MetroRiderLA

• LA Weekly doesn’t mince words when it comes to the Westside vs. SGV transit funding debate.
• Goodbye Pam from Santa Monica, Hello Mayor Villaraigosa.
• Eric Garcetti wants to lift the rush hour ban of bikes on trains.
• Metro buses are late 40% of the time and the yellow shirts won’t let you forget it.
• We’ve heard this one before: Washington Post columnist George Will thinks the solution to America’s transportation woes is simple, build more roads!

• Millennials and Baby Boomers join forces in forgoing the suburbs for the many ammenities of urban life.  Hey Gen X, you suck!
• Hey ladies, despite conventional wisdom, cars aren’t the safest way to travel.
• A journey on America’s “oddball novelty”, Amtrak, presents a compelling look at the failure of American passenger rail.
• The Gold Line Foothill extension is exactly the kind of transit Los Angeles doesn’t need.
• Lusting for cars from the seat on a bus.  Car advertisements get heavy rotation on TransitTV.
• Pam is back! Join the Metro Interactive chat today at noon to discuss “beautiful rides, such as the Metro Line 2 bus down Sunset Boulevard”.

• Pasadena rules when it comes to smart growth planning.
• Transit advocates storm Sacramento looking for some respect, or at least money.
• Pam chat aftermath: O’Connor wants to end the free ride for low-emission vehicles.
• Metrolink is a bit overzealous when it comes to protecting its “brand”.
• The L.A. Underground as seen from the BBC.
• Pleasure in pain, high gas prices put smiles on the faces of environmentalists

Pam from Santa Monica took a break from chatting with us last month as Metro’s software gurus worked on improving the
chat interface.  It seems the work is done and Pam is returning tomorrow to chat about toll roads, congestion pricing, taxes, and public transportation.

Also returning is the ill-fated Anti-Pam Chat held by none other than MetroRiderLA.  The APC started last month, but failed to attract many chatters, most likely because there was no actually Pam Chat held.  Hopefully if you’re tuning into Pam’s chat tomorrow over at Metro Interactive you’ll open up the MetroRiderLA Forum in another tab or window and chat with us concurrently.  The plan is to critique the questions asked and Pam’s answers to those questions, and perhaps come up with some good questions of our own.  In addition to the Shout Box located on the sidebar, I’ve started a new thread on the forum where you can share your thoughts for the Anti-Pam Chat.

So tomorrow at noon make sure to load up your browsers and head to both the Pam and Anit-Pam Chat for some chatteriffic Metro chatting.

Today was supposed to be the day that Pam from Santa Monica was to hold her monthly Live Chat via Metro Interactive. I had planned to hold what I dubbed “The Anti-Pam Chat” (not that we have anything against Pam per se, she did a bang up job on public access television) to coincide with Metro’s oft maligned experiment in interactive communication. The idea was to provide a live chat forum where we could sarcastically discuss and make fun of the Metro Chat, MST3K style, while presenting Pam with our own questions and awaiting the usual canned responses. Unfortunately, the Metro Interactive Chat for April has been canceled. Apparently Metro is testing out a newly redesigned chat tool and it’s not ready for prime time yet. On one hand it’s great that they’ve decided to try a new chat program, since the one they’ve been using was interactive only in the very broadest of definition of the word, but on the other hand it means The Anti-Pam Chat kind of loses its purpose.

Regardless, I’ve decided to go for it anyway, so today at 12:30pm MetroRiderLA will hold its first last-minute impromptu live Anti-Pam chat over at the MetroRiderLA Forum. There’s a little chatbox on the left-hand sidebar which is where the live chat will take place, and we’ll discuss whatever the hell comes to mind. Forum topics, recent blog posts, transit news, MetroRiderLA, Pam’s haircut, whatever. Plan your lunch break around it, we’ll try to talk for half an hour or so. If it works out, then The Anti-Pam Chat will return in May, hopefully along with Pam, for some interactive Metro fun.

See ya there!

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.