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.

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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.

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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.

Photo courtesy of savemejebus.

Note: I will be out of town for the next three days, so expect light to non-existing posting until Thursday. Here’s some tasty morsels for you to talk about in the meantime.

• The BusTard takes an in-depth look at the transportation mess that was the L.A. Marathon.
• Gold Line to Ontario?  Think again after reading this detailed report.
• Omnitrans whoops Miss Traffic! Omnitrans will award $1,000, a laptop computer, and free bus rides for a year to the student who creates the best Omnitrans commercial.
• 12 miles of bus only lanes coming to Wilshire Boulevard courtesy of Arnie.