship with bloggers. It has a list of different transit blogger archetypes to look out for:

• The Fanboy/Fangirl: the purest geeks of the geeky world of transit advocacy, these guys have nothing but love and passion. I don’t know if L.A. has one of these, the closest I’ve found is the Go Metro MySpace page.
• The New Urbanist Wannabe: ultra critical intellectual bloggers with a background in urban design for whom nothing is ever good enough. I might put the L.A. Metro Mole in this category.
• The Journalist: news hounds with only one beat: transit. This is the realm of Streetsblog LA and in a less traditional way, The Bus Bench.
• The Crank: nutty types who rant endlessly about nothing much in particular. Although it’s not updated any more, I’d put the What’s Wrong With L.A. Public Transportation blog in this category.
• The Hater: these people just be hatin’. Hmmm… are there any pure haters out there?

I think MetroRiderLA is a little bit of all of these. I’m probably a reluctant fanboy at heart, why else would this site exist? While I don’t have anything near formal training in urban design, I sure like to pretend I do. Every once in a while I’ll try to be a journalist, but my lack of formal training in those arts is obvious. And often, I can be a cranky hater. Luckily, I’m not the only one who writes for MetroRiderLA, and the other contributors help create a somewhat balanced blog that Permanent Campaigns kindly listed as an example of a good unofficial transit blog, and even quoted The Big Lebowski by calling the blog “very thorough”.

All of this inspired me to revamp MetroRiderLA’s links to external sites. I’ve created a new page, the Links Index, which has a fairly extensive list of some great blogs, websites, and resources relating to the transit oriented lifestyle. It’s nice to note that Los Angeles has at least 15 transit oriented blogs that are currently active, let’s hope Metro is listening to Permanent Campaigns and establishing positive relationships with all of them.