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Ever drove by bus in LA? Ever asked the bus driver if this particular bus goes to a specific direction? All you get is "RTFBM"!

I think, it is not a problem of the Linux community. You can find this attitude everywhere.

And, of course, I like to spend my transit time reading so a car wouldn't be very nice to me or others.

Admittedly, I'm biased. A couple of years in Portland, many years in NYC, lots of time in D.C., and enough time sitting in traffic in L.A. have all added up to perhaps, a different view than many. I don't claim that mass transit is perfect or even a solution for everybody. I'm just really f*cking sick of people acting as if there is no real mass transit "west of Chicago". Christ! In L.A. they've got one of the most impressive heavy rail (subway) networks in the world and they're going gangbusters extending it. In fact, it's happening all over but most angelenos still are suffering from a severe absence of clue.

oh, no, the subway? No, that never actually got built. They lost their funding after doing three or four stops worth.

But I'm looking at the map at this very moment, complete with today's schedules.

No, it never actually got built. Those are just planned routes.

I can see pictures here of it in use.

No, you mean drawings. Or maybe they're computer simulations.

No, these are definitely shots of actual commuters on actual trains.

No, it doesn't exist. You must be looking at the site for a different city.

And so on. It's like they're brainwashed. Oh, let's be honest, they are brainwashed. And I'm very sick of it. It's yet more corporate American FUD of a level and effectiveness that Microsoft would be proud to call their own. Typical of what nobody seems ready to admit is stuff like this, from, of all places, USATODAY:

As transit expands further, new projects will follow. The Blue Line light rail that runs south from Union Station has sparked $1 billion in development at Long Beach stations where the route ends. A 5-mile Gold Line extension into densely populated, mostly Latino east L.A. is underway. A 24-mile extension east to San Bernardino County will open rail access to tens of thousands of commuters in the San Gabriel foothills.

But even with that, most folks I talk to say the same deluded horseshit as the post I was responding to. Was my response snarky? Borderline rude? Yes. But I'd say that I have plenty of grounds.

-Rustin

Los Angeles has a pretty decent Metro Trip Planner. Even though it's run by the MTA (one agency), it covers all the other agencies of the area as well. It used to be very picky about addresses, but does a decent job since the update not too long ago.

The basic problem with a light rail mass transit system is that it only travels from fixed point to fixed point. If either the start of your trip or the destination of your trip are not near the rail station, you will need to take some other form of transportation to get to your destination.

Now in a city like New York or London, mass transit does work: they both have very dense packed downtown areas, so generally the destination is near where you want to go. You still will need a car if you don't live in the dense business districts or downtown districts: drive your car from your home in New Jersey to a "park and ride" parking lot, hop the subway, and take it into Manhattan. The same goes for London, though I did encounter many people on the fringes of London who have never taken the London Underground because they live in the suburbs that most tourists without cars never see.

Which is, by the way, the blind spot most tourists and travelers have when traveling and exclusively using the mass transit system at their destination: you never get to see the 90% of the residents who never use the mass transit rail system because they live too far away or don't go into the dense downtown region.

Now they are trying to install a mass transit system here in Los Angeles. When seen from the perspective of cost per person using the rail system, it's a complete failure: for the many tens of billions spent digging underground tunnels and repairing buildings in the Hollywood area which were damaged when the earth settled above the tunnels, we got a rail system that was hailed for being able to carry tens of thousands of people per day. Sounds like a lot until you realize that one major freeway junction (the 405/10 exchange) will often see over a million cars a day.

In Los Angeles, there are no centralized districts where people either start or wind up at. So often, such as in my case, the nearest metrostation is a good mile and a half away from where I live in Glendale, and five miles from where I work in Santa Monica. Now if the destination station was (say) a quarter mile from where I work, I could just drive to the metrostation and walk--God knows I could use the exercise. But to drive to the park and ride, tthen hop the yellow like, transfer to the red line, then to the blue line, then to the Green--then take a bus from the end of that ride and then transfer to a second bus--I'm sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. It's not because the light rail and bus systems are poorly designed: it's that Los Angeles is a sprawling metropolitan region of many smaller towns which grew into one mass (like most south-western and western cities in the United States), and people desire to own in their own home rather than live in a cramped apartment--so convincing people to change their living patterns would be impossible.

(That is what Los Angeles is trying to do, by the way: convince people the benefits of mass transit are so much better than the freeways--which have been neglected for the past two decades--that people will willingly sell their bungalos and move into sprawling apartment complexes that haven't been built yet. While it is true that along the Red Line there is a lot of revitilization projects going on, for the amount of money spent Los Angeles could have just bought the entire tract of land there and did the revitalization directly.)

I have a friend in Seattle who is trying to kill the Seattle Monorail project. It's cost overruns are insane, and the amount of money it sounds like they want to spend on their Monorail--which doesn't appear to go to enough destinations to serve enough of the population as to make a dent in current traffic (just like L.A.'s subway project)--works out to be a rediculous amount per transportation mile. And from the sounds of it, the Seattle area doesn't have the centralized business district that New York has that would make mass transit make some degree of sense.

I guess what I'm saying is that

Los Angeles authorities thought it would be a good idea to build some trains...they don't go anywhere that you'd ever want to go.

Just because they don't go anywhere that you want to go, doesn't mean that they aren't heavily used. Have you ever riden the blue line? I take it a lot of times to get from my home in downtown Long Beach to the LA convention center and Staples Center, and it is almost always standing room only.

According to the MTA's own website, the trains that don't go anywhere that you want to go carries 1,371,825 riders on average every week. Obviously someone is riding them.

It doesn't connect to the airport because the taxicab union lobbied against it.

Actually, the green line doesn't connect to the airport because far more people use it to commute from their homes in Redondo Beach than would use it to carry a bunch of luggage to the airport. Just because you want to take it to the airport doesn't mean the majority of people do.

Okay, since my public transport agency was kind enough to send me a free pass so I could try it out, let's try using public transport in my area.

First, I couldn't use my own address because it's high up in the hills and is nowhere near any public transit. In fact, the streets near my home are so narrow no bus could get through even if it needed to. So if I love my hillside lifestyle, which I do, I simply can't use public transit at all. Traffic density on my street is about one car every ten minutes.

But let's say I'm on the closest major street, which is about a five minute drive from me. I want to go to my work, which would take appoximately 10 minutes via car. It would also cost $2.50 each way, or $5 a day.

Here's the route. If you're too lazy to click on the link, be aware that it would take one hour and 20 minutes to get to my work. That's EIGHT TIMES what it takes by car.

I drive a gas-guzzler car that gets about 14 miles per gallon. It's a Mercedes sedan with leather seating and good handling. I enjoy driving it down the beautiful leafy hillside roads of my community. It's about three miles to work. At $2.50 a gallon (premium fuel, you know), it would cost about $1.07 to go to work and back every day.

Clearly, public transport doesn't work in my community. And the only way it would work, is if we all lived in massive, ugly apartment buildings on the same streets. Now, I don't know about you, but I really, really don't like massive, ugly apartment buildings.

So what's the solution? Live close to your work. As already noted, I have a ten minute commute each way, with no traffic congestion whatsoever, even though I live in a busy Los Angeles suburb which has huge amounts of commercial activity.

It's not perfection but I can't think of a better alternative that would work for me. The only real flaw is that I really lucked out in buying my house three months ago; I could not have afforded its value today (!).

D

because some cities won't allow bikes on commuter rail during the heavy commute window. if your office isn' within walking distance of a train station you're sort of screwed... but they will allow segways (at least for now).

I know LACMTA has effectively solved the problem by building vast ventilation systems in teh red line stations. I think the principle idea here would be to direct the heat elsewhere through a grating outside. It has to go somewhere, why not put it someplace where it's going to have an easier time dissipating than the subway station?

This would work if they encased the flywheels in outside-vented rooms, and would help cool things off by installing a blower in the room. Side effect: outside air is pulled in. Perhaps others can throw in other factors I'm missing and solutions to the inherent problems?

Maybe the LA County MTA can take a few hints from these guys on the Metro Rail. Or for that matter, any mass transit system using rails.

the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority. They were on strike for over a month!