MetroRiderLA

Last night, Metro Board member Pam O’Connor answered questions and spoke about the Long Range Transit Plan on Los Angeles Public Access Television. I’ll be honest, I didn’t watch the live show last night, but watched it on the web this morning. You can check out the show on LA36’s website, right here.

The hour long show proved to be a much better medium for Pam than her monthly home on the Metro Interactive online chat, which is pretty much universally panned for its inability to be either interactive or informative. Metro Live, despite its obviously public access level production values, managed to keep my attention for the entire hour. Pam’s answers came off a lot more candid and sincere than they do on the online chat, which for the most part seem like copy-paste clippings from Metro press releases. That’s not to say she didn’t paint a rosy picture of Metro when faced with some hardballs, from hearing her talk you’d think the TAP card is the second coming and fare gates are neccessary, well, just because.

Here’s some highlights (and lowlights):

• The motion graphics that begin the show really set the technical tone: this is gonna be Wayne’s World quality stuff. Hard to believe we are in the heart of the movie industry with production values like this.
• Pam talks some good game about congestion pricing, noting how we pay variable prices for virtually every resource we use but our roads . “We’ve not valued, or put a price, on what’s really a rare resource… our roads”
• A Santa Monica woman calls and asks if job growth should be regulated until an expansive transit system is in place, Pam keeps it real and says Los Angeles is growing no matter what (mostly from new births) and there’s going to have to be jobs for these new Angelenos.
• “The pattern of driving, alone, in a single occupancy vehicle… even if it’s fueled by alternative fuel, you still need a place to park it… that takes carbon emissions to build. So we are going to have to, as a society, start making some choices about how we travel.”
• Ricky from Woodland Hills asks about fare gates, Pam responds by repeating Roger Snoble’s lie that LA is the only subway in the world without fare gates, a lie that LA Weekly exposed on the day the Long Range Plan was publicly released. She claims there is a “range of reasons” to go to a gating system but only gives two reasons: “safety” and stopping fare evasion. Both of which have been disputed here on MetroRiderLA.
• My favorite momment was when an angry bitter bus driver called in asking for Metro to fix the current system (mostly, make the buses run on time) before moving on to the future. Pam was reasonable when she noted that buses must ride in the same traffic as cars, and also implied that a real-time GPS bus tracking system was on its way. Still, the dude had a point.

For a hoops based look at the Metro Live Television chat, read Damien Newton’s entertaining take over at Streetsblog LA.