MetroRiderLA

This Saturday at 2:15 pm I will present an updated version of the Get LA Moving Plan before the Southern California Transit Advocates monthly meeting on the 4th floor meeting room in Downtown Los Angeles’ Angelus Plaza (255 S. Hill St, Los Angeles, CA 90012). Please come to the meeting to see the presentation and engage in a healthy dialogue about the future of our region with some of the most seasoned mass transit advocates in Southern California.

[tags]lacmta, metro, fare hikes, meetings[/tags]

12 speakers in the San Fernando Valley. 3 at Gateway (in a huge room the size of an aircraft hangar, with over 100 chairs set up, yet hardly anyone came). 7 at Westside/Central Sector. Nobody seems to want to express an opinion one way or the other.

What is going on here? Are people informed of the forums? (Some people found out about it through those small “Metro News” ads that Community Relations runs for each sector, but they are easy to miss unless you are looking for them.) No notice on the buses about them (or any hearing, for that matter). Do people not care? The BRU did not show up at Gateway or the Westside, so do they care, or are they just focusing their energies on May 24?

It is notable that they have produced items in multiple languages per the FTA regulations (which I went on at length a while back), and they had a stack of all of these at the Gateway Sector meeting that I went to (none at Westside, though). They are putting more information on the website (though not nearly as much as I would like), and they did more public meetings aside from that Thursday morning. Yet the public is not taking advantage of that. This is not a good sign.

In keeping with the Eric Mann Watch, if you’re not too busy Saturday night perhaps you should drop by the Crystal Ballroom in the Biltmore Hotel to celebrate with Los Angeles’ favorite transit adovocates - the B.R.U. and Labor Strategy Center.

It’s not yet clear whether the esteemed philosopher, theologian and transit engineer will show (please, oh please Fuhrer Mann come to teach us how racist we rail lovers all are), but free food and comedy at the Biltmore is enough to get me to consider swinging by. And heck if they have an open bar I might stay the night.

Hopefully, I can get in the door after having my cover completely blown.

I’m sure at 1 a.m. they plan to burn the place down, so I advise leaving before 12:30 a.m. lest you spend the rest of the weekend in jail sleeping next to some buff guy with a name better suited for a rottweiler.

So, seeing as the peanut gallery back here is going to have to pick up the slack, let’s have some “fun” at the expense of LADOT today.

Many of you know that I’m in a wheelchair, which makes the whole car-free thing interesting at times. I moved here from Boston, where ADA access seems to only be a suggestion, and have largely done well here; the two primary systems I use, Metro and Santa Monica, are both very much on top of things.

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[tags]metro, mta, los angeles, downtown los angeles, transit coalition[/tags]

The Transit Coalition holds its monthly meeting at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 24. It meets at Philippe The Original near Union Station. This month, the group invited a special guest, Metro Rail DEO (Deputy Executive Officer) Melvin Clark, for a question-and-answer session.

RSVP with Bart Reed by calling (818) 367-1661 or via e-mail.

Transit access: Metro Red/Purple and Gold Lines, Rapid lines 740 and 745, express lines in the 400-499 series except 450 and 460, most local and limited-stop services to downtown Los Angeles; all Metrolink trains except Inland Empire/Orange County Line, Amtrak; FlyAway; Foothill Transit Silver Streak and lines 493-499 and 699; AVTA Line 785; LADOT DASH Downtown Line D and Lincoln Heights/Chinatown; Santa Clarita Transit lines 794 and 799; Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus Line 10; and Torrance Transit lines 1 and 2.

Yelp has Philippe The Original rated.

[tags]metrolink, fare increase, los angeles[/tags]

When the last multi-year fare increase was approved in 2004, it was a many month process that included extensive public comment periods and public meetings. At that time, annual increases of approximately 3.5 percent were approved for each year over a 10-year period.

This time around, the proposal is to increase fares an additional 3.5 percent over the next three years. That means that for the next three years the fare increase will be double what was previously approved in 2004.

The only notice that passengers received was a flyer dropped on the seats on some, but not all, morning trains on April 3, 2007. The meeting to approve the fare increase is the next regular board meeting on April 27, 2007. The fare increase was not even mentioned in the monthly Metrolink Matters publication for April.

Many passengers don’t even know the fares are being increased and it’s hard to find the information about the increase on Metrolink’s web site, even if you know about it. See if you can find it.

And beyond that, what’s available on the web site only focuses on one year of the fare increase without showing what the two subsequent years fare increases will look like.

It’s difficult to see the effect of the fare increase, because the calculator provides the fares only for each station pair, one at a time. It would take hundreds of uses of the calculator to determine how the fares would look system-wide.

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