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

For the anniversary that marks the first generation of modern urban rail in Los Angeles, July 14, 2010, was a day like any other on the Blue Line. No fanfare, no recognition, just people going about their business. The inaugural run of the Blue Line was the talk of the town. The Militant Angeleno was there, and he provided footage. The 10th anniversary was marked with a modern train paying an homage to history.

There’s not much to celebrate this time around. Metro just raised its fares on the 1st, and the deadbeat state is again flaking on funding, and that of course means another round of service cuts. The 20th anniversary also comes full circle to the 1990 opening day. Then and now, the Los Angeles economy was mired in a deep recession — both in the wake of financial crises and real estate bubbles.

While the anniversary itself went by without fanfare, the Blue Line itself has proven to be an important backbone and setting the pace for our still-growing network with ridership well north of 70,000 on weekdays. It has also been a line that has seen the extremes of few major transformative developments and most of the communities remaining as they were in 1990.

July 14 offered a look at what is different and the same with a fully mature light rail line.

Downtown Los Angeles

Stations: 7th Street/Metro Center, Pico, Grand and San Pedro Street

The resurgence of Downtown Los Angeles as a place to work, live, play, eat and everything else seemed to happen without it being caused by the transit investments of three downtown rail lines. Much of Downtown L.A. as we now know it happened in the last five years, and the hives of activity weren’t confined to the catch areas of stations.

Downtown L.A. has great transit, great development, but one did not lead to the other. Most of the planning work that went into these lines was done under the premise of luring car drivers off the freeways and onto trains. Development was an afterthought.

That’s not to say that this is a bad thing. The Financial District station, 7th Street Metro Center, is the busiest rail transfer point in the system. It’s also an important transfer center for DASH and express buses. The long north-south streets near 7MC have been lined with converted condos and luxury apartments. Downtown L.A. saw a Ralphs reopen in the center city, where the grocery chain started, two blocks south in 2007. The arrival of a market proved to be a major turning point. The conventional wisdom in the retailing world is that an urban format store like the Fresh Fare is not feasible. Yet the Fresh Fare became a top performing store for Ralphs within its first year of operation.

Downtown’s next hope has been for Seventh Street to become downtown’s restaurant row. Bottega Louie, a combination restaurant and upscale deli counter, has its legion of fans. The Burger King and McDonald’s across the street from the Flower Street entrance, known for being open on weekends but also attracting a large homeless clientele, are long gone. Burger King is now the upscale Chinese restaurant Wokcano. McDonald’s became a trattoria.

Food options have also helped to revive the flagging 7+Fig, long known as the Seventh Marketplace. The addition of California Pizza Kitchen, Arnie Morton’s steakhouse and Adoro drive traffic to a shopping center amenity to a major office building that has always seen large vacancies.

Its anchor, Macy’s closed its store at the mall. It had to, because Macy’s was for years operating two stores within two blocks. Macy’s remains in … where else, Macy’s Plaza.  But at the time the Blue Line opened and for several years after, Macy’s Plaza was Broadway Plaza. The Broadway, if you remember, was headquartered here in Los Angeles until it was bought by Macy’s parent company in 1995.

The most visible transformation, though, was one station south at Pico. Staples Center, which opened in 1999, was the megaproject of megaprojects. It brought four professional sports teams into downtown L.A., helping set a foundation for the restaurant and nightlife commerce — and the jobs they bring — that would come a few years later.

Pico Station, dedicated in memory of legendary Lakers announcer Chick Hearn, is a simple platform station that’s worthy of much more, as it is an important destination station. Pico was the original northbound Blue Line terminal; 7MC didn’t come until about a year later. Since 1990, the changes at Pico can be described as “Go Big and Go Home.” In 1993, the Convention Center completed a major expansion to compete with the efforts of other top-tier rivals Anaheim and San Diego. The blue-green buildings seen from the Blue Line are the expansions; the original structure, a drab blue and brown box, can be seen from the Harbor Freeway. In 1999 came the Staples Center. Then bigwigs decided that downtown L.A. needed its own Universal CityWalk or Downtown Disney, so LA Live was added in 2008. It came with the two Nokia venues, several mid- to high-market restaurants, and the newly completed JW Marriott and Four Seasons Hotels. The addition of the Marriott has spurred a hotel upgrade boom throughout downtown.

The “Go Home” part is the development of South Park as Downtown L.A.’s southern neighborhood. It has seen its share of new multiunit buildings, such as City Lights and Met Lofts, as well as a dose of upscale eateries, wine bars, and the rejuvenation of the Transamerica Building into AT&T Center. So some of the action is also occurring east of the station.

The Grand Station didn’t need transformation, but it’s getting it now. The area is dusty now with the construction of the Expo Line tracks continuing south on Flower Street, as well as expansion and beautification of Los Angeles Trade-Technical College. Trade-Tech has another educational neighbor, the L.A. Unified School District-run Friedman Occupational Center, on the other side of the 10 Freeway but close to the Blue Line. In the past few years, the traffic court building on Hill Street has doubled as overflow courthouse for the Foltz Criminal Courts Building in the Civic Center. A few years ago, the Grand Olympic Auditorium, a small sports and concerts venue fabled in Los Angeles boxing and wrestling history, was sold and is now a Korean church.

San Pedro (Street) Station — as an aside, I’ve always hated that station name since it is more associated with the community more than 20 miles to the south than the street itself — is where the transition begins to the industrial belt and the residences of L.A.’s underclass. San Pedro Station is seeing more low-cost and fast-food restaurants and some busy (and blatantly auto-oriented) strip malls, while its industrial spaces, mostly servicing the huge garment and textile industries, are declining. Many of the industrial spaces bear For Sale signs. One of the more interesting tenants along Washington Boulevard, though this is closer to the Washington Station, is Arrowhead. So the Blue Line apparently takes you to the fabled mountain springs of Downtown’s industrial quarter.

South Los Angeles

Stations: Washington, Vernon, Slauson, Florence, Firestone, 103rd Street, Rosa Parks/Imperial/Wilmington

Now the train heads to areas that have been essentially frozen in time, and not for the better. The biggest transformation has been demographic, as the South L.A. communities have been transitioning from black to Latino.

Even a train has not been able to change the bleak landscape of the north right of way. It has been able to give residents an opportunity to access jobs and education outside of the neighborhood. Otherwise, the Blue Line exhibits many of the problems facing the residents of the South L.A. neighborhoods.

Violent crime remains an ever-present menace in the neighborhood, despite statistically showing a large drop in criminal activity from 20 years earlier. This has been the biggest obstacle to changing the course of the neighborhoods.

Another is the miserable quality of life that residents must contend with. The Blue Line shares its right of way with a freight railroad that still carries significant freight traffic even after the opening of the Alameda Corridor. Houses here are often neighbors with small industries operating out of blight-inducing windowless buildings that are magnets for graffiti. Worse, these small factories in many cases use chemicals, fuels and processes that are nuisances at best and carcinogenic at worst.

The right of way, frankly, doesn’t help. Blue Line stations? Yes. Yet the community has a four-track right of way that is marked with dangerous crossings and has contributed to a bulk of Blue Line accidents involving pedestrians and vehicles. Much of the right of way is also fenced off, providing residents few points to cross between east and west. Third, the exposed right of way, used by the freight railroads, is an open landfill littered with discarded furniture, clothing and auto parts.

Many of these businesses are around the Washington and Vernon Stations, though the latter has a couple of fast-food kitchens next to it.

Junkyards, warehouses and other storage facilities compound the problem by consuming copious land while producing very few jobs. The elevated Slauson Station, for instance, is surrounded by a junkyard and a mammoth Department of Water and Power storage yard for power poles and transformers.

Florence Station, a grade-level station that typically sees high traffic, is comparatively pedestrian-friendly. Granted, there’s a car wash and auto parts store immediately to the west, but there are also many storefront businesses and swap meets that can provide basic needs.

Firestone Station is also elevated, but not as high as Slauson. The connection with the street level is unfortunately lost, but it is offset by the linear Washington Park, often teeming with children and families.

The 103rd Street Station, named for the late County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who was key in not only getting the Blue Line built but also making sure it would be the first to open so as to serve the transit-dependent, is a few blocks north of the Watts Towers Historical Park. This station also is next to one of the few full-service supermarkets available to South L.A. residents, Food 4 Less.

Rosa Parks, in unincorporated Willowbrook, is an important transit junction. Here, the Blue and Green Lines meet. The station, originally Imperial, was named Imperial/Wilmington with the opening of the Green Line between Norwalk and Redondo Beach in August 1995. The building to the east is the Sheriff’s substation. The bus transit center is the north-south and east-west dividing line. When the Green Line opened, many of the buses that had been through-routed here were now forced to terminate and were split in two. The splitting could be seen as a sinister motive to force people onto trains or just to charge for a transfer, but operationally it was also done to build recovery times into bus lines in hopes of improving reliability, especially on the southern legs of north-south routes.

The station had been at grade until about 2000, when a ramp was built to take Imperial Highway over the Blue Line tracks. Later, the station had been renamed in honor of Rosa Parks, commemorating her refusal to be forced from her bus seat.

The Rosa Parks station also represents tremendous lost opportunities. One, the community lost King-Drew Medical Center after horrific mistreatment of patients and rampant mismanagement were revealed to all. The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its King-Drew series. Another lost opportunity was the retail development right next to the station. There is a Food 4 Less and Rite Aid available, yet all Blue Line patrons see is the asses of the buildings facing the trains.

Compton and Rancho Dominguez

Stations: Compton, Artesia and Del Amo

Many of the same problems afflicting South L.A. are also pervasive in Compton. Its political leadership has not been of much help. Before the early 2000s, Compton had a heavy-handed mayor and city council that was more known for settling political scores than fixing problems. For instance, the city’s police department was dissolved and turned over to the Sheriff’s Department because a police captain was the brother of a candidate challenging the mayor.

Compton’s civic challenges are numerous, but one thing the city has done right is develop around its train station. Compton has its civic center and two shopping centers next to its namesake station. The shopping centers are giant strip malls, yet they are oriented in a way that understands the stores will be patronized by transit users. The sidewalk entrance to the stores lines up close with the train platform, and even bus passengers do not have to walk across the parking lots. Also, the lines of sight are clear for train passengers to know what stores are available, along with signage that can be seen from passing trains. This is doubly smart for Compton, as the Blue Line can attract shoppers from outside the city limits to contribute sales tax revenue.

Compton has recently opened a transit-oriented townhome village, but it meant the razing of the Martin Luther King Transit Center. The pilings indicate that a replacement bus facility is being built.

Then it goes 180 degrees to the absolute worst in station access, Artesia. Pedestrian ingress and egress is all but impossible. Artesia Boulevard is a highway above the right of way, so train passengers need to take a bus just to get out of the station. And if you think that’s bad, the east side of the station will make you cry. The neighbor is what is now Crystal Hotel and Casino, a resort that has quite a shaky history of its own. They get little love from Blue Line passengers, as a fence has long separated the train from the hotel. There were at least two times when a formal entrance was established; both times, it had been sealed. When it was closed, a chain link fence had always been cut open, and an iron bar fence had a small passage dug under it.

Today, it has fortifications the Berlin Wall came close to matching. There’s the iron bar fence, a cinder block wall, and they are both topped with barbed wire! All that’s missing is a “No Dogs or Blue Line Passengers Allowed” sign.

This wall of shame even prevents passengers from accessing a greenfield shopping center that had just popped up north of the hotel. It has stores such as a Staples, Best Buy and Home Depot. Hmm, don’t these places provide jobs? Artesia is just disgraceful.

Del Amo Station, in the unincorporated community of Rancho Dominguez, is an access point for North Long Beach and Carson. This elevated station has a bus transit center, which is presently closed and undergoing a remodel. It has a small park and ride lot that is often full, but the land use resembles more of an exurban office park, complete with broad boulevard and no pedestrian activity.

Long Beach

Stations: Wardlow, Willow, Pacific Coast Highway, Anaheim

Long Beach is the second largest city in Los Angeles County, third largest in Southern California, sixth largest in California, and about 35th or 36th largest in the U.S. The Blue Line is fortunate to have two strong anchors along its line.

The stations outside of downtown don’t give the impression that the city is such a regional powerhouse. Wardlow Station, for instance, runs through a mostly residential neighborhood with two major housing complexes for the elderly. One is the Hillcrest Care Center just east of the station, the other is the large gray mid-rise tower southeast of the station.

Willow Station is adjacent to Memorial Medical Center, which is undergoing a major expansion, particularly for its Miller Children’s Hospital unit. The Wrigley Marketplace, west of the station, shows a blown opportunity for transit-oriented development.

About the only thing this massive strip mall has going for it is that it doubles as a park and ride lot for Long Beach residents. The developer built the garage for Metro in exchange for the retail fronting Willow Street.

The key difference is that Blue Line riders have no clue about what is inside the mall (Albertsons market, Starbucks, several restaurants, etc.) and the asses of the Rent-A-Center and parking lot trees obscure the lines of sight from the businesses oriented to Willow Street. Contrast this with the shopping centers around Compton Station. The other three intersections are anchored by fast food joints.

Then Long Beach Boulevard becomes the transition zone, or zone of decline, on its way to downtown. A new apartment complex, part of Long Beach’s affordable housing initiative, was completed about three blocks south of the station. Yet from Willow to Anaheim, Long Beach Boulevard is marked by a sad collection of used car dealers and seedy motels.

Pacific Coast Highway Station has a mid-priced Best Western Hotel and the old and new King Taco. The popular Southern California taco chain first moved into the former Norm’s restaurant that was at the southwest corner. It then lost its lease in the early 2000s but vowed to return. The space was then, and still is, occupied by El Gallo Giro, a combination fast-food chicken and sandwich restaurant and panaderia. King Taco returned to the northwest corner of Long Beach and PCH, about three doors up from the corner.

Also in the early 2000s, Greyhound left downtown Long Beach and opened its replacement bus station two blocks south of PCH.

Then comes Anaheim (Street) Station. Again, this is a name I hate (see San Pedro above). People associate Anaheim with the city made most famous by Disney. This is tens of miles away from Anaheim, and doesn’t even go to Orange County. But I digress. The station, which was the original southern terminus when the line opened in July 1990, has so little to offer but so much potential.

The southwest corner, which had housed retail and apartments above, is now an empty lot. A low-rent strip mall and tire store are north of the station, while a two-story apartment/retail box is on the southeast. St. Mary Medical Center has been expanding northward, coming very close to the southern tip of the Anaheim Station, though it’s oriented toward parallel Atlantic Avenue and 10th Street.

Anaheim is the main business strip for the Cambodian community that is the largest outside of Cambodia. The Cambodia Town designation would help raise the neighborhood profile.

Downtown Long Beach

Stations: 5th Street, 1st Street, Transit Mall, and Pacific (Avenue)

Collectively, these stations are also unofficially known as “The Loop.” Maybe, just like Cambodia Town, Long Beach can crib the name of Chicago’s famed downtown transit node and apply it for its downtown. Chicago has long been known as America’s “Second City,” and Long Beach is L.A.’s second city. Both have transit loops. Why not?

Anyway, unlike Downtown Los Angeles, Downtown Long Beach was an immediate beneficiary of Blue Line service. It set in motion the downtown’s long-desired renaissance as a jobs center and tourist destination.

For much of the postwar period, downtown Long Beach labored under the “Navy town” stigma. Long Beach had long housed a Navy presence, including the famed shipyard that had closed in 1997. Despite its distance from Los Angeles and Orange County and waterfront location, Long Beach’s downtown was held in low regard. Just as in other cities, where offices and retail decamped to suburbs, all that was left to fill the void was the “three Ps” — pool halls, pawn shops and porno theaters. It was fit for seamen and other less savory characters, but downtown’s seedy reputation preceded it.

Long Beach had first tried to right the ship, so to speak, with the Grand Prix street race. It was a momentary weekend boost that hadn’t really sustained long beyond the races. The Queen Mary is of course a tourist icon, yet its upkeep often put the whole operation in the red. Also, it was remote from the broader downtown area. The Pike amusement park, long a sad shell of itself, was demolished in 1979. The Spruce Goose was a repeat of the Queen Mary.

Long Beach had also tried to gin up sales taxes through the Long Beach Plaza Mall. It was at best a catastrophic success. When it was new, it drew limited regional interest. However, the low-income residents near downtown found the store selection too pricey. Also, it drew pedestrian activity inward and sucked the life from Pine Avenue, downtown’s Main Street. The mall failed to become the rival of Lakewood Center or Los Cerritos Center, and the owners threw in the towel and let the mall go downmarket.

Then came the Loop stations, and the pieces started to fit together in happy coincidence. While the Plaza strategy failed, business owners along Pine instead speculated on a pedestrian strategy. The new light rail line provided the impetus for Pine Avenue’s roadway to be narrowed and its sidewalk to be widened, with the addition of outdoor dining. The strategy worked, and it helped make downtown the regional strategy it wanted to be. Long Beach’s downtown boom began in earnest in the early 1990s.

Of course, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Long Beach does wonderfully focusing on the little things. Look at the revitalization of Pine Avenue and the East Village, which is east of First Street and Transit Mall stations. Downtown Long Beach has a diverse racial, ethnic and income mix, and it remains one of the more affordable waterfront residential options.

On its grand plans, Long Beach strikes out. The Aquarium of the Pacific has been a debt burden on the city. The Pike, this time a City Walk or Downtown Disney Like entertainment and dining destination, was sealed off from the rest of downtown and has struggled with high vacancies since opening in the early 2000s. The pedestrian activity stubbornly refuses to go south of the Convention Center and Arena, so Shoreline Village has proven to be a challenge.

The demolition of the Long Beach Plaza has represented a new beginning for downtown. Rather than focus on the upmarket, sales tax-rich regional market, it decided to go big on more affordable urban conveniences. The indoor mall was made into an outdoor mall and its links to Pine Avenue re-established. City Place is easily accessible from the 5th Street and Pacific Avenue stations.

The retail was successful, but the housing component has largely failed. One problem is that living on top of an urban center is too noisy. The other problem is that the apartment structures have an unreasonable premium in relation to its more affordable neighboring units. A resident in an older fleabag apartment can have all the same downtown amenities at half the price of the Archstone-built units.

Lately, though, the residential development action has shifted to the Transit Mall itself. Three different complexes were built on the Promenade between Long Beach Boulevard and Pine. A new multiunit complex went up two blocks north of First Street Station. And, on the high-tone Ocean Boulevard, several condo projects went up alongside historical homes.

Postscript

In 20 years, the Blue Line has helped put L.A.’s rail renaissance on strong footing by opening first, building up very high ridership, and connected L.A.’s two largest cities. Yet the Blue Line has been a reflection of its times. Strong areas regained strength, while weak areas continued to languish. Long Beach has been at the head of the line, so it’s important to see the effects on the city.

Just as Downtown Long Beach was the earliest beneficiary, it has in one generation begun to dip into its second decline. Pine Avenue’s success has retreated to just Ocean Boulevard to Broadway. North of Third Street, Pine Avenue is mostly dead. The Pike has lost its window to become a regional destination. Long Beach’s tourist anchors are becoming debt burdens. Much of the area outside the Loop remains poor and high-crime. High-profile brawls have broken out on Pine, which is hurting nightlife.

Meanwhile, Downtown Los Angeles has become what Long Beach was until very recently. The sidewalks rolled up after 5 p.m. and residency in downtown reflected derilection. Now, Los Angeles and Long Beach seemingly have traded places.

The Blue Line, in the meantime, maintaining its high ridership, but the opening of the Expo Line and the Regional Connector could mark its next 20-years with six-digit ridership. Stay tuned.

Photo by Yours Truly via Flickr

Sorry for not getting this up sooner. We were out of town last week and unable to express our shock and dismay at the result of the real NBA Finals.

For a while, it looked like our prediction was about to come through. Boston managed to break through and gain a 3-2 lead going into Game 5. The Lakers then caught up in Game 6, and took it to a Game 7 … and won the whole thing.

Yes, an L.A. website could be shocked and dismayed that our home team managed to win back-to-back championships. Shocked and dismayed that our prediction proved inaccurate, but moreso because a small contingent of “fans” take it upon themselves to start a riot just for no other reason than fun.

For your actions in disgracing this city, the championship Lakers, the sport of basketball, and while we’re at it, the entire human race, those who trashed the area around Staples Center need to be declared enemy combatants and extraordinarily rendered. If that fails, let these specimens of crotch rot resurface at today’s parade and be pounded on by Ron Artest.

Anyway, in case you don’t know, the Lakers will hold their victory parade today at 11 a.m. along Figueroa Street from the Staples Center to Jefferson Boulevard. This is going to snarl bus routes downtown, so your best bet will be to take the Blue Line to Pico or Grand stations.

The Finals going to a seventh game, despite the sloppy play, proved to be more exciting than the one-sided affair that was the NBA Finals (of Transit). Boston winning it should have been no surprise; L.A. making it all the way to the Finals, and beating Portland no less, came as a shock to many. L.A.’s time did come. Unfortunately, it had to come with a stronger team at the other side.

Boston, though, proved to be a dull competitor. Boston essentially played the same game. It dominated on urban rail, mainline rail, and had a league-leading website. Its buses are very limited. One person asked how could Boston lose on buses. Simple. You’d expect the MBTA to have a bus system that would complement its fast, frequent and prominent rail system. Looking closely at the schedules, buses were nowhere near as frequent as the train lines, and the routes tended to be comparatively short.

Boston’s penalization was a combination of weak services as well as a disappointment penalty. (L.A. faced the same thing with urban rail. We have a comparatively limited rail network that doesn’t match our extensive bus grid.)

Also, this simulation of the NBA Playoffs and Finals sought to find an answer as to which city has the “best” transit system. The answer to who has the worst transit system is simple: It’s the one you ride every day. No one hates New York City’s MTA more than New Yorkers themselves.

So does this series prove that, say, Boston, has the “best” system? Well, working under certain parameters, it does. In this case, it’s about the quantity and quality of transit service around the arena. For mainline rail, it’s the presence of Amtrak or commuter services within the metropolitan area. So for the case of Boston, it excelled in several categories that make MBTA a great choice to go to the TD Garden.

The formula worked reasonably well, though the predictive value plummeted badly from the positive values seen for the similar series we ran for the baseball playoffs and World Series. This calls for an alteration to the formula.

Beginning with the next playoff series, all match-ups will be a best-of-7 series. A best-of-5 series did not mirror the brackets well, so we hope 7 games will lead to more accurate prognostications. Here is how the new 7-game series will work for all major sports:

1. Walk score. Game 1 will utilize Walkscore.com to see how venues score.
2. Bus service. Formerly the first game of the series, Game 2 will evaluate the local bus options around a sports venue.
3. Urban rail. Formerly the second game of the series, Game 3 will evaluate the urban rail (light rail, heavy rail, streetcar) options around the venue.
4. Mainline rail. Formerly the third game, this looks at Amtrak and commuter rail service within the team’s home market (generally the same as the metropolitan statistical area).
5. Transit information. Formerly the fourth game, this looks at the content and look of transit systems’ websites.
6. Transit ridership. A new category, this will look at the actual weekday, Saturday and Sunday ridership as based on the National Transit Database. (Note: If the playoff team is Canadian, some other data source will be used for their score).
7. Actual team records. Formerly the fifth game, this deciding game will finally account for the teams’ actual regular season performance. This is in case transit systems are evenly matched transit-wise.

And now, for the curious ones, here is a matrix of all the cities in the playoffs and how the ranked in the five games.

Imagine if you could get a house for $20. What an amazing deal, right? Imagine all of the money saved that you could now spend on other things. If all of our houses were $20, everyone would be a lot richer. Well, not really. Because while it is a good deal for you, it is also a good deal for everyone else who wants a house. Furthermore, you could probably buy that house for $20 and then sell it for a tremendous profit. And this is the main point: the scarcity of houses is what makes it so expensive, and because a lot of people are willing to pay a lot more than $20 for a house, then it’s a safe bet that most houses are going to cost a lot more than $20.

But what does this have to do with parking? Well, the concept is the same. There is only so much parking to go around. Look at downtown Los Angeles. If you had a job interview, how much would you pay for a spot right next to the building? How about a spot 3 blocks away? I’m willing to bet that you’re going to want to spend more on the close spot than the spot further away. But this is the problem with free parking or flat-rate parking. Even though the demand is different in the spots, the price is the same. It will be first come first served. And what are the negative effects of that?

Well first of all, we’re not realizing the cost of that parking space. Right now, there is a monopoly on those spots – they are reserved for parking. However, those spots have some property value. The person who owns that small piece of land would have to decide which use was most profitable. So the cost of the parking would be similar to the potential profits gained from that most profitable use, otherwise it would be converted. What am I getting at? Land is scarce! And cars take up a lot of land. Maybe street parking isn’t the best use of that land downtown. In the suburbs, maybe it is, but I doubt it is downtown. However, there is no way to know unless we allow those spots to be priced. In downtowns, parking garages are probably a good investment (to an extent). Either way, right now we are paying an artificially low price. People are willing to pay more for parking and the land is more valuable than the price we currently pay.

Well, so what? It’s simple really. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Right now, in this city, we have an artifically high amount of driving because of subsidized parking. This gets us tremendous congestion and very unwalkable streets. It’s no surprise that people do not want to open street shops downtown – who wants to walk near there? It’s just not a nice area to walk around. If we had market-priced parking, then we would also see more transit use, more biking, more walking, etc. These options all become more appealing when we pay the real cost of our driving. Subsidized parking should be a thing of the past.

Of course, this will not work unless people can live closer to these destinations, so that will require a change in zoning laws, which will be a future post.

Attention all working class heroes: Metro wants your business.  The latest installment of the billboard ad campaign running in Hollywood features a world-weary cubicle slave proclaiming to the masses that he “M’s to the daily grind.”  The one before that was of a young woman letting us know about the joys of not having to shell out money at the pump.  The theme of these ads focuses on the low cost of Metro and how it will let you keep more of your paycheck than a car.

This is a bit of an odd commercial campaign, because the tone of it really does not pitch the product in glowing terms to the consumer.  It goes more in the direction of the reassuringly cheap option instead of presenting itself as ride that is just as comfortable, if not more so, than taking a car.  Young professionals can be attracted to Metro for more than just saving a buck.  The morning commute offers a good opportunity to get work done and organize for the day plus desk jockeys can get a fleeting amount of exercise when walking from to/from the bus stop.

Let’s further examine who Metro is  trying to attract with these advertisements.  The series is aimed at people in the same age group as the disgruntled employee in the empty office and the sweater lady.  Young working people who have never taken public transport before the economy tanked.  Now there is a big influx of people who are now using metro for economic reasons and a concerted effort should be made to attract and hold onto as many of them as possible.  The message conveyed to potential riders in these ads seems to be that Metro is all right, but more importantly,  much cheaper than owning some wheels.  Money issues may keep people on Metro now when times are bad, but what will happen if/when the economy improves?  Long-term passenger retention of these 20-30 somethings will not just rely on low costs, but a comfortable traveling experience as well.  If services are set at a high standard, these people could become regular passengers for the rest of their lives.

A perfect example of this new breed of metro rider is a young lady who is writing in a blog I recently came across call Snob on a Bus, which details the life of a girl in here in LA who takes Metro because she could not afford to keep her car.  Taking into account that economics dictate nearly all of our actions, will people like this blogger abandon Metro in a year if they suddenly can afford to make that car payment every month?  This will depend on a few factors.  Will attitudes towards taking the bus change to the point where people than can afford a car decide to refrain from having one and opt for mass transit instead?  Also, will the expansion of service offer a comparable amount of convenience as taking a car for these newbies?  The price is right for new Metro riders, now the big factor is the customer experience.

A while back, I asked Fred Camino if I could make a post about Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence by Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy. So I decided that now I could make a few posts about the recommendations that they made in their book.

On reducing automobile dependence, they came up with 5 solutions: traffic calming, introducing options (bike/bus lanes for example), polycentrism, planning for open space, and different tax methods. However, I thought that they missed what what would be better than all of these options: tolling freeways (and roads where applicable).

Why is tolling roads such a good idea? Well first off, it would decrease the traffic on roads almost instantaneously. Instead of a 2 hour drive from Westwood to Pasadena, it would only take a little more than half an hour (like it does weekend mornings). Secondly, the price would act as an incentive to use other modes of transportation because they are inherently cheaper. So we would give an incentive towards rail that most in the political spectrum would have to agree on. Liberals (for the most part) would like the lower pollution from alternate modes of transportation and conservatives (for the most part) wouldn’t be able to argue against it because this is what we would arrive at in a free market. Thirdly, it would help us see where we need to divert the most resources for transportation because we can directly see where people are paying the most to use roads. Lastly, and what I think is most important, is that we would finally have a way to separate traffic based on the importance of the drive. Right now, a mother sending her kids to daycare gets just as much priority as a son driving to see his dying father. With toll roads, the son would be able to pay the toll while the mother would look for another, cheaper option.

What about the gas tax system that we have now? We should abolish it. It prices all roads the same so it is in some ways hard to tell which roads should get the most maintenance. As for pollution, it would go way down. So why not toll roads? Traffic decreases, alternative uses will become more popular, and pollution will decrease. Of course, this begs the question: why not price for pollution? Well, I think we should. And weight? Of course. It is easy to see why the latter should be taxed, by conservatives would cry fowl about the former. I say, so what? In their ideal system, the road builder would have to make a deal before building the road in order to compensate local landowners for the pollution that the road creates. How would this be any different?

So this sounds like a good idea in itself,  but it is not the only transformation that would be necessary. But more on that later.

These aren't racing flags

Yet another good idea we can steal from the Old Continent: the income based speeding ticket.  Already the law of the land in Finland, where a 2002 fine to a director of the Nokia Corporation cost him €116,000 ($103,600 at the time) for doing 75 km/h (47 mph) in a 50 km/h (31 mph) zone.  The man charged, Mr. Anssi Vanjoki, was charged a fine equivalent to 14 days of his €12.5 Million annual income.

What prompted this post was the news on Yahoo! on January 7^th that the record for a traffic ticket has been broken by a Swiss speeder to the tune of $290,000.  This may seem harsh to the offender until you realize that he is worth over $20 million and will definitely not be rolling pennies for gas.

Now for those Angelenos living paycheck to paycheck, a speeding ticket really hurts.  They have the feel of a harsh penalty and getting a speeding ticket definitely affects their driving for months after a citation.  Say an individual makes the minimum wage and works 40 hours a week.  The net pay on the check is about $300.  After a fine and other ancillary costs (e.g. traffic school), that person has lost at least a full week’s wages.  For a person worth $20 million in LA, a $300 fine is laughable and no deterrent to speeding at all.  With a toothless monetary deterrent to hundreds, if not thousands of drivers, what is to stop them from speeding?  There is a point system in place to punish repeated offenders, but this means someone has to get caught time after time to have their driving privileges curtained.  Not the best system that requires the multiple offenses before behavior is punished for a particular segment of the population.

A copy-paste of the income-based traffic fines used in Finland and Switzerland would bring many positive benefits:

1. Rich people would drive better.  It levels the rules of the road for all drivers by implementing a fairer system of deterrence that would make even the wealthiest of people think twice before speeding.
2. Since some people will speed anyway, the city would raise a lot more cash.  The money raised by the city should entirely be used to fund public transportation.  After a few years of this, the city might have enough money to fund European-quality mass transit.
3. Not to bang the egalitarian drum too loudly, but implementing such a system would be a fine example of ending the cultural phenomenon of being able to buy your way out of things in this country.  Think of the children.

If you are driving multiple $500,000 cars and are worth millions, there is not much of a defense in arguing against such a proposition on monetary grounds.  Those people have the money to pay two weeks of their annual income should they be found exceeding the speed limit.  If there are any millionaires that read the metroriderla blog and would like to mount a defense of the current system and how it keeps them in check, contrarian views are most welcome.

The Transit Coalition, a rider advocacy group pleasantly short of kooks and cranks, has graciously volunteered to maintain the Year in Transit archives. Look back at the years past and see how frighteningly true these predictions have come.

With the pre-trip inspection complete, let’s roll this bus out of the division.

Metro once again shows it can make quick decisions, and once again, it shows the quick decisions only leave riders confused and angry. A week before the June shake-up, Metro decides to transpose the colors on the two busways. Riders and bus drivers are baffled, but Metro says the confusion is worth it because it was stupider to have silver buses on the Orange Line and orange buses on the Silver Line.

Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach wins the hearts and minds of locals with his new solution for the OCTA funding crisis: Cancel all bus service, then round up Orange County’s transit-dependent population to be ground up and fed to the hungry.

Los Angeles’ bicyclists evolve from a community to a fierce, hardy tribe when they acknowledge Ubrayj as their leader. The announcement catches Brayj by surprise and he decides to learn leadership methods from a weekend of watching “Braveheart”. He is then inspired to lead bicyclists on a siege of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation headquarters in downtown L.A.

Californians are getting so sick of the state’s raids on transit to balance its own budget that a group is now circulating an initiative petition to stop it once and for all. The wording of the measure says that if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or any state official attempts another raid on funds, their punishment shall be to strap all their campaign contributions to them and then have a transit agency representative be able to keep all the money they can obtain from turning the politicians upside down and shaking them.

The Metrolink board is unable to decide on either raising fares or cutting service to meet budget shortfalls, so it instead decides to allow passengers to get free passes if they mail in a manila envelope filled with gold coins or jewelry they no longer use.

The Expo Line is so desperate to get any part of the problem-plagued light rail line in service by the end of 2010, the best it could do is scale back Phase I to operate peak hours only between 7th Street Metro Center and Pico stations in time for the service shake-up in December.

Metro decides fare gates are a failure — we can only hope — after an experiment to try actual fare collection ends miserably when riders stare glazedly at the turnstiles because they aren’t sure how they work.

California’s high-speed rail plan wins federal funding, but the state doesn’t even get beyond the $1 billion mark. The federal money we get is just enough to buy higher-speed service powered by adding sails to existing Amtrak trains and locomotives.

Long Beach pours water on a councilwoman’s ambitious plans to introduce modern streetcars in the city. The City Council instead votes to spend the equivalent amount of money that would have gone into a steel-wheel system and spend it on buying battery-powered faux trolleys and use the money left over to “paint” tracks into the street.

One of the last acts of retired USC president Steven Sample is to announce that the University of Southern California will be vacating the campus and leaving Los Angeles the Friday before the weekend the Expo Line will open. He put a few professors in the School of Policy, Planning and Development in charge of the transition team, and they settled on an ideologically correct campus near the junction of the 133 and 241 toll roads in Orange County.

An investigation reveals Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s vow to have a subway extension completed within 10 years relies heavily on a speculative extension beyond Santa Monica to the Moon. Villaraigosa figured an extraplanetary extension would make the Purple Line extension eligible for NASA funding.

Southern California transit systems become the test markets for a new federal initiative to get on-the-ropes carmakers General Motors and Chrysler back into health by building transit equipment. The yet-to-be-named end product has the looks of a Pontiac Aztek combined with the reliablity of a Chrysler.

While we’re on car companies, the latest conspiracy theory to raise teabaggers’ hackles the way chum does in shark-infested waters is a Drudge Report post claiming the Obama administration deliberately bankrupted GM and Chrysler in order to weaken the auto industry and force everyone onto transit. Teabaggers claim they are victims of the “Reverse Roger Rabbit Conspiracy.”

RobDawg, who has been noticeably quiet for much of the last year, will resurface in a big way after he completes his move to the Inland Empire. He says his heart will always be in Ventura County, but the houses he scored for cents on the dollar at an auction was a deal too good to pass up. He will relaunch his blog as Methburban Nation.

And speaking of relaunches, Fred Camino will be coming back to MetroRiderLA full-time, only this time, he knows the haters are the only ones that get readership. So starting April 1, MetroRiderLA will keep the same name, except content from then on will be a daily candid photograph of a transit user that Web users can laugh at without the fear of putting themselves in danger — transit’s answer to PeopleOfWalMart.com.

There you have it, the Year in Transit.

This is the point where the entree is finished with a lemon wedge and a warm cup of vinegar. It’s that bitter. Readers, this is the optional point where you can take the road Lisa Simpson wish she could have and get off at Crackton. A Metro or Santa Monica bus will be by shortly to complete your trip on Pico Boulevard.

That’s it?

Last call.

Alright.

If there is anything that can be proved from living through the last year, it’s that The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” had been proven true, lyric line for lyric line, in 2009.

Barack Obama may be the United States’ first American president, yet at the same time Americans elected a conservative despite that ideology leading us into the abyss. Obama is the definition of a classic conservative. The root of “conservative” is “conserve,” going all the way back to the Enlightenment.

Obama chose to conserve the very agents that have pushed the United States on that split second of hang time Wile E. Coyote has after he overshot the cliff ledge but before he falls hard into the chasm.

He chose to conserve the war effort that’s yielding no benefits but a sizable portion of the costs of our trillions in debt. He chose to conserve the cracked and termite-infested pillars of our financial community who caused a global economic collapse through reckless business practices by committing another trillion to ensure “stability.” What did we stabilize? The finance sector’s license to recklessly squander wealth on whatever the prerogatives taste makers of the markets have and set us up on the rhythm method of bubble-collapse-bubble that has become our economic system. Only each subsequent bubble will grow bigger and the aftermath more catastrophic.

The self-identified liberals and progressives are shocked, shocked! that they thought by voting for a Democrat and getting him elected, that the election represented a chit they could call in. Call in for things that we actually need: infrastructure repairs, energy efficiency and of course, a health care deserving of even Third World standards. Yes, America, we need to aspire to Third World status because genuinely poor countries have been able to invest in First World medical standards and technology and build nascent economies around medical tourism.

The last year was marked — besides our moribund economy — by what has been misnamed as the “debate” on health care. Supposedly, after spending the better part of the year fashioning compromise and consensus, the Senate and House present thousands of pages of laws that amounts to the health care industry getting a government license to play with our health the way the finance sector played with our money.

The health care may be labeled Healthcaregate once the bloom comes off the rose, but the “-gate” suffix should be banished forever. This is not a scandal, it’s the internal mechanics of the American way. Just standard operating procedure.

I propose a new suffix, one more apt to Americans’ capabilities: -Trina. It of course originated in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. We of course now know that the city, state and the federal government had ample warning that a sizable hurricane would wipe out the city and kill thousands unless everyone got on the same page and invested money and energy to solve the problem. We dithered, then the worst came true. Now, more than four years after the disaster, we are no better off than the years before the hurricane and won’t be for years to come.

It repeated itself in the Twin Cities with the bridge collapse. It manifested itself as the first horseman of the economic collapse in 2008 when the trauma of $4.69/gallon gas made all of America into transit advocates. This year, regardless of the health care bill’s outcome, we’re witnessing Healthcaretrina as we speak.

A bipartisan consensus has determined that the avarice of the healthcare industry is Not Up For Negotiation. The healthcare industry will come out a winner either way, right up until a few years down the line it collapses under its own weight and everyone’s nightmare comes true: We get socialized medicine, only it will be the medical equivalent of Amtrak.

The one curiosity to emerge from the healthcare fiasco is the rise of a subculture that is bound to infest the body politic like crab lice. America, meet Citizen Teabagger.

If Obama is conservative by virtue of the institutions he wants to, you know, conserve, what becomes of the opposition that can’t stand the true conservative? Well, the discombobulated multitudes that emerged from the Tea Party movement cannot be linked by an ideology, since it is a movement free of ideas. Teabaggery isn’t an ideology for the same reason that arson isn’t a political movement.

If there is a tie that binds them, their common sentiment would be: “I’m against people who don’t think like me giving my money to people who don’t look like me.”

That doesn’t take much thought, and the movement — remember the rallying cry “Get the government’s hands off my Medicare!” — sees ideas as an undesirable personality trait to be corrected.

Disaffection? Yes. Untenable expectations? Why not. Deep-seated resentment against a world full of The Other? You betcha.

America, these are the choices left to you. In one corner, you are supporting the forces of a financial and a government overclass that will tug the leash around your neck ever tighter, and expect larger and larger pulls in the future.

In the other corner, you can cast your lot with the arsonists. Their only redeeming quality is hostility to the order of things, but the more you hang around them you realize that to the arsonists, fire is both the means and the end.

There is yet another way to a better life — in theory. Yet most Americans will take their side among these two factions, and those that remain don’t have the numbers, the intellect, the self-discipline and the resources to offer something compelling.

Listen to The Who very carefully. The message is about futility. Acknowledge it. Resign to it. Embrace it.

The year 2009 shall also be known for a collection of famous and historic figures that have left us. Michael Jackson. Walter Cronkite. Robert McNamara. Heck, even Billy Mays and Ed McMahon are people of accomplishment in their own ways. There are so many to acknowledge, so it is tough to single out a dedication to a single deserving person.

This Year in Transit is dedicated to the memory of Hope and Change. It left us too soon.

Sardonically yours, the Year in Transit wishes you peace and a Happy New Year.

The route names, rationales for the changes and service frequencies are on the Google Map for this series. Click on a line and look.

This map covers route suggestions for services between the Santa Monica Mountains and the 10 Freeway. There are DASH proposals for East and Northeast Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley as well.

The route names, rationales for the changes and service frequencies are on the Google Map for this series. Click on a line and look.

Photo by Yours Truly. This and other photos can be seen on the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool.

The opening of an urban rail line is truly a cause for celebration, especially in Los Angeles — the city that’s a blonde joke come to life.

November 15, 2009, marks a time when L.A. could celebrate that in more than 5 years of construction, the hard hats managed to build a rail line from downtown L.A. a whole six miles east, with almost two miles built in a tunnel intentionally. The Gold Line continues beyond Union Station to East Los Angeles. It will travel along East First Street in Boyle Heights, then zag to Fourth Street in East Los Angeles.

In 20 years of rail (and busway) openings, two things have proven as certain as the sun rising in the East and two and two adding to four:

1. These events are a lot of fun and the festive atmosphere brings out tens, if not hundreds, of thousands
2. Angelenos, generally speaking, are insufferably petulant and are less mentally sharp than a zombie on Quaaludes.

Both of these self-evident truths will be on full display November 15 as the Gold Line Eastside Extension makes for its public debut.

In the process of making maps for the DASH restructuring series, I have been inundated by curious and credulous MetroReaders or their friends and/or unindicted co-conspirators asking me on what we can look forward to on opening weekend. Which is really strange, because I try hard to hide my e-mail addresses and generally try to avoid any contact with you outside of the comments here.

Yet with great knowledge comes great responsibility. Your Metro Yoda will answer some of the questions to help MetroReaders along their way on their public transit Jedi-hood. And with great science fiction references comes a great tribute and thank you to one of the masters of the genre, the late, great Douglas Adams. Without you, the title to this blog post and your witty, easily imitable writing style would not have made this effort possible (in the case of the title) or even relevant (in the case of the writing style).

Q. Where does the line run?

A. This segment of the Gold Line will run between Union Station and a platform on Atlantic Boulevard where Fourth Street and Beverly Boulevard fork.

Q. Segment? You mean there are going to be two of them? As you know, I am from L.A. and get on the Purple Line train every day when I want to go to Hollywood. Don’t judge me. I went to the public schools here.

A. Too much information. What’s your question?

Q. Oh, right. There will be trains going to Pasadena and to East L.A. That’s like so totally confusing and junk. I’ve already been to Pasadena. How can I be sure I can get the East L.A. train on the first try?

A. Well, on opening day Sunday, trains will in effect run as two separate lines. All passengers will be let out at Union Station and have to wait in line for the East L.A.-bound train. Stand at the end of it to ride the train.

Q. People are going to wait in line just to ride a train?

A. Well, there will also be festivities planned at four stations: East Los Angeles Civic Center, Mariachi Plaza, Little Tokyo and Union Station. Each station will have a different musical theme and have vendors serving up food. Metro posted the details. These will be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Q. This sounds like there are going to be a lot of people.

A. Count on it. When the Gold Line opened to Pasadena in 2003, by midday lines grew so long there had been waits of up to 4 hours to ride.

Q. Are you serious? Four hours waiting to ride a train? Metro is like totally incompetent.

A. You won’t be like totally stranded. In 2003, when Metro saw that the lines had grown that long, it had dispatched several buses to emulate the Gold Line and take passengers back to their originating locations. If things get like that, Metro may likely do that again. If it doesn’t, keep in mind that you can take parallel bus lines between both ends: Line 68 runs along Cesar Chavez Avenue, Line 31 runs along First Street, Montebello Bus Line 40 runs along Fourth Street and Line 18 and Line 720 run along Whittier Boulevard. The closest buses to the station are lines 31 and 40.

Q. That’s all?

A. Well, LADOT has three DASH lines that connect with the Gold Line. Note, though, that the one line reaching the Eastside stations — Boyle Heights/East Los Angeles — does not operate Sundays. The other two, Lincoln Heights/Chinatown and Highland Park/Eagle Rock, are accessible on the older Pasadena segment north of Union Station.

Two other smaller systems you might want to keep in mind are Monterey Park Spirit and East Los Angeles’ El Sol Shuttle. Monterey Park Spirit does not run directly to the Gold Line yet, and it won’t operate on Sunday, but it does serve East Los Angeles College.

East L.A.’s system does run on Sundays, and in fact is expanding hours in anticipation of the Gold Line operation. The buses will run as late as 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. El Sol has three bidirectional loops that meet at the Dionicio Ramirez Transit Plaza next to the East L.A. Civic Center station.

Q. There’s got to be more to do in East L.A. than just riding buses, right?

A. No question. One of the niches the Gold Line is quickly evolving into is a foodie train. East First Street in Boyle Heights is lined with dozens of establishments to sate your gastronomic rapacity. One of the stalwarts is La Serenata de Garibaldi, which has been a longtime attraction for city officials and other bigwigs from the west bank of the Los Angeles River. With its solid reputation and already high profile, it is likely to become the Gold Line equivalent of what Langer’s is to the subway.

There’s variety aplenty along First, but don’t ride the Gold Line just to eat Mexican food. You wouldn’t take a plane to any spot in the U.S. and say you’d like to try some American food when you land, would you? Similarly, Mexico is a vast country that has distinct culinary dishes. Many of the restaurants will have the state or region name — Jalisco, Oaxaca, D.F. or Mexico City, etc. There’s also variety in the restaurants, split between the Serenata sit-down places where meals are about $10-$20 a person, and the hole-in-the-wall taco and torta joints.

Then, of course, in downtown, you have Little Tokyo. Immediately near the station you have Senor Fish, the Weiland Brewery and Cuba Central. If you feel Little Tokyo should have food selections that would be commonly associated with Big Tokyo, the sushi bars and Japanese sit-down restaurants can be found on First and Second Streets west of Central Avenue, and stretching for another three to four blocks. One place definitely worth a look is the Mikawaya Bakery. The downtown institution has delicious pastries, but the confection-eating world would know it for its popular Mochi ice cream.

For some other help mapping out what the Eastside has in store, look at what the people of the Eastside L.A. blog have in store. Even the sages of First and Spring streets are now calling the area cool.

Q. Man, this place sounds so cool. I might actually want to live here. How do I go about gentrifying the neighborhood?

A. Gentrification is a dynamic process, but one that can be heartbreaking for the people who are gradually being pushed out from the neighborhood they helped to create. On the one hand, it is a wonderful process that this often maligned part of Los Angeles will now become better integrated to the whole. On the other hand, it only takes a few hipsters to lounge around the place and wear out their welcome by jacking up the prices for everyone else.

Most of the people who never lived or worked in the Eastside, or only went through here on the many freeways corraling the neighborhoods, only know the neighborhood from the crime or “education noir” stories in the media. Those, or Edward James Olmos movies. These give an exotic, other-worldly feel to neighborhoods that also have a great sense of normalcy.

Notice how taking transit and dense, walkable neighborhoods have become “green,” “socially conscious,” “hip” or any number of dozens of other personal lifestyle tropes? The Eastside has been doing that for generations, and for no other reason than it was natural, authentic and even necessary. It didn’t take any major planning initiative. It was just people doing what they needed to do to live their lives. Mixed with with the unfortunate strip malls are stretches of First (and a lot of Cesar Chavez) where the storefronts are close to the sidewalk and the shops fulfill affordable human needs (bakeries, laundries, tax preparation, etc.)

The key theme is that a place like this was able to happen in spite of the community beyond the L.A. River, not because of it. Moving in here would leave the buildings, and maybe some of the businesses who can now charge gringo prices, but it’s done at the expense of uprooting the social community that built the physical community. Then what do you have? Larchmont. A pedestrian-oriented boutique boulevard that everyone drives to and is filled with 90% of the same chain stores they can find within 2 miles of their home.

In closing, I should tell you that if you’re not living in Boyle Heights or East L.A. now, you’ve already missed the gentrification train. What’s the demarcation line for living in a cool transit neighborhood? This is not etched in stone, but past practice has suggested that you have to move in one year before construction on a transit project is finished. So if you moved in (or plan to move in) to the Eastside after July 2008, you’re not a pioneer, you’re a scenester.

Q. Why are we still building rail lines? Rail is racist, you know.

A. An individual in a yellow shirt slipped me this answer, along with a small hardbound pocket-sized book that says “Chairman Mann’s Little Red Book of Transit Activism.” It’s only 45 pages, but each page just tells the reader to answer every question with “Rail is racist” and repeat until the skeptic or opponent comes around to the correct way of thinking.

Let’s accept your premise. Los Angeles County has a unique way of expressing its racism.

First, voters are faced with a proposition that outlines a dedicated amount to rail construction, transit operations and local return to cities. When Los Angeles County poses this question to voters, they acquiesce to racism by allocating money to rail projects. Not once. Not twice. Three times! Then, when rail lines are built, Metro is culturally insensitive by routing lines through low-income, minority areas with a markedly high usage of public transportation. First comes the guideways, then come stations that allow these neighborhoods a portal into rail. Then riders are charged the same exact fare as buses. Despite a socially just effort to stop racism and regain … umm, bus seats … a vanguard organization speaking in the name of minorities everywhere nearly doubled the bus fleet yet was still angry over the fact that Metro didn’t halting all rail and bourgeois bus services. Worse, these rail services, once established, encroached upon buses by adding to ridership.

If anything, this reinforces the premise that Los Angeles is too stupid to do anything right. The correct way to practice racism is to disinvest in public transportation. Detroit and the bigger cities of Alabama did it correctly.

Q. I could see how the Eastside warrants a rail line, but why did Metro cheap out on building the line as a subway?

A. Two words: Zev Yaroslavsky. Besides the three transportation sales taxes L.A. county voters approved, county voters were also fed up over Metro’s legacy of corruption and incompetence that was in a degree not seen in advanced Western civilization. I could hit the point home by going into hyperbole, but I won’t. The 1990s marked two things: subway construction and a general backlash against the subway. In a project that was envisioned never to breach the $1 billion mark, it orbited that amount several times over. And we are still paying bonds for another two decades or so. The low point came, or rather was exposed, when a sinkhole swallowed a portion of Hollywood. Voters passed Proposition A in 1998, by a two-to-one margin. Including in the Eastside.

The effect was to ban tunneling by not allowing local sales taxes to be spent on it.

Gloria Molina, who has been clearly studying Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann in style and substance of public communication, is simultaneously taking credit for bringing the Gold Line to East Los Angeles and pouring water on the line at the same time. This is the same Gloria Molina who authorized every contract and change order to build the line as it stands.

Molina faced the choice of either accepting light rail for her district, or holding out at least 10 years until Measure R passed and then establishing the present corridor in the pecking order of projects to be funded. She had a choice more than a decade ago to take the Gold Line or hold out hope for a subway that would be built in 10 … 20 … 30 … more ??? years.

It’s either throw the Gold Line party now or throw the subway party for your grandkids’ grandkids. We chose to party now and let our offspring worry about the hangover.

Q. I recently decided to become a hipster. I want to know if the Eastside Gold Line is right for my needs. The other rail lines have so far failed to accommodate my lifestyle. One, they don’t go to Silver Lake. B, trains don’t run the most important time of the day: last call. How will the Gold Line change in this regard?

A. One and B? Kid, get your parallels down first before criticizing transit operations planning. No, the Gold Line will not help you live a 24-hour lifestyle. If you can fit your life around the other 21 hours that the train operates (generally, 4 a.m. to 1 a.m.), more power to you.

And I’m with you on the Silver Lake point. Not because I want to go there any more than I have to. Hipsters are best taken in small doses and short exposure, like psychedelics or radon. You might want to talk with the fellas at The Transit Coalition to see if they’re willing to raise their Silver Line concept up the proverbial flagpole again.

Q. Advocacy groups? Good grief. Metro is teh suck. The only people who like Metro are employees who are paid to like them. They are tools anyway. Why don’t you tell the truth that public transit sucks, L.A. sucks, and life sucks?

A. I got stuck for 20 minutes trying to parse that third sentence, then spent another 10 trying to decipher “teh”. Folks, no need to do research. It’s blogspeak for the word “the”.

Anyway, public transit has its good, bad and ugly moments. Especially in L.A. If you’re the type that has no need for that rotgut good crap, I highly recommend The Bus Bench and L.A. Metro Mole, two of the best hater sites on the Web. The are always correct in their observations, and the thoughts reflected on the Web pages reflect the viewpoints of all riders.

We at MetroRiderLA choose an alternative style of presentation because no writer here could ever match The Bus Bench or the Mole. We think our style is a different niche to fill in the blogosphere. In reality, though, we just don’t really have the heart and conviction behind what we write. That’s just between us.

Look at Fred Camino, the founder of this site. He, and former Los Angeles Times journalist Steve Hymon, decided there was no point fighting the machine and became a part of it. They both contribute to The Source, Metro’s stab at social networking.

Call them tools if you want, but one saving grace of Camino and Hymon … if Metro is willing to cut them a check, they did a lot better than most of us.

Q. I’m a honky. I don’t know Those People outside of limited contact with them in a domestic capacity on the Westside. What are they like, really?

A. There’s no way to answer this without someone getting offended but … in many respects, the Eastside community is unusual in the way other groups are unusual if they work, shop, send their children to school, attend church, listen to music, have a beer with their friends or throw parties.

With that said, you can cut the twee “Those People” crap in a feeble attempt to be inoffensive. The Eastside is predominantly a community of residents of Mexican and some Central American origin. The terms Hispanic and Latino are used, but there is even wide debate in and out of the community on whether these are appropriate. That’s not the debate here, though. The terms can be used unless the person feels an aversion to those terms.

If you’re still unsure of what kind of impression to make and what to call someone, ask them their name. That’s usually a safe bet.

If you’re too self-conscious about leaving your comfort zone, just stay in it. The Eastside will get along fine without you.

Believe it or not, I had to throw away about three dozens of questions on this same topic. This was the one that was fit to print here. The rest looked like a ransom note pasted together from Curbed LA comments. That leaves me with one last question.

Q. A billion dollars and Metro can’t even run the trains faster than 15 miles per hour between Union Station and Little Tokyo?

A. Yes, folks. Marmion Way gave birth to an ugly offspring. It’s the flyover spanning US-101, where the train travels in a serpentine from the back of Union Station to Alameda Street. Marmion Way is also the reason why everyone stopped riding the Gold Line because this stretch is too slow.

It happened again, and a dry-run cab video made during pre-revenue testing suggests Union Station to Little Tokyo will be three to four excruciatingly slow minutes of your life that you’ll never be able to get back.

By L.A. logic, you are better off sticking to your car, which can go from Union Station to Little Tokyo … in about 3-4 minutes as well.

In closing, let me pass on to you a little-known mathematical rule that has helped make decisions easier and more rational in life.

It’s called the Inverse Law of Time Conservation.

The more valuable you perceive your time as worth, the less valuable it actually is.

Deep, huh? Have a safe and happy Gold Line celebration.