A Metro staff report on the plan to lock gates in subway stations beginning this summer was briefly discussed by the Board of Directors’ Executive Management committee on Thursday morning.
The gist of it: two of the Board Members on the committee — Board Chair Antonio Villaraigosa and Director Richard Katz — expressed concern over the cost and time involved in finally locking the gates, in particular the possible need for additional staff to help patrons get through the gates.
“After all the money, effort and time and discussion, it’s just not acceptable,” Villaraigosa said at the meeting. The Mayor called for a working group to be formed to figure out how to accelerate gate locking and conversion of fare media to TAP.
The issue of the timeline to lock the gates will likely come back to the Board in June.
The following is the latest Metro staff report on the issue. Here is a pdf version for download.
Felix,
Metro has a full monopoly in public transit in LA so they can do whatever they want. No matter how backwards it is, people who rely on Metro has to suck it up.
If you want real change, we need to bring in a competitor to Metro, one that is a private company that isn’t run with tax dollars.
Steven P, there is no such thing as a private transportation system, because none of them make a net profit and all of them require tax dollars. The streets are the monopoly of the City DOT, as are the sidewalks. Also, all transportation systems are “natural monopolies”; they work terribly if they aren’t monopolies. The history of competing train stations in Victorian London should be enough to prove that.
Nathanael,
“no such thing as a private transportation system, because none of them make a net profit and all of them require tax dollars.”
…in America. Across the Pacific, they are efficient, profitable, less reliant on tax dollars, they have farebox recovery ratios of over 100%, and their operation costs are fully sustainable without subsidies.
There is no such thing as a private mass transportation because the City of LA makes it illegal for private companies or potential startups to create a mass transit system of their own.
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/apr/17/opinion/op-mta17
There will never be a “Facebook, Google, or Apple for mass transit” in America because of stupid policies like these which hinder private enterprise to provide mass transit service with better ideas and efficiency that competes with the inefficiencies of taxpayer funded public transit.
Nathanael,
Guess again. In NY they have private “dollar vans” that are profitable, much more efficient, and service better frequencies than NYMTA bus services.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/the-illegal-private-bus-system-that-works/246166/
Better service, better frequencies, and cheaper cost. Only problem was they were illegal due to the NYMTA holding a monopoly on how NYers got around.
In the end, Mayor Bloomberg realized that some of the services were better off leaving off to private vans like these that they became legal.
I hope Metro (Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority) is going to really set up the TAP only operation on TVM, sell the EZ Pass on TAP from the Tap Card Website, and lock all the fare gates, not just make an announcement about these things.