Category Archives: Policy & Funding

Special February 12th Gateway Cities Service Council meeting and corridor workshop

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The Metro Gateway Cities Service Council will hold a special evening meeting this Tuesday, February 12, starting at 5 pm. The meeting will feature a corridor workshop focusing on bus service along Florence Avenue on Metro Lines 111 and 311, which run between LAX City Bus Center and Norwalk Station. The public is encouraged to attend to share their suggestions about improving service on those lines. The meeting and workshop will be held at Salt Lake Park Community Center, located at 3401 East Florence Avenue in Huntington Park,

Jon Hillmer, Director of Metro’s Regional Service Councils, is hopeful that the public will attend and participate in this workshop. “We are specifically looking for public comment and ideas about improving bus service on these corridors for transit users in the Gateway Cities area and neighboring Southeast Los Angeles County communities,” said Hillmer.

The Council will hold their monthly meeting starting at 5 pm, and receive a report on how customer complaints are received at the Division level, plus the monthly Director’s report on various service performance categories. Immediately following the meeting, the Council will begin the corridor workshop to receive input from the public on Lines 111 and 311. Members of the public who are not able to attend the workshop may submit comments in writing by e-mailing to servicecouncils@metro.net.

For more information about the corridor studies Service Council are conducting this year, click here to read a previous posting on the subject.

SR-710 North Study: what’s on the table and what’s off the table

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I’d like to take a few minutes for an update on the SR-710 North Study, Metro’s effort to improve transportation in the area around the 710 freeway in the San Gabriel Valley. The video above is new from the project team and describes the project.

Original state plans called for completing the 710 from Long Beach to Pasadena. That never happened. As a result, the 710 runs between Long Beach and Alhambra and there’s a very short segment of what was intended to the 710 that extends south of the 210 freeway in Pasadena.

As I’m very sure you’re aware, this is a very contentious issue . While I completely understand and appreciate there are a variety of opinions on what, if anything, needs to be done to improve traffic in the western San Gabriel Valley and beyond, I also believe and hope there are certain facts about Metro’s ongoing study that can be agreed upon:

•A project alternative to widen Avenue 64 was dropped from the study last August, largely because it wouldn’t have improved traffic much according to Metro’s analysis and because of the environmental impacts it would cause to surrounding communities. Reinstating it to the ongoing study would be legally difficult at this stage and, besides, I’m unaware of anyone on Planet Earth who wants it reinstated.

Why was it studied in the first place? Because Metro wanted to review every possible option in order to determine the very best ones for further study. Let’s be honest here. On the one hand, studying a wide spectrum of alternatives gives credibility to Metro’s studies — it’s a way of ensuring the best alternatives are truly the best. On the other hand, it’s also fair to say that Metro’s credibility among some community members took a hit for proposing an alternative that was so unpopular.

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Watch this: Blogger’s response to Dodge Super Bowl ad is a video titled ‘God Created Transit’

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Diana Ladd at the Next City blog admired the craftmanship that went into Dodge’s Super Bowl ad that used an old speech by radio legend Paul Harvey titled “God Made a Farmer” to promote its own line of pickup trucks.

Harvey, of course, wasn’t talking about pickup trucks at the time — but that didn’t stop Dodge. And it left Diana a little blue. Excerpt:

And yet the ad, like the one about soldiers for Jeep, conflated the merits of people with those of cars. Which seems a bit sad for 2013, when in the past six months climate change has reared its ugly head and begged us to change our consumption economy for something a bit more sustainable. And the nostalgic imagery — as if we only believe in farmers and soldiers to represent the best of humanity, and as if buying a car is a noble act — started to offend me.

So she made the above video about transit, using still photos from across the planet. If you look close, I believe there’s a quick shot of the Blue Line in there.

Hat tip: L.A. Streetsblog’s Tanya Snyder for posting this earlier.

February Service Council meetings begin tonight; here’s the agendas

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The Metro San Fernando Service Council kicks off a new round of monthly Service Council meetings this evening (Wednesday, February 6) in Van Nuys. With the exception of the Gateway Cities meeting, all of the February Service Council meetings will be held at the usual times and days and locations our Councils normally meet at.

The Gateway Cities Service Council will move their regularly scheduled meeting to a different day, and combine it with a special public workshop for Lines 111 and 311, which are the Council’s Corridor Study Lines for the year. The meeting and workshop will be held on Tuesday, February 12, starting at 5 pm. The public is encouraged to attend and share their ideas for improving service on the two study lines.

The South Bay Service Council will hold an additional meeting this month, on Wednesday, February 27 at 6 pm, to host a corridor workshop to discuss options to improve service on Metro Lines 210 and 710 (Crenshaw Boulevard). The meeting will be at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in the First Floor Community Room (between Sears and the LAPD Substation, by the Stocker Street entrance).

For a listing of all Council meeting dates, times and locations, click here. As always, the public is encouraged to attend and share their comments with the Service Councils on improving bus service throughout LA County.

For more information about each service council, click on the name of the service council listed after the jump. All Council meetings include a report from Metro Service Council Director Jon Hillmer providing previous month’s statistics on ridership, performance and other measures of Metro service.

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MoveLA conference tackles thorny issues: among them, should the threshold for future sales tax measures be lowered to 55 percent?

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Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.

Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.

I spent a couple of hours at MoveLA’s annual conference at Union Station on Friday. As the group’s name implies, MoveLA — with financial help from Metro — is pushing for an expansion and acceleration of transit projects across Los Angeles County.

Three things I heard that I found intriguing and worth passing along to Source readers:

•County Supervisor and Metro Board Member Zev Yaroslavsky was one of many people calling for the threshold for sales tax ballot measures to be lowered from 66.7 percent (two-thirds) to 55 percent after Measure J lost in November with 66.1 percent of the vote.

Yaroslavsky said it’s a perversion of Prop 13 that general sales tax measures — that is, measures without a specific funding target (such as transportation or education) — only require a simple majority but measures with funding plans and goals must reach a much higher target of two-thirds.

Yaroslavsky also acknowledged that everyone knew ahead of time that Measure J needed 66.7 percent to win and that the campaign wasn’t perfect, nor did it help — in his view and in particular — that turnout was much lower in 2012 than in 2008 when Measure R secured 67.9 percent of the vote.

There is a bill pending in the state Legislature that would change the state Constitution to allow for a 55 percent threshold. If the Legislature approves it and the Governor signs it, the issue would then go to state voters. At this point, Metro doesn’t have any proposal to return to voters although the agency continues to pursue funding for project acceleration from Congress.

•There was a lot of talk, as would be expected, about development near transit stations. It’s pretty clear to me that this is still a very thorny issue in many parts of our region. Among the issues: how much density should be allowed, how much parking should be required at developments and what tools are best to preserve affordable housing near transit stations and areas that are gentrifying.

My three cents: It’s hard to get any affordable units built if the overall number of units allowed to be built is on the low side. Developers will simply walk away. And while I completely understand fears of gentrification, I also think it’s equally dangerous to keep redevelopment at bay because needed money and investment may simply go elsewhere.

•There was a brief conversation about using California cap-and-trade funds as a source of funding for mass transit. That’s an interesting notion, of course. But it depends on cap-and-trade raising some serious money and also state transit agencies firmly being able to quanitfy that their services are reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Transportation headlines, Monday, Feb. 4

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Here is a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by us and the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the Library’s Headlines blog, which you can also access via email subscription or RSS feed.

ART OF TRANSIT: A Metro Rapid bus on Broadway passes by Grand Park and Los Angeles City Hall. Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.

ART OF TRANSIT: A Metro Rapid bus on Broadway passes by Grand Park and Los Angeles City Hall. Photo by Steve Hymon/Metro.

Fixes on tap for TAP at Metro (ZevWeb) 

A very good summary of work underway on TAP by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky who is, of course, also a member of the Metro Board of Directors that makes the final call on issues related to TAP. Among the news, some of which we’ve reported here in drips and drabs:

•In the last 11 months of 2012, more than 65,000 tickets were issued for fare evasion on the Metro system. That, of course, doesn’t mean that there were only 65K cases of fare evasion — those just represent the people caught and cited.

•Gate latching on the Red/Purple Line will begin this summer and eventually spread to the Green Line and parts of the Blue and Gold lines.

•Metro is working on revising the on-screen instructions at ticket machines for those buying and loading fares on TAP cards. Validators will also be moved to more convenient locations.

•Paper TAP cards with electronic chips embedded in them are being tested for Metrolink passengers so they will have a way to get through the latched gates.

Will a smooth Blue Line ride finally come to Long Beach? (L.A. Streetsblog)

After all these many years, the city of Long Beach still hasn’t given signal priority to the Blue Line. Why? It’s costly and it requires a tech upgrade are two of the big issues. The Long Beach City Council recently voted to ask Metro for funding and that could be a start. But let’s be honest here: signal priority is a rarity for mass transit in the region and the city of Los Angeles — as riders of the Expo Line, Eastside Gold Line and Orange Line likely know.

Villaraigosa says he’ll stay for the rest of his term (LA Observed) 

Los Angeles Mayor and Metro Board Member Antonio Villaraigosa released a statement late Friday saying he plans to stay on the job until his second term ends on June 30. There had been a lot of buzz and rumors in the media about him being nominated to replace the retiring Ray LaHood as the next U.S. Secretary of Transportation. Whether he was offered the job or not is anybody’s guess — the media hasn’t verified it one way or the other.

AEG giving seed money to Pershing Square effort (Los Angeles Downtown News) 

Very short story but AEG is providing $700,000 for an effort to re-imagine the downtown park. There’s no money yet to actually revamp the park. If so, my big idea: open it up to the surrounding streets instead of walling it off. It would also help if the parking lot on the north side of the park is finally developed, as has been proposed.

Here’s the thing: there’s already significant public spaces at the first three Red/Purple Line stations: Olvera Street and the L.A. Plaza Park across from Union Station, Grand Park at the Civic Center Station and Pershing Square at Pershing Square. But Union Station doesn’t feel very connected to the L.A. Plaza Park, nor does the subway station at 5th and Hill feel very park adjacent, thanks to the steps across the street leading up to the park.

CO2 emissions down in 2010 in California, continuing a trend (U.S. Energy Information Administration) 

New data just released shows that carbon dioxide emissions in California dropped again in 2010 — both overall and in the transportation sector. CO2 is a heat trapping gas that is primarily responsible for climate change — i.e. global warming. That’s good, but the Golden State still belches more CO2 into the air as a result of transportation than any other state.

Texas, however, is the overall CO2 emitter, thanks to being an amazing energy hog (see bottom chart). I’m guessing a more temperate climate near the California coasts help keep our usage down. In the entire United States, transportation is responsible for 33.3 percent of CO2 emissions behind the leading cause, electric power generation at 39.8 percent.

It’s really a shame that it takes more than two years to collect and process the data from the states. Some type of real-time — or close to that — data might provide a greater incentive for the public to try to reduce its footprint.

As we’ve mentioned before, a great way to reduce your carbon footprint is to take transit instead of driving alone, particularly in vehicles that aren’t very fuel efficient. The top document shows California’s yearly numbers and the bottom one is a state-by-state comparison of the 2010 numbers. Click on the red type to see larger.

Construction 101: The path to a career in construction trades

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More than 100 community members interested in construction careers attended the “Construction 101” workshop put on by Metro, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and other community partners at Inglewood City Hall on Saturday, Jan. 29.

The workshops put eager residents on the career path by covering the basics and putting first things first. Interested participants learn how to find out about construction projects, where to apply, where to get training, how to get union certification and how to acquire the required level of skills.

The workshops also bring together resources for pre-apprenticeship, life skills and professional development.

“It’s a college prep for the construction trade,” said Metro’s Construction Careers outreach coordinator Miriam Scott Long. “I was grateful to hear from two young men attending the workshop who told me they were tired of street life and wanted to have a career.”

The Construction Carreers Policy (CCP) is part of the transportation agency’s Project Labor Agreement (PLA)

The nationwide program aims to encourage construction employment and training opportunities on Metro construction projects to those who reside in economically disadvantaged areas.

The City of Inglewood hosted the confab and the program’s mentors. They are: Metro, LAANE, Trade Union Apprenticeship Coordinators, Black Worker’s Center, 2nd Call, WINTER (Women in Non-Traditional Employment Roles), YouthBuild , Workforce Investment Board representatives, WE Build and Southeast LA Worksource Center.

The Inglewood workshop was fourth in an ongoing series on construction careers preparation. Similar workshops will be offered throughout Los Angeles County in the coming year.

Red Line 20th anniversary video, part two: Is this what city planners had in mind?

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I love the question posed in the opening of this 1989 video, suggesting that city planners could not have possibly been thinking of what Los Angeles had become: TrafficVille.

My two cents: I think this video gives city planners too much credit. I’m not sure they were thinking of anything except, perhaps, how to cram a few more strip malls into L.A. Zing!

When watching the video, also take a few moments to enjoy the music. Memo to our younger readers: there actually was some very good music created in the 1980s. This just isn’t it. This is.

If you missed it earlier, here’s Dave Sotero’s excellent analysis of the Red Line’s 20th anniversary and what the subway has done for Los Angeles — and what it will likely do in the years and decades ahead. Also, here’s another pair of videos documenting opening day on Jan. 29, 1993.

First phase of Metro Red Line celebrates 20-year anniversary

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“This day is here…”

On January 29, 1993, former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley stood among a swarm of public officials and transit agency staffers on the cramped Pershing Square subway platform. Standing shoulders above everyone else, including then-California Gov. Pete Wilson, Bradley proudly inaugurated the opening of the first modern subway in Los Angeles.

“Twenty years is a long time. That’s how long we have been pushing on this dream, this vision of what we should do in Los Angeles County,” Bradley said, referring to the subway’s quixotic path to reality in ‘93. “I made a promise when I ran for mayor in 1973 that in 18 months, we’d deliver by breaking ground for rapid transit. Well, I missed by only a few months…”

Today, Metro marks the 20th anniversary of the Metro Red Line’s first phase from Union Station to MacArthur Park, a nearly 4.5-mile construction milestone that began a brand new chapter in regional rail construction and placing L.A. among other major cities across the globe with high-speed, high-capacity subways.

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Move LA’s annual conference at Union Station next Friday, Feb. 1

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The transit advocacy group Move LA has seen increasingly larger crowds for its previous four annual conferences. This year’s conference is Friday, Feb. 1, from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the old ticketing area at the front of Los Angeles Union Station (i.e. the Alameda Street side of Union Station, which The Source officially recognizes as “the front.”

The first panel discussion of the day deals with a topic that is probably on the mind of many of you: where might money come from for transit projects in the wake of the narrow loss of Measure J at the polls last year? Among the panelists: Metro CEO Art Leahy and Metro Board Member Richard Katz.

The afternoon panel discussion on “The DNA of Transit Corridors” also looks intriguing given that development around some of the region’s heaviest used transit lines has been sporadic. The panel is mostly comprised of officials from the city of Los Angeles or Metro so it will be interesting to see if there are diverse views on how our region is faring — or whether everyone just agrees we’re doing swell.

Move LA — which does receive some financial support from Metro — is headed by Executive Director Denny Zane, the former Santa Monica Councilmember and Mayor. He’s been a regular presence on the L.A. transit scene for a number of years now and was one of the major advocates who pushed for the passage of Measure R in 2008. Denny will be leading the morning panel discussion on transportation funding and my best guess is he may drop an opinion or two.

The entire agenda for next Friday’s conference is after the jump. Click here for registration information.

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