MetroRiderLA

• High gas prices cause people to give up more and more of their own lives to pay for their car. Drive to work and work to drive
• People are getting scared about the end of free freeways.
• A 70-year woman experiences the car-free life for the first time, and makes some startling revelations.
• Metro rejects cuts of Tier 1 bus service.
• Dodger Stadium is getting a facelift, but will transit play a part?
• Awesome: Hipsters ride Amtrak’s free Coachella Express to the Indio rock festival

Today I decided to be all green and jump on the Purple Line to go the Wilshire Center Earth Day Celebration down at Wilshire/Western.

I’m not a particularly “green” dude in that I don’t really care about Mother Earth and Gaia and Saving The World and all that crap. I do, from an economic standpoint, appreciate the logic of conservation and dislike the idea of unnecessary waste. I don’t own a car because I don’t think it’s a very effective or economical mode of transportation in Los Angeles, nor do I like the burden of having to store and maintain a 2-ton multi-thousand dollar piece of machinery on my own. I work enough, thank you very much, and I like to get paid for my work, not pay out the ass for it.

This being said, my transit oriented lifestyle has invariably led me to terms like “green” and “sustainability” as well as events like “Earth Day”. I’ll admit, this is the first Earth Day anything I’ve been to since probably 3rd grade when my class made various ecological shapes out of construction paper to paste on the halls of the school. So I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I walked out of Wilshire/Western and onto a car-free Wilshire Boulevard.

What I got was a bunch of hippies selling crap.

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Image courtesy of Payton Chung.

• Getting around Wilshire on Earth Day, car-free of course!
• L.A. Times: Let’s fix our current transit system before trying to build a new one.
• Reasons to vote for California High Speed Rail.
• John Kerczek provides density data for a future Westside transit system.
• Freakonomics and the external costs of personal automobiles.
• Congestion pricing regressive?  HA!  Take a look at how car-culture as a whole is regressive.
• Environmental costs of cars that you don’t think about: the afterlife of tires.

Things got a “little” busy with my billable work last week, thus the lack of updates. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to up the ante to make up for it.

Image courtesy of Coneee.

• Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus celebrates 80 years of service today.
• United Airlines Hemispheres Magazine takes a look at the growing car-free movement.
• Reality Check: Growth in Los Angeles is not going to stop, not matter what.
• Zev on density: “Housing should also be built around subway, bus and light-rail stations.“
• Redondo Beach man gives a car-free commute a try.
• New security checks on the Red Line are part of a larger bum control issue.

Who says you need a car to buy and plant a Mexican dwarf lime tree?

I’m terrible to go shopping with. I like to wander. I have no problem being at a grocery store for a half an hour to leave with nothing but bread and a twelve pack.

I’m a phase kind of person. I live through ideas that may last only an afternoon. Public transit lifestyle and advocacy might be the only thing in my life not based on phase theory. This Sunday I was in such a phase. This Sunday I was going to garden, and by God, I was going to do it car free.

Now this isn’t all that new really. I’ve been through this phase before and on such days I spend a couple hours at Home Depot spending more money on the items to make/plant than the item/plant will ever yield. Recently was a compost pile and making it, albeit fun, will in no way produce the amount of fertilizer equal to its relatively meager cost. Not to mention I don’t go through all that much fertilizer. The same can now be said about the Mexican dwarf lime tree I decided to buy yesterday.

To move this along—when I stepped up to the register I had in total: a 25lb bag of manure, a 25 lb bag of potting soil, a gigantic black plastic pot, a lime tree that stood about 3 feet tall and had thorns, as well as 2 succulents (the reason for the trip), a lavender plant, and spider killer.

The pretty black girl in her orange apron, after talking about how cold she was and giving me the eye (probably not), was blown away that I was taking the subway from MacArthur Park back downtown with all this stuff. I assured her it was no big deal and that it was worth it to not have to drive. She summed up the point of MetroRiderLA in 7 words by questioning where I was from because “that’s not what people do in LA.” I gave her a smile and she gave me a good luck.
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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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