MetroRiderLA

A reader tipped us off on Foothill Transit’s hip new guide book for riders. You can check out pix and a quick review of the book on Heather’s blog, With These Hands.

The cover of the “Bus Book” injects some green into Foothill’s usual blue and white color palette, no doubt to capitalize on the eco-sustainable-green movement that has been sweeping the globe. Wavy green flourishes follow the path of a Foothill Transit bus like vines, and flowers, birds, and lush fields of grass are seemingly emitted from the exhaust. The ecological theme continues inside the booklet with the slogan “Fresh Air, Fresh Fares” used to highlight Foothill’s fare tables. According to Heather, the bulk of the book, the schedules, lack the flair of the cover, but still retains a few elements of green iconography.

I guess it’s not surprising that some of the best aspects of our region’s transit agencies are their graphic design and promotional departments, given the creative nature of Southern California. I’ve long said Metro’s designers have created a canon of work that is more often than not far better than the service it promotes. And although Foothill Transit’s Silver Streak might look like it belongs in space rather than the streets of SoCal, the graphics team definitely hit the right chord with this Bus Book.  Unfortunately, like so much transit design and promotion, for the most part it’s only preaching to the choir.

Steve Boland is a Northern California based transit planner who spends a fair share of his time in our fine city. He runs the website San Francisco Cityscape, which used to be a blog, but is now a repository for beautiful high resolution desktop wallpapers of the Bay Area and even more beautiful high resolution transit maps. These are basically the best non-agency transit maps I’ve ever seen. They are simply stunning.

Steve’s most recent creation is a map of what he imagines to be a realistic portrayal of the Los Angeles rail system in 2030. Subway, light rail, high speed rail, and busways are all included in his fantastic map. He developed the map before the release of the 2008 Long Range Plan, but I think it seems pretty accurate. What’s more I think the design of a map is an improvement over the current Metro Rail map, because as Steve notes, simplified Tube-style maps make sense for complex systems but not so much for our rather sparse and spread out system.

What do you think?

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.

Metro has officially launched the first phase of what it calls its “interactive video wall”, or Metro Interactive. Currently the site features various videos intended to “help customers and visitors more easily navigate Los Angeles”. It is also the new home of Metro Board Chair Pam O’Connor’s infamous online chats. Future plans for the site include: blogs, polls, user uploads, and live streaming video. Metro views Metro Interactive as “a tool to help us reach out to our customers”. Let’s see how phase one fares with this discerning customer.

First Impressions

Thankfully, Metro decided to go with a unique domain (or at least a subdomain) with Metro Interactive. Unlike Miss Traffic, which was hidden three directories deep in the Metro site, Metro Interactive can be reach by simply typing multimedia.metro.net into your web browser. Doing so will lead you to a site with the clean visual design that has been successfully standardized throughout Metro. Bold colors and imagery on a clean grid are complimented with the serious but friendly Scala Sans font. The header pays homage to the silhouettes of th now iconic iPod advertisements, portraying an image of a person holding a video camera. The site seems a little barren, with a sizable chunk of empty space in the top right corner, but keep in mind that this is the first-phase. Plus, less-is-more is always a good philosophy when it comes to design. One strange visual flaw is an unnecessarily low resolution Metro logo at the top of the page.

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Sure, technically the new year began 14 days ago, but I wouldn’t know it. I’ve been hard at work re-imaging MetroRiderLA both visually and conceptually for 2008.

Clearly there’s a new layout. This is the heart of the changes. It’s a Wordpress theme that I built from scratch (my first one!) and it was designed to specifically address some issues that I (and others) had with the original MetroRiderLA template. In addition to color (at last!), I’ve tried to heavily orient the layout around the community, which has become one of the strongest features of the site. People love to talk here, and I want to make sure it’s easy and fun. Let’s go over all the changes.

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