MetroRiderLA

The Miss Traffic Saga has finally come to a close. The videos were posted, the people watched, and the votes have been tallied. Your second runner-up is the sassy Sharon Butler, with 428 votes. Your first runner-up is the spunky Roz Brown, who garnered 445 votes. And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

With an astounding 1,867 votes, your very own Miss Traffic…

Stefanie Perez!!!

The little latina that could, did, and she did it with flying colors. Picking up more votes than Roz and Sharon combined times two, the people of Los Angeles had no doubt who they wanted to represent their Metro system. What is it about Stefanie that makes her the obvious choice for Miss Traffic? Is it her mysterious smile? Her dry wit? Her undeniable love of missing traffic with Metro? Or maybe it’s a combination of all those things and more… that je ne c’est sais quoi that defines all women who capture our hearts and minds.

It’s not known whether Stefanie has received her prize package yet, but I know a lot of ladies and gentlemen (maybe even yours truly) who are very jealous. It’s not every day you get a free Metro t-shirt and props from an advertising photo shoot.

It seems to me that the Miss Traffic Contest was a rousing success. In a period of 6 days since the finalists were announced, 2,270 votes were cast, more than half of them for Stefanie. In contrast, Metro’s highly publicized Imagine campaign has a poll that has only received 708 votes since March 12th. And the Imagine blog has a poll that has only received 77 votes in the same time period. I guess the old adage is true: sex sells.

Things aren’t that sexy over in Austin, where you may recall they are holding a similar contest. But, a guy named Chris Stangland has submitted a video that might give Stefanie a run for the money if Miss Traffic goes national. Imagine what Chris could do if he was competing for a Metro t-shirt instead of a stupid iPhone and $500 cash.

Good news for the clubbers and MetroRiders in general, according to this press release[PDF] I received from Metro, starting in May the Red Line will run nonstop Thursday night through Sunday morning thanks to a program Metro is calling “Metro L8Nite”.

Yes, that’s right, L8Nite. As in, “late night,” get it?

The copy in the colorful press release is just as ridiculous as the name. Using words like “party peeps” and “hipsterific”, Metro is obviously targeting a very specific demographic with this campaign, skewing towards the young and trendy members of Generation Y. According to the press release, starting Thursday nights at midnight, Red Line trains will run every half hour, until, one can assume, the regular schedule starts up again. Apparently this will be the case Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. The catch is you have to buy a “Metro L8Nite Pass” which will be available at the ticket vending machines for $8. Another innovation Metro seems to be pulling with this campaign is having “Metro Bouncers”, which I think is just a “kewl” way of saying fare checkers, in place after midnight to make sure the club goers aren’t cheating.

The best part of this all? It’s coming in just over a month. It seems Metro is timing the start of this program with a big party weekend, Cinco de Mayo. I imagine if they promote this right, things are going to get really wild on the Red Line that first weekend of May.

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Last night, Metro Board member Pam O’Connor answered questions and spoke about the Long Range Transit Plan on Los Angeles Public Access Television. I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch the live show last night, but watched it on the web this morning. You can check out the show on LA36’s website, right here.

The hour long show proved to be a much better medium for Pam than her monthly home on the Metro Interactive online chat, which is pretty much universally panned for its inability to be either interactive or informative. Metro Live, despite its obviously public access level production values, managed to keep my attention for the entire hour. Pam’s answers came off a lot more candid and sincere than they do on the online chat, which for the most part seem like copy-paste clippings from Metro press releases. That’s not to say she didn’t paint a rosy picture of Metro when faced with some hardballs, from hearing her talk you’d think the TAP card is the second coming and fare gates are neccessary, well, just because.

Here’s some highlights (and lowlights):

• The motion graphics that begin the show really set the technical tone: this is gonna be Wayne’s World quality stuff. Hard to believe we are in the heart of the movie industry with production values like this.
• Pam talks some good game about congestion pricing, noting how we pay variable prices for virtually every resource we use but our roads . “We’ve not valued, or put a price, on what’s really a rare resource… our roads”
• A Santa Monica woman calls and asks if job growth should be regulated until an expansive transit system is in place, Pam keeps it real and says Los Angeles is growing no matter what (mostly from new births) and there’s going to have to be jobs for these new Angelenos.
• “The pattern of driving, alone, in a single occupancy vehicle… even if it’s fueled by alternative fuel, you still need a place to park it… that takes carbon emissions to build. So we are going to have to, as a society, start making some choices about how we travel.”
• Ricky from Woodland Hills asks about fare gates, Pam responds by repeating Roger Snoble’s lie that LA is the only subway in the world without fare gates, a lie that LA Weekly exposed on the day the Long Range Plan was publicly released. She claims there is a “range of reasons” to go to a gating system but only gives two reasons: “safety” and stopping fare evasion. Both of which have been disputed here on MetroRiderLA.
• My favorite momment was when an angry bitter bus driver called in asking for Metro to fix the current system (mostly, make the buses run on time) before moving on to the future. Pam was reasonable when she noted that buses must ride in the same traffic as cars, and also implied that a real-time GPS bus tracking system was on its way. Still, the dude had a point.

For a hoops based look at the Metro Live Television chat, read Damien Newton’s entertaining take over at Streetsblog LA.

Last night in West Hollywood the first of seven community meetings scheduled to discuss the Metro Long Range Transportation Plan took place.  Streetsblog LA’s Damien Newton was there with over 60 other Westsiders to report on and contribute to the discussion about the LRTP and what it means for Los Angeles and the West Side in particular.  In journalist mode, Damien reports that support for rail was unanimous among the 20 people who spoke.  In citizen mode, Damien gave a stirring testimony  encouraging Metro to place more emphasis on biking and pedestrian improvements, and less on highway expansion projects.  Check out his full report on Streetsblog LA and read his testimony in its entirety on Street Heat LA.

If you were hoping to find out what the folks out Metro thought about the first meeting, you won’t find it on Metro’s own Imagine… blog, which hasn’t been updated since its first impersonal post over two weeks ago.  That post has collected 43 comments so far, and there’s yet to be one response from Metro, so it’s likely the blog is little more than window dressing, created just because websites are supposed to have blogs now.

The next community meeting is tonight at Metro Headquarters, aka the Taj Mahal, adjacent to Union Station.  The fun starts at 6:30pm on the 3rd floor Board Room.  Take the train, bus, bike, or walk tonight and share your thoughts on the future of transportation in Los Angeles.

Image courtesy of bruceley.

The headline is my impression what a Valley Girl might say if the youth of America felt the same way about cars as the young people in Japan. According to a recent article in Newsweek, in Japan the car has lost its cool.

Last year car sales in Japan fell 6.7 percent and since 1990 sales have fallen over 30 percent. The reason? According to the article, demographics play a part, but there’s another factor as well: kuruma banare, or demotorization. To the young people of Japan, cars are just another gadget, and in a country of a million gadgets, cars are low on the “must-have” list. Status is defined by the coolest cell phone or gaming device, not your mode of transport. An increasing number of people in Japan live in urban areas, and the urban areas are served by extensive mass transit, making the expensive prospect of car ownership unnecessary. Why spend so much money on cars when you can get around just fine with out one? That money can be spent on cool gadgets, as is evidenced by the increase in spending on internet and mobile phone subscriptions (up to $1,500 since 2000 according to Newsweek) and the decrease in spending on automobile expenses (down to $600 since 2000).

The article opens with a quote from a young Tokyo-based businessman who no longer owns a car, and gets around instead using mass transit: “It’s not inconvenient at all…having a car is so 20th century.”

Like sushi, karaoke, and anime, it’s time for Americans to embrace the newest Japanese trend: kuruma banare.

The Exposition Construction Authority’s next phase 2 Community Workshops - on grade crossings, station and parking locations, bike routes and more - are scheduled (notice):

• Wednesday, March 26, 6:30 pm, Webster Middle School, 11330 Graham Pl., Los Angeles
• Tuesday, April 1, 6:30 pm, Crossroads School, 1714 21st St., Santa Monica
• Thursday, April 3, 6:30 pm, Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services, 3200 Motor Ave., L.A.

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Metro’s draft Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP) has been released, with public comment due by April 25. This is the master plan for Expo and all other potential new transit lines in Los Angeles County. The Westside and Downtown public meetings are:

• March 26, 6:30pm, Plummer Park, 7377 Santa Monica Bl., West Hollywood
• March 27, 6:30pm, Metro HQ, One Gateway Plaza, Board Room - Third Floor, Los Angeles

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To learn more about the Expo Line, visit Friends 4 Expo Transit and the Expo Line Construction Authority.