MetroRiderLA

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.

(more…)

This morning I had the unfortunate destiny to trek along the Wilshire corridor. At all times I try my best to stay off this God-forsaken street but today was just not possible. But my goal was Westwood so I felt good that I could at least use the 920 express. I know it’s not really all that much faster because B Hills is clogged at all times but fewer stops lowers the percentage rate of the guy that won’t stop sneezing to board.

Accepting my Wilshire fate I took the Red line to Wilshire/Vermont with the hopes of catching a 920 and sailing smoothly to Bruin country.  However, I had the regrettable fortune of forgetting it was Earth day. But, happy to see that the city is promoting the de-caring of LA even if for only a single day I ignored the precarious re-routing situation sure to follow.

(more…)

• Celebrate Earth Day with Metro at  Union Station! Metro is sponsoring a free concert with Latin singer/songwriter Carina Ricco.
• Get a Carectomy this Earth Day!  It’s actually a very painless procedure since a car is not actually neccessary for human survival.
• Attention Metro: Environmentalists are your friends. Identify them, work with them, make them make you look good.
• L.A. takes on San Francisco in the race to be the greenest big city in the state of California.
• Metrolink introduces a new partially electric “green” locomotive just in time for Earth Day.

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.

Image courtesy of agencyaspen.com.

• Earth Day is April 22nd: Celebrate by taking mass transit.
• 10 reasons why John McCain is a moron.
• Yes! Los Angeles is on a top three list!  Oh wait…
• Blogging LA and The Bus Bench embark on the Great Snail Bus Race 2008!
• Downtown blogger heads up north to ride streetcars.
• The general manger of the Big Blue Bus gets it: “Young people think it’s really cool to get on an alternative fuel bus.”

Last month, Siel over at the Emerald City blog wrote about the Google Transit Earth Day Challenge first proposed by the folks over at World Changing. The idea of the challenge was to get transit agencies to get their systems onto Google Transit by Earth Day 2008, which is on April 22nd. With 8 days to go and no word from Metro, it’s unlikely that LA will be on Google Transit any time soon, but let’s look at what Google Transit could do for us.

By now everyone is aware of the ubiquitous Google Maps and its fantastically innovative way of providing driving directions, simply input a start and end location and Google calculates the best route with turn by turn directions, time estimates, and of course a corresponding map. It’s likely that Google Maps made the once neccessary Thomas Guide a bit irrelevant since its release. Unfortunately, for those without cars, the directions provided by Google Maps are for the most part useless, and transit users have had to rely on proprietary programs created by the cash-strapped transit agencies to get transit directions. These programs, like our own Metro Advanced Trip Planner, tend to be clunky, unattractive, and often teeter along the fine line of usable and unusable. And when compared to most modern web applications, especially the ones created by Google, the agencies programs just can’t compete.

(more…)