MetroRiderLA

One of our readers from out-of-town emailed us with a question, and I’m putting it to you guys to help her out. Here it is:

Hi, I’m going to LA and I was wondering if you knew if there were lockers available at Union Station, as I plan to use the FlyAway bus to LAX after exploring the city for a bit. If you do, do you know if they’d be big enough for a suitcase of moderate size? Thanks!

I don’t know the answer to this off the top of my head. My gut tells me that there’s no lockers at Union Station… someone prove me wrong. If I’m right, can anyone suggest any creative ways for a visitor to safely store suitcases at/near Union Station? L.A. needs to be friendly to our 25.4 million yearly visitors.  Thanks!

For Koreatown residents, the last few months have just been a Disaster. Yes, a Disaster. Capital D.

This Disaster comes about because of the bizarre amount of track work that needs to be done between MacArthur Park and Vermont/Beverly. On most weekday nights, a “diversion is in effect” on the Purple Line, one which diverts the Purple Line out of existence and turns it into a very heavy DASH shuttle. The usual Disaster involves running Red Line service like usual, while running The Subway Formerly Known as the Purple Line as a shuttle between Western and Vermont, stopping at the wrong platforms on the westbound segment.

The confusion this Disaster creates is somewhere between “unbelievable” and “insurmountable.” Sometimes, Metro announces the Disaster over the intercom. Sometimes, you can even understand the announcement. Sometimes, the Disaster is announced via the worthless LED screens. Sometimes, said announcement is even accurate - it regularly states that the Disaster will only occur on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, yet the Disaster occurs with regularity on Wednesday nights, including last night.

Inquiries as to what, precisely, brought this about have led nowhere. Metro appears disinclined to explain precisely what needs to be done in the Downtown segments of the subway which requires such a routing. Quite honestly, in the time that the Disaster has been going on, they could have built an underground five-star hotel between Westlake and Vermont.

Usually, not everybody understands what’s going on. Announcements are usually only in English, and often there are people who are, for example, not regular riders, or from out of town, and they invariably don’t understand the scale of the Disaster. Most nights I’ve been caught in the unflinching jaws of the Disaster, I’ve had to give detailed explanations to at least one person, and because it seems that Metro rank-and-file are not being told, precisely, what precipitated the Disaster, train drivers are themselves understandably becoming irritated, and their patience with questions has worn thin in recent weeks.

So, the question I therefore put to you. Does anyone have the slightest clue as to what’s going on?

My concern is that Metro is doing this because ridership east of Vermont may be low due to the relative lack of late-night attractions in Downtown. This may well be the case, and this may be a logical solution to the problem. However, they’re going to have to indicate a permanent diversion such as this on all maps, and they’re going to have to start using the correct platforms for westbound trains, because signage is only worth using if it is always accurate.

Can anyone shine some light on this issue? And for the love of God, can Metro start putting this on metro.net so that people can figure it out before they leave for the day? I’ve put in comments to Metro about this before, to have them apologize and assert that they will start putting the announcement on the website. Well, if anyone in the Taj Mahal is reading, I don’t see anything about the Disaster on the Rail Service Alerts page yet.

Somehow this took an hour to occur and since not every MetroRider got a chance to join in on this farely useless effort here is how it went.

A preview (note this was actually chosen as one of the questions to be answered):

Billie: Not sure if my message got through. My husband is a software engineering consultant. He has worked for Toyota in Torrance, Yahoo in Burbank, etc. There is absolutely no reason that employees who are engaged in similar work need to be on the road. He works in silence in a cubicle all day long with occasional meetings. Corporations should team up with Starbucks or someone, create hub centers with cubicles and web cams and ease the traffic that is affecting us all. It’s a moral imperative.

Enjoy the useless (and edited) fun of it all.

Anyone picked up that “Green Line Destinations” brochure yet? I grabbed one after work a couple days ago because, sadly, I needed a good laugh. It’s great to know that I can take over an hour to get to a McDonalds or an El Pollo Loco, if I’m ever feeling deprived and in need of a pleasure tour along the Century Freeway.

What do people know of the green line? My understanding is that the travel industry lobby (e.g. taxi drivers, LAX garages, area hotels) advocated for the green line to stay out LAX, in order to keep it from being easy to get out of the area. So that makes that part of the Green Line kind of useless. But my further understanding is that, when it was built, there was a hope that the aerospace industry would be a huge employer on the western edge, and that folks would commute from the eastern edge of it, and thus create independent demand for the line. I’ve also heard rumors that the BRU advocated for the line, which would explain why it’s the runt of the MTA litter.

But instead, the military-industrial complex collapsed under its own weight after the Cold War, and now I have trouble seeing the use for it. It follows the freeway medians, which isn’t exactly the most comfortable way to wait for a train, Hollywood/Vine it ain’t. Frankly, I fail to grasp why we didn’t simply split the blue line into two branches, west and east, so that you could at least get a one-seat ride to LAX and Norwalk. A flying junction at Imperial/Wilmington would be annoying but not impossible, and by the time you’re building a flying junction, you could put in switches that would allow the Norwalk-Redondo service that currently exists. Sort of like the NY/NJ PATH, where at peak hours you can go from almost any station, to almost any station, in a single ride.

So, any thoughts on the green line in its current state?

Photo by Peter Ehrlich, hosted by the NYC Subway fan site.

I take transit every weekday, from the SGV to the financial district downtown: usually one Foothill Transit bus and two Metro trains (Gold and Red lines). I generally have no (major) issues with either the FT buses or the Metro trains. I do, however, have a pretty big issue with Metro buses.

I only ride Metro buses rarely, but I see them all the time, working in the financial district, and have increasingly noticed an appalling habit nearly every metro busdriver seems to have. That’s the two-pronged thinking that a) a yellow light (and sometimes even a red) means “Speed up and race through the intersection,” and b) honking somehow makes it okay. These busdrivers - and this includes DASH buses, too - ALL seem to think that if you honk, thus alerting someone - in theory - that you’re rushing through a yellow-changing-to-red, that makes it alright and no one will get hurt. I’m honestly amazed I’ve yet to see a pedestrian (or maybe a bike messenger wearing an iPod) get hit by one of these errantly speeding multi-ton missiles. Downtown is a heavily pedestrian area, thanks to its concentration of office buildings, yet these busdrivers seem to have qualms about speeding through intersections as if not making a stoplight will completely throw them off schedule. As if Metro buses are generally on time, anyway!

I can’t be the only person to have observed this, can I?

(By the way: hi there, I’m a new contributor and longtime reader of MetroRiderLA. I’ve lived here (just east of Pasadena) for 2 1/2 years, and have utilized transit for most of that time to get to and from work (I’ve worked in Glendale and downtown Los Angeles) on a (week)daily basis.)

So this post is for general discussion, and contains a couple gold-related themes.

1) The Gold Line. So I experience for the first time the “express” service to Pasadena. First, and though this is partially my fault for not noticing immediately, it’s pretty confusing that it only stops at Memorial Park going one way. Guess who had to walk to Colorado Bl. from Del Mar. *raises hand*.

Why are they doing this? This isn’t New York, they’re not clearing up tracks by running express trains. It cuts an astonishing 5 minutes off the trip to Sierra Madre Villa, and has to leave some pretty torqued off people who are going to the other station who suddenly find their rush hour service cut back. Why is this a useful service? I’m having trouble seeing it. They’d do the gold line more of a service telling the people on Marmion Way to get a grip than they are with this one.

2) Where’s the gold? I spent 2 weeks here in August, and got stopped by a Sheriff checking passes probably every 2-3 days. I’ve been here 3 weeks, and haven’t been on a train that’s been checked. Do I just have fantastically bizarre luck, or is LASD on permanent vacation? I ask because, in all of the noise about that Pershing Square fiasco a few months back, I’d hate to see that MTA really was losing money because LASD had abandoned checking tickets, and people had noticed and relied on this abandonment.

(Picture taken by myself, hosted by Facebook.)