MetroRiderLA

I don’t remember paying for that… Image courtesy of kalavinka.

In spite of their name, freeways aren’t really free. No, in fact they are actually quite pricey to build, maintain, monitor, clean up, and expand. But when is the last time you reached into your wallet and handed out some cold hard cash to pay that price? I bet you can’t remember, because you never did such a thing. A hand reached into your wallet and took some money, but that hand wasn’t yours, no it was the frosty hand of the government.

That’s all fine and dandy, the government is always reaching into our wallets. In a few weeks the government will finish its job of taking a large percentage of my earnings from 2007. Federal, state, city, they’ve all got their grubby little hands in my pocketbook and there is very little I can do about it. Some people think this is the way it should be. They think the government knows best and that the government should have the power to take your money and distribute it for the betterment of the entire community. These people are called socialists. On the other end of the spectrum are people who think that the government is a bunch of morons, and that each individual should be free to do what they wish with their own money and lives.  These people are called libertarians.

It would seem logical that someone who doesn’t like the government intervening in the lives of individuals would have a big problem with freeways.  But as Alex Marshall notes in his article for Governing.com, that’s just not the case.  Most libertarians, by and large, love highways and auto roads, even though they are funded by the cold hand of the government picking our pockets.  At the same time, they despise mass transportation because, these days, it’s funded by the cold hand of the government picking our pockets.  How is it that publicly funded mass transit is socialism but publicly funded auto roads are the pinnacle of American freedom and free market capitalism?  It’s simple, these libertarians are actually not libertarians, they fall into another group: hypocrites.

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Yesterday afternoon while traversing the ever exhausting Vermont corridor a man in headphones and overalls was the unfortunate victim of bike theft by an all too loud and obnoxious, possibly insane, bus driver. Of course if I were a driver on Vermont I’d be half crazy as well.

I should have known the trip was going to be a disaster since after boarding it took upwards of fifteen minutes and a good amount of unnecessary yelling and scolding by the driver to load a disabled person. The driver had already closed the door and I guess by doing so decided he was no longer letting people board even though he was of course still at the bus stop; however, the people standing at the door way thought otherwise.
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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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Image courtesy of xero79.

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

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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.

Image courtesy of mrjerz.

Dodger Stadium has long been hailed as one of the least car free friendly/public transit accessible ballparks in the nation, especially in comparison to their NL West rivals, the Giants and Padres. The stadium could’ve been built with the beauty of Elysian Park in mind but instead it was decided by the parlance of the times to destroy any sense of connection to the city by not only ruining said park and paving it over with one of the largest parking lots I’ve ever seen for a sports arena, football stadiums included, but by facing home plate towards a pointless hill rather than the lights of downtown—the lights of the city we all proudly call home.

Obvious complaints about the terribly car-centric 1950’s planning aside we all are still wishing and hoping something in the McCourt world changes for the good of us non-drivers and therefore, the city. But $15 a car in a full parking lot of 16,000 automobiles on 21 terraced lots is understandably hard for him to turn down. My dream would be for a trolley to travel from the Gold line China Town station up and around the stadium and down to Sunset, but that dream is far off and the season is almost here. Streetsblog puts it best when summing up LADOT’s uselessness on the subject:

Major League Baseball might be in Spring Training, but the LADOT’s excuse machine was in mid-season form. The Department seemed uninterested in exploring transit options, offering a variety of excuses ranging from “it’s difficult to get buses up the hill” to “there are limits on how much the Dodgers can kick in because of FTA regulations” to “shuttle service connected to existing routes could cost up to $200,000.”

So here we are everyone. The Golden season of the beloved, even if wavering, Dodgers, starts this Saturday with an exhibition game at the Coliseum against an equally storied franchise, the Boston Red Sox.

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