Metro Research launched a new web page on metro.net today. Click here to check it out!
On the new page you can take a quick poll about Metro’s services, sign up for Metro research opportunities and find links to transportation data resources. The page will also be a hub for sharing research data and reports inside and outside the agency.
In addition, results from 10 years of the annual customer satisfaction survey as well as several other surveys and focus groups are available for your perusal.
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.
Happy Election Day to those voting today for mayor and other candidates/issues in the city of Los Angeles. To add a point to the first headline of the day, if you’re eligible to vote and fail to fulfill your civic duties, then you don’t get to gripe later about the many crucial decisions the next mayor will make about transportation in our area. Here’s the list of those issues!
If you don’t vote, you’re the problem (L.A. Streetsblog)
Take it away, Ted Rogers!:
If every eligible bike rider were to get up and vote today — and vote their self-interests as cyclists — they would be the single most dominant and powerful voice in L.A. politics.
More than the unions, more than any political party or interest group.
A force strong enough to ensure the election of a bike friendly candidate in every race, from mayor through city council, city attorney and controller.
And that’s just bicyclists.
Add to that a few hundred thousand daily transit users. As well as pedestrians — which includes all of us at one time or another.
Great post. The Source bows before Ted Rogers!
A decade later, Blossom Plaza breaks ground (Downtown News)
Ten years and a Great Recession later, a new building will finally rise next to the Chinatown Gold Line station. It will have 240 residential units, 20,000-square-feet of retail and restaurant space and a walkway connecting the station to Broadway. The Source is always pleased to hear about new housing near transit — and hope such trends continue to spread north to other Gold Line stations where no development has occurred. I’m talking to you Heritage Square and Highland Park stations!
Metro uses social media in the planning process (The Transit Wire)
An interview with Metro’s Jody Litvak about the use of Facebook to collect official comments on the East San Fernando Valley Transit Corridor project. As far as Metro knows, it was the first time that social media was actually used for official comments. The idea is to make it as convenient as possible for more people to comment on impending projects.
Density: Census numbers betray an L.A. cliche (KCET)
D.J. Waldie does a nice job explaining the issue of density and how L.A. compares to other American cities, most notably New York. The gist of it: while New York has much higher concentrions of density in Manhattan, L.A. has an overall higher level of density over a larger area. It’s a salient point and a good argument for investing in transit here, but I also fret that people use this stat to wrongly suggest that L.A. is becoming Manhattanized. As a former Manhattan and Brooklyn resident, I don’t recall ever seeing one part of either borough that reminds me of Los Angeles. Or vice versa.
Click above to find your polling place.
As you may have heard, there’s a runoff Tuesday in Los Angeles to elect the next mayor of the second-largest city in the nation — a city with about 3.8 million inhabitants and some well-known transportation challenges.
I ran the following post on March 4, the day before the primary election in Los Angeles. I’m running it again today as a reminder to vote in tomorrow’s mayoral election between Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel because whichever succeeds Antonio Villaraigosa will likely have a hand in many important transportation decisions, including project acceleration, the future of congestion pricing projects, the construction of five rail projects and possible changes in Metro’s fare structure in the future.
Look up your polling place here.
Metro is a county agency and is overseen by a 13 member Board of Directors who serve as the deciders on most significant issues. The Mayor of Los Angeles gets a seat on that board and gets to fill three other seats with his appointees.
A majority of the Metro Board — i.e. seven votes — is required to approve most items. Four of those seven votes are controlled by the Los Angeles mayor. That means that the mayor controls more than half the votes needed to approve items that have impacts across Los Angeles County and the region.
Here are some items that are likely to confront the Metro Board in the next four or so years, meaning they’re items likely to confront the lucky soul (if luck is the right word) who becomes the next mayor of the City of Angels and/or Parking Lots:
•There is the not-so-tiny issue of whether to accelerate the building of Measure R projects and, if so, how best to pay for it and which transit and road projects are included. The next mayor may also choose to use their bully pulpit to persuade Congress to adopt the full America Fast Forward program, which would greatly expand funding for transportation projects.
•Although Metro CEO Art Leahy has already said there will be no changes to Metro’s fares in the upcoming fiscal year that begins July 1, he also said it’s an issue that will likely have to be revisited sooner rather than later in order to help Metro keep up with its expenses.
Does trying to get around L.A. send your stress level through the roof? Take a deep breath and head over to Hub LA next Thursday, May 30 for some creative solutions that might make transit more enjoyable for you. The event is hosted by GOOD and is open to all.
The gathering starts at 6:45 p.m. with an ice cream social. Then there will be a screening of How’s My Driving, followed by a group discussion that will last until 9 p.m.
Getting to Hub LA is easy: walk over from the Gold Line Little Tokyo/Arts District Station or give bicycle riding a chance. Hub LA is located at 830 Traction Ave. #3a.
One of the arguments frequently made for building more mass transit — in particular rail projects — is that it will help reduce pollution and, as a byproduct, greenhouse gases that are contributing to climate change. The above chart comes from a Federal Transit Administration report updated in 2010 that considers the impacts of cars versus transit. Although in some circles this remains a disputed issue (mostly by critics of rail transit), the FTA finds transit is the clear winner.
Comparing the emissions of cars versus transit is not always a clear-cut issue because of the number of variables involved. Which brings us to a new study by several UCLA researchers that drills down deeper on the subject by comparing the Orange Line, Gold Line and average automobile in Southern California. The study was published in Environmental Research Letters and is posted below.
The study found that in both the near term and long-term, the Orange Line and the Gold Line produced less smog and greenhouse gases than the average auto driven in L.A. County. In addition, the Orange Line and Gold Line used less overall energy than cars and will create less particulate matter than cars in the long-term, although the Gold Line currently produces about the same as cars, due mostly to its electricity coming from coal-fired power plants used by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Four key points from the new study:
•Both cars and transit are expected to get cleaner over time as fuel mileage increases for cars and transit relies on cleaner energy sources, i.e. solar, wind, thermal and natural gas.
•Construction remains a big challenge for transit projects because things such as pouring concrete and the use of heavy equipment tends to result in high emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollution — and it can take years, if not decades, for transit to make up for the big cost in terms of greenhouse gases made up front.
•Transit vehicles spend far less of their time parked than cars, which spend 95 percent of the time sitting around. That means that the energy and emissions needed to manufacture, transport, and park transit vehicles are spread over a lot more passenger miles and hours of operation.
•Transit needs to shift 20 percent to 30 percent of its riders from cars to transit order to have less impacts than cars and, as the study says, “the larger the shift, the quicker the payback” when it comes to meeting environmental goals.
Getting people out of their cars onto trains is crucial to improve efficiency of transit. Photo of Expo Line by Steve Hymon/Metro.
I think that last point is crucial for policymakers. To put it another way: if transit agencies and politicians want transit projects that truly improve air quality and such, they have to build projects that will appeal to motorists and pry them out of their cars.
It’s always difficult to compete with the door-to-door convenience of the automobile, but I think it’s do-able but it means building projects that stop where people want to go, making it easy to get to and from stations by car, foot or bike and either designing projects that are fast and/or operate frequently enough to reduce the time-munch that is standing around and waiting at a station.
One other point: earlier this month, it was reported that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere probably haven’t been this high in the past three million years. Carbon dioxide is a primary greenhouse gas and it’s a byproduct of burning fossil fuels for things such as transportation, heating, construction etcetera. Seems to me that transit agencies across the world — many of which shun being political — could market transit as a way to help people perhaps make a difference when it comes to climate change.
Sermon over. The study is below. Kudos to Mikhail Chester, Stephanie Pincetl, Zoe Elizabeth, William Eisenstein and Juan Matute for putting this together. Finally, Metro issues an annual sustainability report that details its efforts to reduce greenhouse gases used by the agency’s transit vehicles and facilities. In fact, Metro cut its greenhouse gas emissions five percent between 2007 and 2011, the last year numbers are publicly available.
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Here’s the news release from Metrolink, the agency that runs commuter rail in Southern California. Because this involves a potential fare increase up to seven percent, I want all readers to understand that Metrolink and Metro are separate agencies, although Metro is one of the five counties in So Cal that provides funding for Metrolink.
The official notice is above.
The release:
Metrolink to conduct public outreach process for potential fare policy changes, a fare increase, Title VI policies
Positive Train Control and increased operational costs drive $14.5 million funding gap for FY 13-14 budget
LOS ANGELES - The Metrolink Board of Directors approved staff to initiate a public outreach process for potential fare policy changes and a potential fare increase as one element to help close an existing $14.5 million funding gap for the Fiscal Year 13-14 budget. Additionally, a Title VI Disparate Impact and Disproportionate Burden Policy Thresholds will also be considered.
The public will be asked to give feedback regarding an average system-wide fare increase of up to 7 percent, which would go into effect on or after July 1, 2013.
“This is absolutely one of the most difficult situations for any transportation agency,” said Metrolink CEO Michael P. DePallo. “We try exhaustively to keep operating costs at the very lowest levels, while providing for the safest and most efficient commuter railroad in the nation.”
The major increases include:
- $8.3 million for implementation and operation of positive train control (PTC). PTC refers to technology capable of intervening and automatically stopping a train, preventing train-to-train collisions.
- $2 million in increases to contracted vendor costs for service providers.
- $1.6 million for new operations at the Eastern Maintenance Facility (EMF) to reduce traffic at Metrolink’s Central Maintenance Facility in Los Angeles, allowing equipment to be serviced in the most efficient and effective manner. Continue reading
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.
Mayor candidates on transportation: innovation versus tried and true (L.A. Times)
With Election Day tomorrow in Los Angeles, the Times tries to tease apart the differences on transportation policy between Eric Garcetti and Wendy Greuel. If not much difference on the issues, there may be an issue in style, says one of the academics who is quoted.
Among likely L.A. city voters in Tuesday’s election, nearly half said they thought policymakers should focus on public transportation, compared with 35% who favored spending on roads and freeways, according to a new poll by the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Los Angeles Times.
L.A.’s next mayor to have a regional impact (San Gabriel Valley Tribune)
