MetroRiderLA

Photo courtesy of savemejebus.

Note: I will be out of town for the next three days, so expect light to non-existing posting until Thursday. Here’s some tasty morsels for you to talk about in the meantime.

• The BusTard takes an in-depth look at the transportation mess that was the L.A. Marathon.
• Gold Line to Ontario?  Think again after reading this detailed report.
• Omnitrans whoops Miss Traffic! Omnitrans will award $1,000, a laptop computer, and free bus rides for a year to the student who creates the best Omnitrans commercial.
• 12 miles of bus only lanes coming to Wilshire Boulevard courtesy of Arnie.

• Construction begins today for new $3.9 million transit center in Long Beach
• Former Metro Board Member Richard Alarcón doesn’t trust Metro, and isn’t afraid to tell them
• BRU tells the mayor to fund bus lanes on Wilshire now that he’s one of them
• Turnstiles are an $80 million boondoggle according to City Beat
• Sales tax to fund subway to the sea? Assemblyman Mike Feuer thinks so.

From the LA Times:

The Federal Transit Administration announced today that it would award $23.3 million over the next two years to help fund bus lanes on a portion of Wilshire Boulevard through the heavily congested Westside.

The lanes will be used during the morning and evening rush hours and would stretch from the Santa Monica-Los Angeles boundary to Valencia Street, which is just west of downtown Los Angeles.

At which point our resident anti-rail ideologue promptly starts cheering. But wait, my dear ideologue friend…

The project does not include the part of Wilshire that traverses the city of Beverly Hills.

That funny noise you may hear is me banging my head on my desk. As basically anyone who has taken the 720 or 920 down Wilshire can tell you (and probably at a fairly high decibel level), at least as between the Pacific and Vermont, the part through Beverly Hills is by far the worst, by far the slowest, and, along with the 405, the source of the delays along Wilshire. Whether or not it’s the fault of BH or Century City is open for debate but irrelevant. The worst traffic along Wilshire is in BH, and if you don’t have them along for this project, then you’re wasting money. Bus-only lanes won’t solve the 405 on-ramp problem, and the lanes don’t go through BH, which is the 20-series’s choke point.

Metro, take your $3.7m, put it in the piggy bank, politely return Washington’s funds and either (a) shelve the project and build the subway, or (b) wait until you have Mayor Delshad along for the bus ride.