Westward Ho!

This Is (One Reason) Why We Can't Have Nice Things!

Coming home on the Orange Line about 20 minutes ago, I got off at my station and a group of young people -- maybe legal drinking age, but only just -- were about to get on. They had an empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin, and I guess they figured that they couldn't bring it on the bus (they could), so they had to make a quick decision. They threw the glass bottle under the bus, got on, and the bus pulled away, not knowing that the bottle was directly in the path of one of the rear tires. When the bus was gone, there was shattered glass everywhere. If I'd had a few seconds more, I'd have alerted the driver, but it all happened really quickly. I'm going to hunt down the number for Metro's transit cops and let 'em know so someone can at least clean it up and prevent another bus from a potential flat tire or accident.

I'm livid. We take enough flak for the high operating costs of our transit system, but everyone still gets in a pantytwist about bad service. I'm glad we have what we do have. Thanks for vandalizing an important public resource and endangering passengers, you ungrateful little turds. Oh, and there was a garbage can about three feet away from you.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Yesterday Green LA Girl ran a Q & A with me as part of its weekly series about car-free female bloggers in Los Angeles. It's a great series and I encourage you all to check out the other entries as well:

Kenya
Kristina
Browne
Kathryn
Enci
Paula

It's noteworthy that all of these females (including me) do not have children. Unfortunately this is not representative of a sizable segment of transit riders in L.A. -- the mothers who rely on Metro to get their children around. A few posters have noted this; I hope we get to hear from the car-free parents out there soon. Another thing I've noticed: the overwhelming number of bicyclists in the series. I'm not one. I support riders' rights and want cities and suburbs to plan for bikes in their circulation elements, but I occasionally worry that the alternative transportation community is too bike-centrist in its collective voice and its commentary. Not everyone who's car-free is a rogue culture-jammer on a fixie. (To be fair, not every cyclist is one, either.)

quick shout-out from NYC before returning to L.A.

I've been hanging out back at home for the past week and a half. Interesting trip -- I only ended up seeing my parents for a little under a week because they jaunted off on some retiree-friendly cruise to Paris. The rest of the time I got to have their Brooklyn Heights apartment to myself, provided I'd take care of the cat.

The cat's name is Kerouac. I sort of cringe when I tell people that these days, because we got him when I was in high school, and it's SUCH a perfect name for the family pet of a pretentious high-school bookworm. He was absolutely tiny when we brought him home from the adoption shelter; he was shy, but he loved to run around and climb all over the furniture and appliances. Now he's about 17 in human years.

He's been slowing down for sure; however I've noticed a difference in him from the way he is now and how he was when I was last home in October for my grandmother's funeral. In October, he could still jump onto the bed, onto the couch... now he has trouble and sometimes gives up if he can't figure out a graceful way to do it. Also he seems depressed. I give him food, change his litter, give him the same amount of affection and attention as in the past, but he cries a lot. I haven't gotten much sleep because his cries wake me up. This is what people tell me raising an infant is like. I'll pass for now. But I love the hell out of Kerouac, and having just lost one family member, it would devastate me to lose another and worry that I hadn't been there for him. So, dander allergies be darned, I'm doing what I can.

Anyway, on this trip home I felt very cloistered. Every day it was either pouring rain or near/below the freezing mark. Sure, I saw friends, I rode the subway and the bus, I walked around midtown Manhattan in a gloppy storm with a wind-gnarled USC umbrella overhead, I had pizza and root beer at Totonno's in Coney Island. We had a girls' night out at Vinegar Hill House, chugging BYOB wine and savoring tender, thymey chicken served in a hot cast-iron skillet. But I stayed home more than I went out, and in doing so, I realized I wasn't missing a heck of a lot. New York is New York. It ebbs and flows, and I was here when the Lower East Side was a shantytown, and I was here for the spend-til-you-puke Sex and the City era, and I've been through the shitty recessions before and here's another one. It's always New York though; plus ça change. Los Angeles, for all its differences from New York, has so many of the same things that make the latter city great -- movies movies movies, a steady stream of touring bands and local dudes, an insane food scene fueled by unrivaled diversity and melting-pot cross-cultural contamination, a more-or-less liberal attitude that sometimes successfully degreases the squeaky wheels of conservatism.

There wasn't much that I thought I needed to do while I was here in New York. I even ride the subway when I'm in L.A., so it wasn't a huge sigh of relief -- just another grudging acknowledgement that NYC's system is comprehensive and well-coordinated while L.A.'s is in its infancy. And NYC's MTA is broke.

Off to bed with me. I think.

The New NYC Taxi Logo

An object lesson in why design by committee is the enemy of art (and good sense).

Transit: Not Just For Pinko Commies and Drunks Anymore!

This from the newest APA Advocate newsletter:

In the same week that transit ridership topped 10 billion trips per year for the first time in 49 years, companion bills were introduced in the House and Senate to raise the allowable transit commute benefit to match that for parking. Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced the "Commuter Benefits Equity Act of 2007" (H.R. 1475 / S. 712). Commuters can now receive up to $110 per month in transit benefits, but the monthly parking benefit is $215.

"Establishing parity between commuter benefits and parking benefits will provide American workers with an incentive to utilize transit for their commute to work," McGovern said. "Enactment of this legislation will help ease congestion, improve air quality, and reduce dependency on foreign oil. It also makes sense for employers who can use it as an effective employment recruitment and retention tool." The measures have been referred to the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee.

Public transit use is up 30 percent since 1995. That's more than double the growth rate of the U.S. population (12 percent) and higher than the growth rate for vehicle miles traveled on U.S. roads (24 percent) during that same period.

Also in the news recently: the LAX FlyAway bus just celebrated its first anniversary, and with 250,000 users over the past year, it has exceeded the projected ridership more than threefold. It's nice to see that that press release comes from the LAWA site, since it's my understanding that historically they've been against transit cutting into their parking revenue.

Hal Bastian on Taxis Downtown

Hal Bastian of the Downtown Center BID posted the following message last night on the New Downtown yahoogroup. I hope he doesn't mind me blogging it here. The "ode" he mentions refers to a poem a listmember wrote about the difficulties of hailing cabs downtown.

For those of you that don't know, I'm working on a plan to change our
culture here in Downtown so that you can hail a cab for a short trip.

Taxis generally wait for hours in a line making no money at Downtown  hotels.
All they want is a fare to LAX.

Right now there are many obstacles, not the least of which is that fact  that
a cab would get a huge ticket if it stopped in a "No Stopping" zone  (all of
Downtown between 7-9am or 4-7pm) to pick you up if you tried to  hail one.
After 7pm, we could look for a taxi in a Dash bus zone,  since Dash stops at 7pm.
I'll fix that later!

If we make Downtown more taxi friendly, we can hail them and the  operators
can make more money doing short trips on a natural meter (no  zones--they are
too hard to understand) than they can making no money for  hours.

I am working with the City to exempt taxis from no stopping zones while  they
are actively picking up and dropping off fares, like every other city in 
America.

Then, we'll have to teach people how to hail a cab!

Taxis can connect the city day and night. The taxi drivers will make  more
money and we will have a great way to get around. We'll be better able to 
patronize our restaurants and bars, Staples Center, etc.

Thanks for the ode!  Wish me luck.

HAL

Overheard Tonight While Riding Home on the 200 Bus

sketchy guy: "do you smoke?"
teenage girl: "huh?"
sketchy guy: "do you smoke? weed?"
teenage girl: "oh... no."
SG: "you want to go to a party? we can smoke weed, listen to music..."
TG: "no thanks."
SG: "i bet you're real mature. girls always more mature than guys. i read somewhere that girls do better in school... you in school?"
TG: "yeah."
SG: "what grade you in?"
TG: "ninth."
SG: "ninth grade, that makes you what, 14? boy, i'm telling you, girls are more mature than guys."
TG: "..."
SG: "you got a job?"
TG: "no."
SG: "oh, so you're a full-time student?"
TG: "yeah."
SG: "you want a job?"
TG: "no."
SG: "your parents treat you good?"
TG: "..."
SG: "'cause i can give you a job. you can make lots of money. you want a job?"
TG: (gets off the bus as quickly as possible)

Two Items

1) I saw an odd MTA house ad on the bus today. It was pimping its website's intermittently useful Trip Planner. Nothing odd about that, but the sample destination address the ad showed was "Fairfax/La Brea." I know they don't mean to imply that Fairfax and La Brea intersect, seeing how the two avenues are both north/south (and don't have a little arc intersecting them the way Glendale Blvd/Silver Lake Blvd do) and are separated by at least ten smaller streets at any given longitude (rough estimate: I spent 5 seconds looking at GoogleMaps).

I'm still new here, so forgive me, but if "Fairfax/La Brea" is one of those cutesy real-estate neighborhood designations I haven't heard it yet -- but it could just be a lazy conflation of the Fairfax District and Park La Brea.

I just typed "Fairfax/La Brea" into the Trip Planner with Union Station as the starting address, with a departure time of Sunday at 10:00 AM. It recognized Union Station and for the former it came up with "NO LOCATION" and this message: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'brea-ycoord) AS subdwalk, hdsgn1 AS dhs, MIN(freqx) AS dfr.

2) I'm doing the AIDS Walk next Sunday, in and around West Hollywood. Here's my donation page -- the proceeds go to AIDS Project Los Angeles and other HIV/AIDS nonprofits. (The walk's 6.2 miles, and yes, we cross both Fairfax and La Brea Avenues -- on foot, so who needs that stinky Trip Planner anyway?)

On a more serious note, HIV/AIDS is still a real crisis in this country (and in the larger world), despite the deafening silence on the issue from career politicians and the mainstream media. It's great that events like the AIDS Walk(s) do their share in keeping the epidemic in the spotlight, albeit for short bursts of time. I wish more could be done (I wish we could wipe the whole f-in' thing out; I also wish I could go back in time and prevent Ronald Reagan from being born), but the total monies raised by this walk will go a very long way indeed -- toward research, education, treatment, counseling, advocacy, and fulfilling such basic needs as groceries for HIV-infected people and their families. Please donate a few dollars if you can. (That link again.)