MetroRiderLA

Wad’s post about LA having the 4th best downtown got me thinking about how we rank in terms of public transit.

So I looked up the 11 cities in California with populations over 300,000 (the cutoff used by Paul Shigley), and looked up a wee bit about their public transit options.

OK, so here are the cities in CA with populations over 300,000 (in decreasing order). (For your edification, I put the name of the rail service provider, if there was one). (Source for most of this info came from Wikipedia’s entry on light rail. It’s woefully out of date, but I don’t have the wherewithall to fix it.)

Los Angeles (Metro and Metrolink)
San Diego (Trolley)
San Jose (VTA)
San Francisco (Muni and BART)
Long Beach (Metro)
Fresno (none)
Sacramento (SacRT)
Oakland (BART)
Santa Ana (Metrolink)
Anaheim (Metrolink)
Bakersfield (none)

In terms of ridership (according this article in Wikipedia, unless otherwise specified), here’s the ranking of our cities:

SF/Oakland BART (320,000 riders per day) (source)
SF Muni (145,000 rpd) (SF Muni’s webpage says 700,000, but this includes the busses as well as rail)
LA/Long Beach Metro (128,100 rpd) (Metro’s webpage says 275,000 for Red, Green, Blue, and Gold lines)
SD Trolley (96,700 rpd) (SD Trolley’s website says 75,000 rpd)
Sacramento RT (49,800 rpd) (SacRT’s website says 14 million/year, or 39,000 rpd)
LA/Santa Ana/Anaheim Metrolink (32,000 rpd) (source)
San Jose VTA (29,800 rpd) (VTA’s website says 27,000 rpd)

I would love to hear what the Metroriders think of these in terms of public transit. Who’s the best?

[tags]bru, eric mann, grist, green la girl[/tags]

The BRU will do whatever they can to get their outright lies out to the eager and gullible bleeding hearts of the world.  Eric Mann’s race-baiting and enviro-baiting sob story made the front page of Grist, an online environmentalist publication (”gloom and doom with a sense of humor”).  If you’ve followed the BRU, it’s the same old story, not even worth reading.  What is worth reading is L.A.’s resident environmentalist’s take on the issue.  The Green LA Girl has had just about enough of the BRU’s anti-rail tirade!  She even wrote a letter to the editor of Grist, here’s an excerpt:

“As it is now, the LA subway system doesn’t even come close to what’s generally considered the wealthier areas of greater LA (Beverly Hills, West LA, Santa Monica). Basically, the BRU vilifies non-transit takers on the westside for not already taking public transit — then calls westsiders racist when they try to get more public transit in the area so they can actually use it.”

Let’s not forget my favorite image of anti-racism anti-rail BRU members joyfully waiting for the Red Line at Hollywood/Vine.  If only our spin machine was as powerful as the BRU’s we could get that image on the front page of Grist.

[tags]los angeles, mta, red line, purple line[/tags]

Go west, young subway, and grow up with the county.
Credit: TravelingMan via Flickr (Creative Commons license)

It was July 13, 1996 when the then-Metro Red Line was extended as far west as it could legally go on Wilshire Boulevard. Click on the date for a very special birthday address to the much-hated-yet-increasingly-loved subway.

Eleven years later, almost to the day of the Koreatown extension, the Los Angeles Times Bottleneck Blog reports that the U.S. Senate has approved in committee a bill to overturn a law that prohibited tunneling through the Miracle Mile. It would still have to go before the full senate and a conference committee to reconcile the Senate and House versions of the bill. And even when all that is out of the way, it still must go through the near-Sisyphean tasks of scopings, studies, engineering, design and the billions of dollars needed just to get it to Fairfax Avenue.

Meanwhile, subway supporters are encouraged to go Tuesday, July 17, to the Beverly Hills Library, 444 N. Rexford Drive, between 6 and 8 p.m. The Southern California Transit Advocates hosts the second of a series of meetings to inform residents and future riders on the steps involved from making the dream come true. For more information, visit Socata at the link above or call (213) 388-2364.

[tags]orange county, octa, organized labor, strike[/tags]

A ride angel help board has been set up for Orange County bus passengers affected by the strike. OC Transit Angels has a comprehensive list of alternative transportation resources. It also has a bulletin board in English and Spanish for people who need rides or are offering them.

[tags]bru, metro, transit racism, hypocrisy, eric mann, damien goodmon, get la moving[/tags]

Yes ladies and gents, yesterday I finally met up with the renowned and very well compensated leader of the Bus Riders Union, Eric Mann, in the boardroom during the fare increase public comment period. I started the conversation - okay okay scolding - telling Eric how much I loved rail and hated seeing him use the blood and struggle of my ancestors to push his personal self-aggrandizing and enriching agenda. I then proceeded to apologize for not being able to afford to attend his recent gala at the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel, explaining I had to put food on my table and buy my bus pass instead. You know how life is for we commoners.

I then handed him my card and encouraged him to personally contact me to discuss the issue further. I asked for his card in return, but being the celebrity he is - he was all out of cards! I was so befuddled by his presence that I forgot to request he write down his info on the back of one of my cards. Darn - maybe next time.

The highlight of our interaction came a few minutes later when I got to personally present him with one of the dozens of flyers I made [above], which I circulated throughout the board room and among the press.

(more…)

So walking home tonight from my grocery, I see the lovely sign above. My Korean is poor (hey, at least I have some Korean now, thanks to the wonderful folks over at the Korean Cultural Center of Los Angeles), but it’s obvious that this is about the meeting on May 24th.

Lovely. So basically, in their “rail is racist” message they expect to drag along residents of Koreatown, a district that, in my view, is the best example in LA of what can happen to an area after you add rail service. My hope is that most fellow residents and boosters of Koreatown recognize this nonsense for what it is. It’s interesting to see them try to pull along Korean residents, when anyone who watched TV in the 90s could tell you how poor relations were between the Korean parts of town and the traditionally poor sections that the BRU tries to represent. Well, that they try to represent when they’re not driving expensive cars or throwing parties at the Biltmore, that is. But that’s neither here nor there.

I do wonder if the reason that the fare hike “debate” is so muted may be the BRU - they’ve basically sucked all of the air out of the room, and it’s hard to come back with nuanced, well-thought ideas when they’re at these meetings shouting like five-year-olds who haven’t had their afternoon snack yet. I know I’ve certainly shied away from the issue - I put in my written comments and went about my day.

So it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’ll be curious to see if the meeting makes the news. But I won’t be there - if I wanted to see or hear a bunch of five-year-olds throwing tantrums, I’d go to my local McDonalds.