MetroRiderLA

Photo by Yours Truly. This and other photos can be seen on the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool.

The opening of an urban rail line is truly a cause for celebration, especially in Los Angeles — the city that’s a blonde joke come to life.

November 15, 2009, marks a time when L.A. could celebrate that in more than 5 years of construction, the hard hats managed to build a rail line from downtown L.A. a whole six miles east, with almost two miles built in a tunnel intentionally. The Gold Line continues beyond Union Station to East Los Angeles. It will travel along East First Street in Boyle Heights, then zag to Fourth Street in East Los Angeles.

In 20 years of rail (and busway) openings, two things have proven as certain as the sun rising in the East and two and two adding to four:

1. These events are a lot of fun and the festive atmosphere brings out tens, if not hundreds, of thousands
2. Angelenos, generally speaking, are insufferably petulant and are less mentally sharp than a zombie on Quaaludes.

Both of these self-evident truths will be on full display November 15 as the Gold Line Eastside Extension makes for its public debut.

In the process of making maps for the DASH restructuring series, I have been inundated by curious and credulous MetroReaders or their friends and/or unindicted co-conspirators asking me on what we can look forward to on opening weekend. Which is really strange, because I try hard to hide my e-mail addresses and generally try to avoid any contact with you outside of the comments here.

Yet with great knowledge comes great responsibility. Your Metro Yoda will answer some of the questions to help MetroReaders along their way on their public transit Jedi-hood. And with great science fiction references comes a great tribute and thank you to one of the masters of the genre, the late, great Douglas Adams. Without you, the title to this blog post and your witty, easily imitable writing style would not have made this effort possible (in the case of the title) or even relevant (in the case of the writing style).

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Digital timetable in Berlin

An upgrade necessary for LA to build a better transportation culture is the addition of digital timetables to the city’s bus stops. These signs have become commonplace outside the US and are a good guideline for passengers who want to know how much time they have until the next bus comes.

Angelenos would benefit from this fairly basic (for any major metropolitan area) upgrade. Not everyone has the metro timetable memorized or can access it online from their pocket. Moreover people visiting the city would be able to better navigate the public transportation system with a better laid out digital timetable and destination sign. Tourists on buses are a fairly rare sight in LA. Improvements to bus stops and increased ease of use would bring in more fares to mass transit and boost revenue that would spur further investment in metro. Digital timetables are a great help to people who do not know much about the city bus routes. These signs work as a glowing advertisement for the metro system by adding a sense of dependability and modernity to the network.

These signs also act as a quality control, by keeping buses on schedule because it is much more visible to the public if the bus is running late. Digital timetables act as a measure of accountability, improving punctuality which will further increase the brand of the metro and the people’s faith in it. Using the Berlin Transportation Authority as a model, buses have nearly an incredible on-time rate around the clock. Based on experience, whether it is during rush hour or at 4 a.m., the buses arrive at the stop usually within a minute of the stated digital time.

It is time for LA metro to install this technology at its most heavily trafficked bus stops. This is hardly cutting edge stuff as cities in developing countries around the world with much less money are digitizing their mass transit for the public. Kyiv Ukraine put up digital timetables last summer despite the city being in tremendous debt, so even though LA is in the red digitizing the bus stops should not be put off.

Another addition to bus stops is more low-tech but just as important…maps. It is understandable that not every bus stop should be equipped with all transit points in the county, but a simple visual of the line with accompanying cross streets and points of reference is not that difficult to add. In the seating area of the average bus stop now, the only information a traveler who is not accustom to LA mass transit would find is the release date of G.I. Joe (August 7th if you were wondering).

Information is the key to successful mass transit and it needs to become more readily available to people, both local and tourist, to establish the city’s reputation as highly mobile and easy to get around.

Image courtesy of Sung Sook.

Angelenos now have one less transportation option when it comes to traveling to San Diego.

One of our readers, Michael, reports that Megabus has canceled its Los Angeles to San Diego route. According to Wikipedia, this route was ended due to low ridership and service officially ended on March 23rd. San Diego now joins Phoenix (which ended in January due to low ridership) in the Megabus route graveyard. It was less than a year ago that Megabus was introduced to Los Angeles, and Wad gave us a ride report chronicling the Los Angeles to San Diego route. It looks like even a positive review from MetroRiderLA and fares as low as a buck can’t convince Angelenos to get on a bus. The Los Angeles hub still has a few routes left, including Los Angeles to Las Vegas and Los Angeles to San Francisco (via either San Jose or Oakland). How long will these routes last? Only ridership will tell.

Image courtesy of jon_hrach.

The transit oriented lifestyle in Los Angeles is often like a jigsaw puzzle, you’ve got all these oddly shaped pieces and you just have to figure out how to connect them. It may seem daunting at first, but it’s never impossible, and with a little work the full picture is bound to appear.

On of my favorite transit puzzles is getting to the airport without a car. Thanks to the FlyAway getting to LAX is like a 300-piece puzzle – even a child could do it. However, LAX is but one of many airports in the region and sometimes you’re just bound to fly out of one of those other aviation hubs. The last time I put together one of these 1000-piece puzzles was when I flew out of Ontario Airport to take advantage of a non-stop ExpressJet flight to Oklahoma City (full disclosure: I’ve actually made this trip a few times since then). A Metrolink and a taxi saved me about $100 and got me a non-stop flight to the mid-west. Not a bad picture for the work it took putting that puzzle together.

Last week I opened up a new 1000-piecer: Downtown Los Angeles to John Wayne Airport (Orange County). The price was right, the time was right, the flight was right, so I bought the ticket/puzzle. As the pieces tumbled out in front of me, I wondered if I made the right decision. Maybe this was one of those puzzles with no solution? Or maybe a few pieces would be missing? Shit. I wish I had a car.

Just kidding.

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Whew! What a trip it has been. A four-day vacation in the Bay Area led to a bumper crop of material for MetroRiderLA, allowing for a 10-part miniseries. It was a joy to write; hopefully MetroReaders enjoyed reading the series.

Exploring San Francisco and Santa Rosa was tremendous fun. Four days was not enough to see and experience all of what just these two cities had to offer. Even an extended vacation would still show a mere fraction of all what the Bay Area has to offer.

With dozens of bus systems, three urban rail services, several commuter and tourist ferries and three busy train services, the Bay Area shows Elhay where Southern California what we are supposed to need. Right?

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[Note: The entry's time was set too early and it was released incomplete. The time is reset to reflect the complete version.]

BART is a two-rail monorail.

The thesis is cold but succinct, but its simplicity is apt for a rapid transit system that is more complex, more complicated and more burdensome than it has to be. Even BART’s successes and strong points must be couched with qualifiers that almost cancel out its merits. BART is a true regional network serving four counties, but it’s a special district that has prerogatives different from — and usually in conflict with — the communities it serves. BART’s ridership demonstrates its success, but expanding service using its proprietary equipment — from its broad gauge to the one-of-a-kind cars and automated control system — is unnecessarily expensive. BART can command a premium price for service and boasts a remarkable farebox recovery of over 50 percent, but the logic behind the prices is twisted to incomprehensibility (demonstrated below). BART is often held up as a model for how a comprehensive mass transit system should be built in the future, but the farsighted designs of space-age planning are now considered archaic and impractical.

Might as well build the guideway as a monorail at this point. BART has much in common with monorails — way too much. BART, with two rails, is working proof of the folly of monorails. BART was conceived and designed by engineers with no reference to other disciplines and dynamics of passenger transportation. It was very much a product of the then-contemporary fashion of the scientific community: The past is a closed door, and the future begins today. Everything about BART seems to emit an aura of public transportation of, by and for people with utter disdain for it. It’s a train meant to make all other vehicle before it be eaten, digested and defecated by history. The engineers and planners were given free rein to reinvent the wheel and the stone age while they were at it. Rights of way were plentiful, but the new cars could not run on them, so virgin guideways were built. The Transbay Tube is a testament to ingenuity, but it replaced an equally effective and comprehensive streetcar system that ran above the water on the Bay Bridge. Plus, the whole point of the wider gauge was so the trains could cross the Golden Gate Bridge, which was later ruled to be impossible physically and politically — Marin County opted out of the BART district when it had the chance in 1962 and even four decades later maintains the Bay Area’s worst public transit. The district itself reflected a “the good is the enemy of the perfect, but the good-enough is the enemy of the good” compromise, where a new agency was created because none of the existing systems at the time would merge or cooperate to bring BART to fruition. So a separate entity was created parallel to available bus and train systems, but the prerogatives of BART and transit agency managers were different and in direct conflict.

Sir Peter Hall cited BART as one of five examples in “Great Planning Disasters”, published in 1980. Almost 30 years later, BART is 104 miles and has a weekday ridership of over 300,000. That’s a catastrophic success.

Go, go gadget bahn.

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