MetroRiderLA

[tags]los angeles, mta, la city beat, public transit, transportation[/tags]

L.A. City Beat put together a series on what was once a dead-end beat in the media but now the lowest hanging fruit on the story tree: transportation.

On the menu:

• “Dozing in the Slow Lane”: The article looks for leadership to get things done. And it’s written by L.A. Sniper Alan Mittelstaedt, mentioned before here recently.

  Mittelstaedt’s writing in the City Beat regarding public transit seems like he’s been hanging around Dana Gabbard and/or Bart Reed a little too much. And that’s a good thing. He recognizes there are more players in the transportation scene besides the shrillest left- and right-wing extremes of the Bus Riders Union and the Reasoners. And he can be quite militant about transit — he’d better be with the nickname L.A. Sniper — but maybe not as militant as this guy.

• “Back to 1984″: This is a piece that infuriates righties at every possible level. It’s pro social-engineering!!!1!!11! It was about the greatness of the L.A. Olympics … in 1984!!!1!!11! The Orwellian symbology is so flagrant!!!1!!11! It forces people out of their cars!!!1!!11! THEY want to take away OUR CARS!!!1!!11!

  Larry Zarian, a former Metro board member during the Dark Ages — last decade — makes a great Monday-mornin-quarterback point: politicians are the problem. They don’t know squat about planning or operations, and should stop acting like they do and leave that up to the professionals.

• “Road Rage”: One of two companion lists. Here are the seven people most responsible for screwing up transit in Los Angeles. Right on the mark and unimpeachable.

  The link is provided, but the names and the reasons shock no one who reads MRLA. And for the record, I or anyone else on this blog did not write this list.

• “All Aboard, City Council”: The other of the companion lists. It fits in with the City Beat’s righteous and justified indignation angle about public transit. It asked why the 15 members of the Los Angeles City Council do not ride public transit, and how the situation can be remedied.

  Eh. It’s serviceable for stoking cynicism, but the basic flaw is … well, it’ll come in a separate analysis. The A material can’t just be given away now.

[tags]los angeles, mta, national public radio, arthur winston, storycorps[/tags]

Arthur Winston at age 99.
Credit: Rick Jager/Metro (downloaded from Wikipedia)

National Public Radio airs one of the last interviews given by Metro’s most dedicated employee, Arthur Winston. He spoke with his great nephew, Eric Anthony Givens, just before he passed away less than a month after retiring on his 100th birthday.

He made news and set world records for working for most of his adult life for Metro and its precedessor agencies, beginning with the Los Angeles Railway in 1924. When Winston started his career, African Americans were not allowed in front-line jobs, so he tok a job cleaning vehicles. And he stuck with it.

Former president Bill Clinton gave Winston an “Employee of the Century” award in 1996. In 1997, Metro named Division 5, the garage near Leimert Park where Winston worked, after him.

NPR airs the interview in a partnership with StoryCorps, an organization recording life stories of Americans. The StoryCorps Griot Initiative is a one-year project seeking to collect oral histories from 1,750 African Americans, with World War II and civil rights movement stories of particular interest.

[tags]seattle, streetcar, south lake union, seattle post-intelligencer[/tags]

Jerry Johnson, foreground, and Don Clifton model the “Ride the S.L.U.T.” t-shirts at the Kapow! coffee shop in the Seattle neighborhood of South Lake Union.
Credit: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

This is unrelated to anything in Los Angeles, but MetroRiderLA readers could use a laugh once in a while.

Dateline: Seattle.

The unofficial name of a neighborhood streetcar has stuck, and it’s a most unfortunate acronym. The Trolley line is the South Lake Union Trolley. Yes, SLUT.

This is one of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s most read and e-mailed stories.

In reality, the official name of the service is the South Lake Union Streetcar. SLUS. But that’s not nearly as funny. The funnier acronym was just an urban legend, but one that’s enduring. One coffeehouse — how Seattle – is even printing up t-shirts saying “Ride the SLUT,” with a picture of a streetcar to give wearers a point of reference.

South Lake Union Trolley Streetcar Map

See also:

• The Overhead Wire: An inconvenient acronym
• Seattle Transit Blog: Future of Transit in Seattle

[tags]collge, students, valley college, bru, metro, los angeles, fare increase[/tags]

Aside from being a few months late, the Valley Star Online, the student newspaper of Los Angeles Valley College, spouts nothing but BRU rhetoric in an opinion piece about the Metro Fare Increase this past July. The article calls the fare increase “unwarranted” and claims that college students will not be able to afford the extra $13 per month come 2009 when the college pass increases from $30 to $43. It’s obvious the writer has been reading BRU literature, because the rest of the article is nothing but a reiteration of the same old BRU anti-rail/transit-racism argument. Check this out:

What is adding insult to injury is that the MTA will not use the increased revenue to improve bus services, or increase the size of their bus fleet. Instead, the MTA will use it to build another Metro rail line, running from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica. The MTA states that this new project will cost $600 million to build. What would make more sense is to build something similar to the Orange Line - Which cost only $349.6 million dollars to construct, and has been a runaway success for the authority.

What’s sad is how the BRU continues to prey on young students eager to get behind a good cause and attempt to indoctrinate their impressionable politically active minds with bad ideology. Hey freshmen! Don’t buy into the nonsense!

[tags]los angeles, purple line, beverly hills, santa monica, los angeles times[/tags]

Credit: FredCamino

Developer Ken Kahan may have a way. He suggested to the Los Angeles Times’s Steve Hymon to use property tax increment financing which would pay for a subway construction bond. It was the second item, preceded by Los Angeles Councilman Tom Labonge’s frequent travel schedule.

Kahan, the president of California Landmark Group, suggested this method after purchasing land in West L.A., hoping to turn it into a condominium. This is currently used by redevelopment agencies, but laws would have to be changed to allow development to fund a future rail line.

It’s not easy to explain, so here’s a chunk of the article:

When those units are sold, Kahan expects the building will generate about $2 million in property taxes annually. Under his plan, the overall increase in property taxes would go to a fund, which in turn finances a bond to pay for the subway.

…

The downside is that the plan depends on continued turnover of properties along Wilshire and will likely invite critics who say it will bring too much density and redevelopment to Wilshire.

“Forget the development, it’s going to happen anyway and you might as well use the increment for what people are crying and screaming about,” Kahan said, referring to the Westside’s constipated streets.

See also:

• Bottleneck Blog: Subway to Sea: Show me the money!
• MetroRiderLA: Woo hoo

[tags]los angeles, gold line, lincoln heights, dwell magazine, transit oriented development[/tags]

Photo of the Fuller Lofts under construction.
Credit: Curbed LA

Fuller Lofts, an adaptive reuse project in Lincoln Heights, received mention in haute architecture mag Dwell. The concrete building, formerly Fuller Paints, is located a few blocks from the Lincoln Heights/Cypress Park Metro Gold Line station, and when completed in January 2008 will house 80 units. A few are to be set aside as “affordable” units, while market rate condos start in the mid-$200,000s.

The Fuller item is towards the end of the article, “The Condo Generation,” available online and in dead-tree form in the October 2007 issue. The article praises the Fuller architects, Pugh+Scarpa, for this project and an affordable-housing complex built in Santa Monica.

Curbed LA reports the drab concrete exterior has been sexied up with “a wall of colorful red, yellow and purple blocks.”