MetroRiderLA

MetroRiderLA founder Fred Camino takes his buddies for a ride on the Green Line, which celebrated its 15th year of service yesterday. The person called Mdogg must have the headache many Green Line riders get from the amplified noise emanating from the surrounding traffic on the 105 Freeway.

That, or he’s just missed his train and has to wait 15 minutes for the next one. It’s hard to say. Fred didn’t provide a caption in the photo.

It’s probably the former. Even the sculpture behind him has a headache.

Actually, it fits the motif of artist JoeSam., who created “Hide and Seek” with the help of children in Willowbrook, the site of the Imperial/Wilmington/Rosa Parks station. From the Metro Art description page:

Over a period of three years, JoeSam. worked with over 1,000 children from the community to realize this project. To initiate the project, young people from the Watts/Willowbrook Boys and Girls Club worked with the artist to produce cutout figures of themselves playing hide-n-seek.

Note to readers: Transit Oriented Dining will be delayed until the weekend. Why? Paraskevidekatriaphobia. Just kidding. It’s just work-related. And, it gives me an excuse to use the word paraskevidekatriaphobia today.

Copyrighted image by Salaam Allah West Coast Transitphotography KING!; used with permission from the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool. All rights reserved.

Wait a minute! This is supposed to be Metro bus month on MetroFlickrLA, you might be saying. If not, I thank you for eschewing pedantry.

We’ll take a break from bus images for a few days to celebrate another milestone. Today is the crystal anniversary of the Metro Green Line. It opened to the public August 12, 1995.

If the Metro Rail lines were Baldwin brothers, the Green Line would be Stephen. (The decision to bypass LAX is the Green Line’s “Bio-Dome.”)

The high concept for the Green Line would be worthy of a Hollywood farce. (“A train line is built solely for the sake of getting a freeway completed, designed to miss as many destinations as it serves, and yet somehow attracts riders.”)

This is a case where the execution was wrong in every way imaginable and yet still stumbles into becoming a somewhat successful line. It’s amazing to see any ridership with the barriers it must overcome.

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Photo by Fred Camino in the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool. Used with a Creative Commons license.

For the anniversary that marks the first generation of modern urban rail in Los Angeles, July 14, 2010, was a day like any other on the Blue Line. No fanfare, no recognition, just people going about their business. The inaugural run of the Blue Line was the talk of the town. The Militant Angeleno was there, and he provided footage. The 10th anniversary was marked with a modern train paying an homage to history.

There’s not much to celebrate this time around. Metro just raised its fares on the 1st, and the deadbeat state is again flaking on funding, and that of course means another round of service cuts. The 20th anniversary also comes full circle to the 1990 opening day. Then and now, the Los Angeles economy was mired in a deep recession — both in the wake of financial crises and real estate bubbles.

While the anniversary itself went by without fanfare, the Blue Line itself has proven to be an important backbone and setting the pace for our still-growing network with ridership well north of 70,000 on weekdays. It has also been a line that has seen the extremes of few major transformative developments and most of the communities remaining as they were in 1990.

July 14 offered a look at what is different and the same with a fully mature light rail line.

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Today’s picture from waltarrrrr, the catch of the day from the MetroRiderLA Flickr pool, succinctly frames what is hated most about the Gold Line, particularly the first segment between Union Station and Pasadena, which opened seven years ago this month.

This was taken near the Highland Park station, an older urban neighborhood densely packed with small single-story bungalow homes. North Figueroa Street, a block east of the Gold Line, is the neighborhood’s commercial heart. On Tuesdays, the area just outside the station perimeter hosts a community farmers market.

Many would fall in love, or at least grow to like, Highland Park. Unfortunately, Highland Park stands in popular imagination as the area that made the Gold Line so unbearably, excruciatingly, torturously, mind-numbingly slow that it repelled riders and caused the line to be a ridership failure. The disappointing ridership is true. Before the East L.A. extension opened, the Gold Line had attracted a pitiful boarding level in the low- to-mid 20,000s. Now, 20,000+ boardings would make for an extremely crammed bus line, but for rail, the passenger loads are so low that it’s more costly to carry passengers than on ordinary bus service.

Now, looking at Gold Line service closely, there are some other explanations as to why it was never able to meet projections. For one thing, the neighborhood density is high, but a big problem is the topography of Northeast Los Angeles. The area is very hilly, and the curvilinear road network doesn’t lend itself to the pedestrian activity seen in the flatter areas, which have a regular road grid. Also, the Northeast L.A. stations are isolated and remote, though this isn’t so much the case at Highland Park.

Another problem is that this Downtown L.A.-bound service only skirts the edge of Downtown but doesn’t really go in it. Northeast L.A. riders wishing to go downtown are better off taking lines 81 or 83, as they go within downtown with a single-seat ride and no transfer at Union Station, a transit center that makes intermodality an ordeal.

That’s the reality. The popular perception: Gold Line failed because it’s too slow. In fact, the average speed is quite fast for light rail. Specifically, all the blame is heaped upon Marmion Way. Or, as it’s better known, F—ing Marmion.

In Highland Park, Marmion Way is a roadway that became less than a lane wide when the Gold Line tracks were added in. You can see a small bit of it to the left of the train in the photo. Marmion is not an alley. It’s a regular road, and the fronts of buildings are oriented to the street. So when cars have to access driveways, some of them will have to turn onto the tracks briefly to complete the maneuver. This is also why the tracks aren’t fenced on the outside.

Marmion also intersects with many short Avenue (numeral) blocks. As a result, Gold Line trains run at a 20 mph speed limit along here.

This proved to be unacceptable to riders, as Marmion Way takes 2 minutes of your life that you’ll never be able to get back! And that’s just one way! Round trip riders have to spend an astonishing 4 minutes to trek through this arduous stretch of urban road each day. Four minutes!

Something else about the Gold Line that is disliked: That train in the picture is the infamous AnsaldoBreda. This particular order was years late, and when it was finally delivered, it proved to be a steel-wheeled lemon. Riders also complained of the loud interiors and cramped seats.

So how does AnsaldoBreda get punished? It was in the running for a sweetheart deal AnsaldoBreda proposed when it begged Metro to continue its car contract. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promised to create “green-collar” jobs. AnsaldoBreda was one of the first to take the bait. The Italian manufacturer promised to build a factory in Los Angeles to build more cars, and create hundreds of jobs in the process. Trouble was, Metro personnel urged the board to sever all ties with AnsaldoBreda and put the car order out to bid. Good jobs vs. good train cars? In the end, the board heeded staff’s recommendation and will put the cars out to bid. Plans for the assembly plant were scrapped.

Happy Fifth of July, MetroReaders. Just a reminder: Metro’s buses and trains will run on a second consecutive Sunday schedule today. It’s safe to assume other transit agencies will have a similar policy.

Being on a Sunday schedule means another dip into the Metro Library‘s Flickr trove. July also marks the opening of the Gold Line between Union Station and Pasadena. This is the first entry of the Gold Line in the monthly Summer of Rail theme.

The blur combined with the stark contrasts of darkness and light makes this an eye-catching photo of a new AnsaldoBreda train passing through one of the more eye-catching stations, Del Mar. The Gold Line, which has struggled in its early years to develop a ridership base, had been making headway (no pun intended) in attracting development around the stations. Del Mar Station, shown here, has a brightly colored Archstone apartment building wrapped around the platforms as well as the units above it forming a small tunnel.

Del Mar Station was a former Santa Fe train depot. Now it’s La Grande Orange Cafe, home of the commuter breakfast and some reasonably priced lunch and dinner specials. It’s next to the west platform, and it just might be a future TOD: Transit Oriented Dining candidate.

Again, computer problems rear their ugly heads. Now, my router has prevented me from working from home. So I’ll make this short and marginally relevant. This has put the concluding installment of the MOS-5 Purple Line Census profile on hold for a few days.

No MetroRiderized post for this, but Metro has a series of Regional Connector (the second subway through downtown L.A.) meetings in November. Three of them are in downtown L.A. One of them is in Pasadena.