Have a transportation-related article you think should be included in headlines? Drop me an email! And don’t forget, Metro is on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Pick your social media poison!

ART OF TRANSIT: The sunset over Union Station and downtown Los Angeles on Friday as seen from the 25th floor of Metro headquarters. Can’t decide which version I like better — the bottom one was taken about three minutes after the top image. Click above to see larger. Photos by Steve Hymon/Metro.

This time it really would be a restructuring (L.A. Streetsblog)

Editor Damien Newton ruminates on different on different fare structures for Metro and what they may mean for people’s commutes. Note: there is nothing on the table officially and there won’t be until next year. At a Metro Board Committee meeting last week, Metro staff said they will be presenting the Board with several options. Please see this post from last week.

Paying for L.A. County’s transit future (L.A. Times)

The Times’ editorial board says it has “serious reservations” about any new transportation sales tax that Metro may pursue in 2014 or ’16 — in particular, the editorial says that next year is too quick to properly vet any type of proposal. Key excerpt:

In considering a new sales tax proposal, Metro leaders must consider transportation needs throughout the county, but in the end they should select the projects that deliver the greatest impact, even if they are concentrated in the city.

That’s why a 2014 ballot measure should be off the table, and 2016 would be a better target.

 

Here’s a recent Source post about a Metro staff report that looks at potential ballot measure to accelerate and/or fund new projects. Measure R was approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2008 and staff are considering ways to either extend R past its expiration date of mid-2039 or possibly a new sales tax that could fund new transit projects.

Postcards from the West: Union Station bustles with film plots (L.A. Times)

A nice profile of Union Station and some of its considerable history by reporter Christopher Reynolds and photographer Mark Boster — check out Mark’s photos. Metro officials also say they’re still working to get restaurants into the old Harvey House and Union Bagel spaces, as well as add some other food offerings.

Auto correct (New Yorker) 

Very long and very good article on self-driving cars — this is a great read if you’re taking transit. Here’s the lead:

Human beings make terrible drivers. They talk on the phone and run red lights, signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids. They have blind spots, leg cramps, seizures, and heart attacks. They rubberneck, hotdog, and take pity on turtles, cause fender benders, pileups, and head-on collisions. They nod off at the wheel, wrestle with maps, fiddle with knobs, have marital spats, take the curve too late, take the curve too hard, spill coffee in their laps, and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault.

A case in point: The driver in the lane to my right. He’s twisted halfway around in his seat, taking a picture of the Lexus that I’m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski. Both cars are heading south on Highway 880 in Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour, yet the man takes his time. He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so. Then he snaps the picture, checks it onscreen, and taps out a lengthy text message with his thumbs. By the time he puts his hands back on the wheel and glances up at the road, half a minute has passed.

The article goes on to explain the many different efforts underway to produce a self-driving car. Google seems to the most optimistic and is trying to develop the software and hardware it can sell to a traditional car manufacturer.

But that may not be easy. Many of the traditional car companies are also pursuing the technology but some — such as Mercedes — are concerned that drivers won’t buy it because they want to remain in control, particularly of vehicles marketed as performance oriented. In the meantime, some elements of self-driving have started to make their way into cars as safety features.

We recently ran a poll asking readers if they would still take transit even if they had a self-driving car. So far, 64 percent of those who responded said they wouldn’t be giving up their transit passes. Feel free to vote.

Urbanites flee China’s smog for blue skies (New York Times) 

This excerpt says it neatly:

More than two years ago, Ms. Lin, 34, and her husband gave up comfortable careers in the booming southern city of Guangzhou — she at a Norwegian risk management company, he at an advertising firm that he had founded — to join the growing number of urbanites who have decamped to rural China. One resident here calls them “environmental refugees” or “environmental immigrants.”

At a time when hundreds of millions of Chinese, many poor farmers, are leaving their country homesteads to find work and tap into the energy of China’s dynamic cities, a small number of urban dwellers have decided to make a reverse migration. Their change in lifestyle speaks volumes about anxieties over pollution, traffic, living costs, property values and the general stress found in China’s biggest coastal metropolises.

Take air quality: Levels of fine particulate matter in some Chinese cities reach 40 times the recommended exposure limit set by the World Health Organization. This month, an official Chinese news report said an 8-year-old girl near Shanghai was hospitalized with lung cancer, the youngest such victim in China. Her doctor blamed air pollution.

Check out the accompanying video; looks like some beautiful country. Any readers out there been to Dali?