MetroRiderLA

I discovered this bad boy, the Ford F-650 XUV Conversion Truck by the Alton Truck Company, from the consumer blog Uncrate. Big enough to be a Metro bus, but built for you and maybe your high-class prostitute date, this truck represents the pinnacle of personal private transportation. Don’t be fooled by the rugged exterior, inside is a world of class and comfort with hardwood floors, wi-fi, and 42-inch plasma television. At only $200,000, this one-of-a-kind truck is sure to fit into your budget.

Further research led me to the anti-MetroRiderLA… Jalopnik! Where MetroRiderLA tries to create a transit oriented culture, Jalopnik is proudly “obsessed with the cult of cars”. MetroRiderLA often has articles poking fun at bad auto drivers, and Jalopnik is not above making fun of stupid bus drivers. Jalopnik is part of the Gawker Media blog empire, which means it probably gets 5 billion more readers than MetroRiderLA, further cementing our automotive future.

Last but not least on this auto-centric opposite day, I want to tell you about a guilty pleasure I’ve been enjoying… well that is until my XBOX 360 died on me for the third time. Burnout Paradise (XBOX 360, Playstation 3) is probably the best racing video game I’ve ever played. I confess, I love racing video games. How does this square with my hatred of driving? Well, racing video games, especially ones like Burnout Paradise, are fun… driving in reality is not. Burnout Paradise gives you a complete virtual city (Paradise City) to drive through at top speed without having to worry about death, gas prices, or traffic. There is traffic in Burnout Paradise, but you get extra points for pushing other cars off the road. In a funny nod to the pervasiveness of car culture, the in-game announcer makes it known that all trains were removed from Paradise City in order to create more room for stunt driving. If you have to drive, this game is the only way to go.

Disclaimer: I have joined Amazon.com’s affiliate program, so the above links to the Xbox and Playstation versions of Burnout Paradise will earn me a small percentage of the sale if you end up purchasing them from the links.

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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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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Bike racks in front of the L.A. Times Building in Downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of Payton Chung.

Many many square miles of Los Angeles are devoted to parking and securing the private automobile.  The options read like Bubba’s shrimp recipes from Forest Gump: there’s surface parking lots, underground parking garages, multi-story parking buildings, street side parking, valet parking, and parking lifts, to name a few.  Bicyclists aren’t so lucky.  Usually they get nothing.  But that’s not to say that there isn’t a wide variety of bike racks to choose from, it’s just that if there were as many parking lots are there are bike racks, auto drivers would have little to do.

Anyhow, over at the Cool Hunting blog, there’s an article the references a design competition to build a better method of parking bicycles in New York City. Inspired by this competition, the author lists five bike racks that represent the creme de la creme of bicycle parking as it stands today.  These include: the “Arlington”; the Velib from Paris; Cyc Bicrac by Madrax; the witty car shaped rack by Adrien Rovero;  and the Horsehoe Rack by Creative Pipe.  What’s great about all these racks is that not only are they functional, they’re also aesthetically pleasing and add to the built environment in pleasant way… a stark contrast to the urban wastelands that are parking lots.