MetroRiderLA

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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I know that as MetroRider’s you’ve been waiting with bated breath to find out who your new Miss Traffic is going to be. Well, today Metro proudly announced the finalists in the much mocked loved Miss Traffic Contest. The finalists are featured on a page on Metro’s new Interactive website. Rather unfortunately, no men made the final cut, and it’s down to three lovely ladies who are fighting for your vote to crown them the next Miss Traffic. Let’s take a closer look at our contestants:

• Roz Brown: She’s been going Metro for over 20 years and raised a child on Metro. She’s also got a rad side ponytail.
• Sharon Butler: She likes the peace and quiet the Metro offers. The zen candidate. Sassy.
• Stefanie Perez: Looks 10 years younger thanks to Metro. Her voice makes her sound even younger than that.

I voted for my girl Miss Sharon Butler, I like her style and she’s not afraid to sass if need be. Unfortunately, it seems that the internet has pretty much chosen baby-faced Stefanie, because with 513 votes so far, she’s burying the other contestants. But the results aren’t written in stone, and there’s still six more days to vote! That is unless this contest is rigged. Diebold!!!!

Good luck girls, but remember, there can only be one winner. Budgetary constraints ($60 million going to fare gates) prevent Metro from providing each of these ladies with their own Metro t-shirt.

Looks like MetroRiderLA has a double dose of Zipcar fun for you today. First Tyke’s story about dumping his Zipcar membership, and now my story about Zipping around in multiple Zipcars this weekend.

It may not be as initially shocking as “2 Girls, 1 Cup” but spending a weekend doing a lot of driving leaves me feeling the same: a little queasy, sad at the current state of the world, and asking myself “why the hell would anyone do that?”.

Before this holiday weekend, I had only taken out a Zipcar once since Flexcar became Zipcar and made a big poopy mess out of the whole L.A. car sharing scene. Due to the top secret political nature of that Zipcar outing, I never wrote about it. Luckily for all of you, this weekend offered me not just one, but two opportunities to take out a Zipcar and move about this city the way you’re supposed to: behind the wheel of your very own personal automobile. Vrooooom!

It all began innocently enough, my lady friend was flying into LAX and I was planning on hopping on a Flyaway and meeting her there as I would usually do. Unfortunately, her flight was coming in quite “late”, 11:30pm, and I feared that if I took the Flyaway, upon returning to Union Station, our trusty subway system would no longer be in service. Knowing that she would be accompanied by some heavy ass baggage and a healthy dose of travel exhaustion, I knew a 2.5 mile walk home from Union Station was nothing either of us were interested in. Nor were we interested in transferring to some stinkin’ dirty bus. I thought about the possibility of taking a taxi from Union Station, but the prospect of spending $15 to go 2.5 miles, plus the cost of the Flyaway, just didn’t sit well with me. It was too much money for too much inconvenience. So it was time to turn to the ultimate tool in modern luxurious ultra convenience: the personal automobile. Vrooooom!!

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As of this past weekend I have bid adieu to my less than useful, often pointless, Zipcar membership. It was a tough decision because I wanted very much to stick with the idea that even through the terrible mishandling of their Flexcar takeover and the awfully secretive and annoying six months that followed, it would all work out for the good in the end.

Even at the lowest point, the day all us Flexcar members found out that every car had disappeared from the system and that it sadly was not just a website glitch, I had faith. Even when I learned that Zipcar had actually taken all those cars we used so much, with convenience and delight, away, and were gone forever—moving only a sorry amount of them to a couple local campuses—I still had faith. But sometimes faith is shattered and there’s no way to believe again.

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As Good As It Gets starring Jack Nicholson made me laugh. It might have made me cry too but don’t tell my dad. I laughed like everyone else because of how crazy this man was and what a life such as his must be like. I cried because I saw way too many similarities between he and I.

For the longest time I had forgotten about most of those similarities (I’m not one to re-watch, re-read, re-whatever anything that points out things I’d rather not think about). Then I started riding public transportation.

When I first joined the world of public transit I tried not to hold railings, I wouldn’t sit down, and I carried anti-bacterial hand lotion with me. The little pocket sized tubes replaced chap stick in pocket priority for some time. Most annoying was that I didn’t really know why I was doing all this. I have my fair share of neuroses but at no point in my life was I victim to germaphobia. I may not have been open to the sharing of a toothbrush or underwear but a germaphobe I was not. Germs were never real to me. They were to absurd and there were too many products out there to stop the spread of them that the panic had to be fake—a marketing gimmick is all. To me, Airborne couldn’t have been more absurd.

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The 14 has long been hailed as one the hardest to find Metro buses. Photo via Flickr, courtesy of So Cal Metro

Aside from the enormous pain in the ass a missing bus can be—the overcrowding which compounds the already annoying delays further on the route—it’s also a drain on the soul. And seeing as Holy week is just around the corner for some, I figured I’d look at all things public transit in the same light priests see sinners. Forgivable, yes, but not without some serious penance. Unfortunately, Metro, at times, acts like a godless heathen with its lack of foresight and decision making skills so I don’t feel any Hail Marys or Our Fathers are going to whip her into shape.

Instead, I’m going do something even more pointless—I’m going to email costumer relations every time something isn’t to my liking. If a bus driver passes without stopping, if a subway’s doors stop working and I’m forced to take the train all the way to Union Station and then another one back to where I had planned on going, if the intercoms aren’t working, if the elevators are broken, if the ticket machine is broken, if the ticket line is absurdly undermanned and I have to buy a day pass for an entire week, if their fancy new monitors don’t warn me not to chew gum, and of course, if a bus doesn’t show up.

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