Category Archives: Feedback

Reminder: take our poll on Metro service over the holidays!

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So far voting hasn’t exactly exploded — although we have more voters than those who voted for Herman Cain in the Iowa caucus!

Please take the time to vote and leave a comment if you would like. It’s a good way to provide feedback to the agency about the all-night rail and Orange Line service that Metro ran over the New Year’s weekend — as well as other Metro service over the holidays.

How was Metro's service over the holidays? Take our poll!

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The Gold Line saw heavy crowds, as usual, for the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl game. Photo by Fernando Andres Di Zitti/Metro

 

Over the past two weeks, Metro provided free service on its buses and trains on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. In addition, the agency also ran all night Metro Rail and Orange Line service on both New Year’s Eve and Sunday night and bulked up rail service for the Tournament of Roses parade and the Rose Bowl game.

So, what did you think? Did Metro help you get around better? Were our buses and trains a useful alternative to driving?

Please take the above poll and leave a comment if you have any specific compliments or criticisms. I’m sure we’ll also see some tweets to this effect later today in our weekly Twitter Tuesday post.

Here’s a short video showing the post-parade and pre-game crowds at the Gold Line’s Memorial Park station in Old Town Pasadena.

A look back at some of the year's most popular and interesting posts on The Source

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The demolition of half of the Mulholland Bridge in July. Photo by Peter Watkinson/Metro.

As 2011 winds down, the following is a look back at our more popular posts from the past year. Not surprisingly, many of the posts are from earlier in 2011, which tended to be heavy on big news.

And equally non-shocking, readers showed the most interest in posts about Metro projects either under construction or in the planning pipeline — the Expo Line, Crenshaw/LAX Line, Westside Subway Extension, Gold Line Foothill Extension, Regional Connector, ExpressLanes, Orange Line Extension and the Van Nuys Rapidway, to name a few. Many, of course, are receiving dollars from the Measure R sales tax increase that Los Angeles County voters approved in 2008.

Please feel free to comment if you feel as if the following list doesn’t reflect the big events or the real news of the past year.

The 405 freeway bone dry of cars on Carmageddon weekend. Photo by Dave Sotero/Metro.

Transit guide to Carmageddon (July 15). No surprise here. Before the big tear-down of half the Mulholland Bridge, people were seriously concerned with getting around — especially between the San Fernando Valley and LAX. Several other posts about Carmageddon and feared traffic impacts were also among our most popular posts of the year.

Metrolink adds Angels Express trains (March 29). Metro is one of the five counties that funds the commuter rail agency that aggressively added special service trains in the past year. It’s clear to me that readers want alternative ways to travel to events around So Cal and, thus, no surprise that this post got a lot of attention.

Bus service changes for June approved by Metro Board (March 24). It was a close vote with the Board approving the changes by a 7 to 6 margin. The 300,000 hours of reductions were about 100,000 hours less than agency staff originally proposed.

Metro begins testing real-time bus arrival system (March 2). The Nextrip system gave Metro customers a way to use their computers or cell phones to see when their bus would be arriving. In the months since, most people seem to like Nextrip with some occasional complaints that it’s buggy or not working. I’ve found it works very well. Here’s the desktop version and here’s the mobile version.

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Two year anniversary of the Silver Line today

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The Silver Line debuted on this day in 2009, running seven days a week between the El Monte Station in the San Gabriel Valley, downtown Los Angeles and the Artesia Transit Center in the South Bay. (See the map after the jump).

The bus makes that trip in under an hour, thanks in part to using the carpool lanes on the 10 and 110 freeways. Before the Silver Line came along, bus service along the 10 and 110 freeways was on separate lines — the Silver Line tied it all together, complete with stops throughout downtown L.A.

How has the Silver Line performed? Pretty well. On an average weekday in November, there were 10,648 boardings on the line, a 42 percent increase over Nov. 2010. Average weekend boardings in November totaled 5,858, a 55 percent increase over a year earlier.

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