MetroRiderLA

Photo by Fred Camino; available in the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool; used with a Creative Commons License

Walk Score has factored in transit service into its latest addition recently. Straight Outta Suburbia just completed its survey of Walk Scores for stations before the Transit Score was deployed. Chewie, the author, finds the scores around the subway to be some of the highest in L.A.

The same goes for Transit Scores. Walk Score calls a score above 90 a rider’s paradise, 70-89 excellent, 50-69 good, 25-49 “some transit”, and 0-24 minimal transit. Keep in mind that it pulls its information from what’s on Google, so about 6,000 smaller systems in L.A. County are missing.

I have 7 categories for the Transit Score. The station, which is self-explanatory, the walk score, the top 10% score, the percentage of areas with a better walk score, the average score, the transit score, and how many available transit lines are at a station. Since the subway is within Los Angeles city limits, the top 10% score for Los Angeles is 92. The average score for all Los Angeles neighborhoods is 49. The subway runs through the top 10% of L.A.’s most walkable areas, with the Vermont/Beverly station with the worst score but within the top 15%. The Wilshire/Vermont Station is judged to be the best neighborhood, and if you’re into that sort of thing, you can live right over it.

Note: Transit Score data were not available for the Valley stations.

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We all know Walk Score. We’ve dabbled in it. We’ve critiqued its shortcomings. We’ve generally embraced it.

Oh, you don’t know what Walk Score is? It’s a website that integrates a Google Map with an API that would search what establishments are near an address and base a score of 0-100 on how easily they can be reached by walking.

The criticism is that Walk Score has been a Yelp! without the reviews, just basing a score on an algorithm that measures businesses nearby, not a human-surveyed tally that raises or deducts score for actual pedestrian amenities or barriers (such as impassable freeways or rivers).

If you haven’t seen Walk Score lately, MetroReaders, take note. It now incorporates a Transit Score! Oh, happy day! It works on the same principle as the Walk Score, but it pulls transit data from Google Maps to determine its 0-100 score. So that’s one limitation. If your system hasn’t plugged in to the Matrix, then you don’t get a score.

What is a big deal, though, is that of the first cities Walk Score rolled out on its transit API, Los Angeles made the first cut! Woo hoo!

MetroRiderLA will be taking Transit Score for a spin. Stay tuned for the results. In the meantime, Straight Outta Suburbia has the Walk Scores for the subway, Blue, Green, Gold and Orange lines. These were completed before the transit API was added.

(Hat tip to The Transit Wire blog for this item).

Photo by Fred Camino, from the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool. Used with a Creative Commons license

August brings bad news for bus riders, particularly for passengers of LADOT and Pasadena’s ARTS.

LADOT’s DASH services cost a dime more, up from 25 cents to 35 cents. This has marked the first fare increase for DASH buses. It was a quarter when it began as a downtown L.A. lunchtime short-hop in the 1980s. Speaking of downtown, Route C to South Park, the weekend Downtown Discovery and the Central City East routes are canceled. Cancellations for the Commuter Express bus services are 413 to Van Nuys, 430 to Pacific Palisades and 575 between Simi Valley and Warner Center.

Also eliminated are the Hollywood/West Hollywood, as pictured in the bus stop sign above, Warner Center and Hyde Park routes. Routes including Crenshaw, Highland Park/Eagle Rock, Hollywood, Lincoln Heights/Chinatown and Midtown, will have Sunday and holiday service eliminated.

Also ending Sunday service is Pasadena’s ARTS bus system. Both LADOT and Pasadena cite a fall-off in sales taxes and the deadbeat state of California shirking contributions as reasons for the cuts. More will likely come.

Photo by Yours Truly, from the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool

Some Rapid are bound to end up like Line 724 in this photo by Yours Truly. It can be found in the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool.

One of the upsides of bus rapid transit is its flexibility. Well, flexibility can also work on the downside.

In large part due to funding shortfalls and in some part due to low productivity, several Metro Rapid lines are either facing cancellation or losing weekend service. Metro says it will fold the service hours from the Rapid lines into their local counterparts.

Seven other lines are also proposed for cancellation.

The services proposed for elimination are lines 168, 177, 214, 220, 439, 608 and 620; the Rapids that would disappear are lines 711, 714, 715, 753 and 920.

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This Thursday, July 1, means two things. First, your bus and/or train ride is going to cost more. Have some extra change or load up your TAP cards. Metro‘s basic cash fare rises from $1.25 to $1.50, a day pass up $1 from $5 to $6, and a Metro-to-muni transfer rises to 35 cents. Express bus step-up fares rise a dime to 70 cents per zone. Discount fares for seniors, the disabled and students will hold for another three years. Visit Metro’s page for the new fare table.

July also gives MetroRiderLA an opportunity to try out new features and churn some activity on our fair site to keep the wheels spinning. The first is MetroFlickrLA. It’s simply sharing a photo here found from our Flickr group. We’ll also supplement you with some of the rich collection of images from the Metro Library, bringing you a slice of Los Angeles history. We’ve got 164 members and are approaching 2,500 photos. Some lucky shots are going to get featured here. It will be a daily gallery of great transit art — and MetroRiderLA’s group has some photos worthy of being displayed in museums — and the goal is to have a monthly theme.

July’s theme: Summer of rail. As we know, the summer months in L.A. tend to be hot. The summer months are also when Metro has celebrated the openings of Metro rail lines or their extensions. In the month of July alone, service started on the Blue Line (1990), the now-Purple Line to Wilshire/Western (1996), and the Pasadena Gold Line. The July theme is especially fitting for the Blue Line, which celebrates 20 years of service on July 14.

If you have photos to share, we encourage you to drop them in the MetroRiderLA Flickr group. If you don’t have an account, Flickr offers a basic free account and a Pro account for $24.95 a year. We would also appreciate if you would mark the photos with a Creative Commons license or grant us permission to share them here if you reserve rights.

Now, besides Flickr, there’s a second feature also making its debut. TOD: Transit Oriented Dining shows the intersection of mass transit and food. It will be a weekly review of a restaurant, and it will to the best of abilities also be organized around a theme. The July theme, easily enough, would be a showcase of Downtown Los Angeles. It’s quickly becoming L.A.’s dining go-to spot, and it’s also the easiest to get to by Metro Bus, Metro Rail, and even some muni lines. Plus, MetroRiderLA will continue the tradition of Fred Camino‘s Yelp account and list the transit options available to the establishments. The first review comes this Friday.

Great things are on the line here at MetroRider, and they start in two days. We will still cover news, events or other topics of interest that strike our fancy or yours, so stay tuned.

Rapid fans, take heart. One more line gets the red-bus treatment this weekend.
Photo by Scott Page / Metro Library and Archive via Flickr; used with a Creative Commons license

Metro conducts its semi-annual schedule shake-up beginning this Sunday and Monday. The biggest changes are a Rapid line for Venice Boulevard, a splitting of bus lines on East First Street, and the elimination of limited-stop service on Eighth Street.

Metro has posted the new schedules, effective this Sunday, on its website. Line numbers link to the PDFs.