Los Angeles

The Power and Pleasure of Grids

Posted on February 23, 2010 in Basics, Frequent Networks, Los Angeles, Paris, Philosophy, San Francisco, Sydney, Urban Structure

Why do transit planners love grids? Now and then you’ll even hear one muttering about “grid integrity” or “completing the grid.” What are they talking about?

Suppose you’re designing an ideal transit system for a fairly dense city where there are many activity centers, not just one big downtown. In fact, you don’t want to give preferential treatment to any point in the city. Instead, you want people to be able to travel from literally anywhere to anywhere else by a reasonably direct path, at a high frequency. Everybody would really like a frequent service from their home to everywhere they ever go, which is pretty much what a private car is. But money isn’t infinite, so the system has to deliver its outcome efficiently, with the minimum possible cost per rider. What would such a system look like? Continue Reading →

On Subways to the Sea

Posted on December 4, 2009 in Los Angeles, Rail Transit

This friendly little graphic, which I found on Dan Wentzel’s Pink Line blog, promotes the “Subway to the Sea,” an extension of the Los Angeles Purple Line subway, largely under Wilshire Blvd., all the way to the beach at Santa Monica (map here). I like it as a logo, but it also serves to explain why relatively few subways in coastal cities go all the way to the beach, and why they often stay back from the ocean a bit. Continue Reading →

Bus-Rail Debates in a Beautiful Abstract City, and in Los Angeles

Posted on November 20, 2009 in Bus Rapid Transit, Los Angeles, Rail Transit

On a recent post, commenter Pantheon laid out the core idea that explains why I cannot be a full-time rail booster, even though I love riding trains as much as anyone:

The problem can be posed in the abstract in the following way. Let’s
say we have a city with 20 neighbourhoods, A-T. Our city has a big
deficit in transit infrastructure, and limited resources for redressing
it. We have X dollars to build infrastructure, which is enough to do
one of the following things:
Continue Reading →

Bus Rapid Transit Followup

Posted on November 19, 2009 in Brisbane, Bus Rapid Transit, Language, Los Angeles, Ottawa

I’ll pull together a response to feedback on the controversial Brisbane busway post in the next few days, but meanwhile, Engineer Scotty asks a good clarifying question:

Part of the problem with BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] acceptance in the US, is [that] most visible BRT systems … tend to look and act like rail-based metros. In the US, we speak of BRT lines–the Silver Line in Boston, the Orange Line in LA, EmX in Eugene, OR–and so forth. The busses which run on BRT are different than the local busses (different branding, different route nomenclature, different fare structures, rapid boarding, longer station spacing, nicer stations, proof-of-payment or turnstiles rather than pay-the-driver-as-you-board)–
Continue Reading →

Los Angeles: Reader Feedback on the Gold Line

Posted on November 16, 2009 in Los Angeles, Rail Transit

My attempt at a feel-good post on the opening of the East Los Angeles Gold Line light rail extension attracted a lot of comment from locals who don’t feel so good about it. Continue Reading →

Los Angeles: Gold Line Opens; “Planners” Blamed

Posted on November 14, 2009 in Los Angeles, Rail Transit

Congratulations to Los Angeles on today’s opening of the Gold Line light rail extension, which runs from Union Station through several historically neglected suburbs to East Los Angeles, and will probably someday go further.

More precisely, congratulations to every Angeleno except Ari B.Bloomekatz of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote this:

Why is the Gold Line not a subway?
From the beginning, residents and politicians on the Eastside pushed for the Gold Line extension to be built completely underground. In the end, transportation planners decided to make a roughly 1.7-mile portion of the Gold Line a subway — the part that runs underneath Boyle Heights. The majority of the route runs above ground.

Continue Reading →

How Paris is Like Los Angeles (via New York)

Posted on July 23, 2009 in Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Urban Structure

Alon Levy, guest-writing at The Transport Politic, recently did a great piece proposing that the New York region’s commuter rail lines, which currently all terminate in Manhattan, should be connected to each other so that trains would flow through, for example, from Long Island to New Jersey and back. The inspiration, of course, is the Paris RER, a system in which commuter rail lines on opposite sides of Paris flow across the city into each other. Because all these commuter trains, merged into a common city segment, add up to reasonably high frequency, the RER also serves as an “extra-rapid metro” connecting major centres across the city with trips making just a few stops. Alon’s plan (part one, part two) is a great read, as is Cap’n Transit’s response to it.

Such a system would be wonderful if it existed today. Commutes from Long Island to New Jersey would certainly be much easier, and it would also be great to get the space-consuming and time-consuming end-of-line functions out of the core.

Continue Reading →

When Expansion is Dilution

Posted on June 18, 2009 in Branding, Language, Los Angeles

My post on crowdsourcing bus stop design included a pitch for the importance of branding in making a particular quality of service visible. I cited the obvious example of the Los Angeles Metro Rapid, the region’s network of frequent and relatively fast buses. Integral to the Rapid product was a distinctive logo, colour scheme, and on the first lines at least, shelter design.

But Los Angeles commenters such as Wad pounced, reminding me that as the Rapid brand expanded, bits of it started falling off:

Continue Reading →

Rail Rapid Transit Maps, to Scale

Posted on May 27, 2009 in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Maps, New York City, Paris, Rail Transit, San Francisco

Neil Freeman recently posted a great collection of rail rapid transit maps, all drawn to scale, and all at the same scale. The image at right, of course, is New York City,

He calls them subway maps, but of course that term suggests that the service is all underground, which few “subway” systems are. What matters is that they’re rapid transit. In this case, they’re specifically rail rapid transit, which is why Staten Island’s rail line in the lower left appears disconnected from the rest. In reality, it’s just connected by rapid transit of a different mode: the Staten Island Ferry.

(By “rapid transit” this blog always means transit services that run frequently all day in an exclusive right of way with widely spaced stations — linking centers to each other, for example, rather than providing coverage to every point on the line as local-stop services do.)

Continue Reading →

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