Almost a year ago, I told the story of Los Angeles line 305, a diagonal line that ran every 40 minutes zigzagging across the city's high frequency grid, between Watts and Beverly Hills. The line was so infrequent, and the surrounding grid service so frequent, that if you just missed the 305 it was faster to take the frequent grid routes and transfer than to wait for the next 305.
The 305 comes up often in my presentations because it's such a useful example of symbolic transit. The purpose of the line was not to be useful to very many people, but rather to announce, as a matter of symbolism, that "we run from Watts to Beverly Hills"! That's certainly how Jennifer Medina of the New York times described it, when it was first proposed to be cut in 2011. The Times's graphic:
The NYT headline of the time even claimed that cutting this line would "make a long bus commute longer," which was factually untrue if you count waiting time as part of travel time.
Well, a year later, LA Metro is finally cutting the 305. Very few people will experience any loss of travel time as a result, but the system will be simpler, more frequent, and ultimately, more liberating for anyone who wants to get where they're going. Of course, like such worthily deleted lines as San Francisco's 26-Valencia, the 305 will still be useful as a parable!