MetroRiderLA

Photo by neighborhoods.org on Flickr; used with a Creative Commons license

The day after Thanksgiving, known in recent years as Black Friday, has been the time when bovine Americans stampeded to shopping malls and general merchandise stores. Yes, that remark has a kernel of truth.

That was before the alcohol-induced spending binge of most of this decade led to a brief coma and the hangover gripping most Americans. Unfortunately, 70% of our economy depends on people buying crap.

If you do join the herd Friday, remember MetroReaders, keep your money in Los Angeles County. We have to feed the Measure R kitty.

If you choose not to, you can see where the Measure R money goes by joining the Southern California Transit Advocates on its Day After Thanksgiving study tour. This year, Socata’s train-hopping aboard Metrolink. The Socata folks are going to use Family 4-Pack tickets to explore almost every line in one day.

Participants are asked to shake off the tryptophan somnolence and arrive at Union Station by 7:50 a.m.

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

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Photo by Yours Truly via Flickr. Add your photo to the MetroRiderLA Flickr Pool.

The Orange County Transportation Authority, like most of L.A. County’s suburban neighbors, must look at another round of service cuts as tax revenues have fallen off sharply during the recession. The worst is to come in March 2010.

OCTA has revealed is various scenarios to reduce more than 300,000 service hours from the system. The most drastic involves killing off a large swath of routes, while others involve adding more short lines and reducing span of service and/or frequencies. Read the PDF for the proposed route eliminations and service reduction in its PDF. Most of the cuts affect routes in northernmost and southern Orange County.

A good source of news and a voice for Orange County’s bus riders is Steven Chan and his TransitRiderOC blog. In his post on the service cuts, Chan doctors up existing OCTA system maps and shows what the route grid would look like when the proposed services are eliminated. It’s a sad sight to see.

He also points to a link to the Pacific Progressive blog, which has pulled out the doomsday scenarios to plain text:

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• The illusion of control: in a car you’ve got control, in a bus you don’t. Or is that really the case?
• Angelenos dump the pump with gusto. Not hard with gas prices over $4/gallon.
• In Orange County, 10,000 people downloaded a free transit pass offered by OCTA for Dump the Pump Day.
• Metrolink hits 50,000 riders on Tueday, its highest single day ridership EVAR.
• A freeway is completed and traffic increases.

• Four reasons why rising gas prices are hurting public transit.
• The O.C. to spend $12 million studying monorails and trolleys for the area.
• Megabus about to bail from Los Angeles confirming stereotype that Angelenos love their cars.
• Save mass transit, save the world.
• Amtrak needs to get on the wi-fi tip and quick.  Strike while the iron’s hot!
• L.A. Visions provides an update on the Downtown Regional Connector.

Image courtesy of jon_hrach.

The transit oriented lifestyle in Los Angeles is often like a jigsaw puzzle, you’ve got all these oddly shaped pieces and you just have to figure out how to connect them. It may seem daunting at first, but it’s never impossible, and with a little work the full picture is bound to appear.

On of my favorite transit puzzles is getting to the airport without a car. Thanks to the FlyAway getting to LAX is like a 300-piece puzzle – even a child could do it. However, LAX is but one of many airports in the region and sometimes you’re just bound to fly out of one of those other aviation hubs. The last time I put together one of these 1000-piece puzzles was when I flew out of Ontario Airport to take advantage of a non-stop ExpressJet flight to Oklahoma City (full disclosure: I’ve actually made this trip a few times since then). A Metrolink and a taxi saved me about $100 and got me a non-stop flight to the mid-west. Not a bad picture for the work it took putting that puzzle together.

Last week I opened up a new 1000-piecer: Downtown Los Angeles to John Wayne Airport (Orange County). The price was right, the time was right, the flight was right, so I bought the ticket/puzzle. As the pieces tumbled out in front of me, I wondered if I made the right decision. Maybe this was one of those puzzles with no solution? Or maybe a few pieces would be missing? Shit. I wish I had a car.

Just kidding.

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Parking… it’s what cars crave!

• U.S. Secretary of Transportation praises Orange County public-private transit center
• Los Angeles wants home-owners to pay $3,500 to fix broken sidewalks
• New city regulations force Claremont College to provide 220 more parking spaces for students
• City Watch on L.A.’s future: Gotta have Heart er… Parking