The Metro Board of Directors meets on Thursday at 9 a.m. at Metro headquarters adjacent to Los Angeles Union Station in downtown L.A. As usual, the meeting is open to the public. You can also listen online.
The 13-member Board is comprised of elected officials and their appointees from around Los Angeles County. The Board oversees the agency and makes the final decisions on policy and contracting.
Among some of the more interesting items to be considered at Thursday’s meeting:
•A parking ordinance that would give Metro the legal right to impose parking fees at Metro lots and would raise the daily parking fee at Union Station from $6 to $8. Point of emphasis: nothing has been decided yet on whether to impose fees.
•Approving a budget of $30-million for a project to install pedestrian gates at 27 intersections along the Blue Line — including gates on the Union Pacific side of the alignment.
•Adopting official names for the stations along the Crenshaw/LAX Line that is currently under construction. The names, from north to south: Expo/Crenshaw, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leimert Park, Hyde Park, Fairview Heights, Downtown Inglewood, Westchester and Aviation/Century. There is also a motion to change Westchester to Westchester/Veterans.
•A motion designed to encourage more cities who pursue bikeshare on their own to use the vendor chosen by Metro for the regional bikeshare program. There is also a separate motion to accelerate the regional bikeshare program to locations outside downtown L.A. — including the Westside — to no later than the end of 2017.
•A motion asking Metro to conduct a study on how best to resume operations of Angels Flight in downtown L.A.; the funicular has been closed for several years due to a regulatory issue. Please note that Angels Flight is a nonprofit and is not operated by Metro.
•An update to Metro’s joint development policy. Two key updates would require that 35 percent of all residential units developed on Metro-owned land qualify as affordable housing and that Metro could give a discount to developers who agree to include affordable units.
•Consider a contract for design and construction of a new subway vehicle maintenance facility at the Red Line yards in the Arts District. In addition, the Board will consider a motion to establish a Design Advisory Committee for the facility to help resolve ongoing concerns by the Arts District about the facility interfering with new open space planned near the Sixth Street Viaduct.
Links to staff reports on these items and others are included in the above agenda.
Categories: Policy & Funding, Projects
Can’t hear anything online.
I’m all for ending free parking myself, but let’s not make the same mistake by making this parking fee thing like the honor system again where one can park there at a Metro parking lot for free but not use the actual transit system and they just park there to go to nearby restaurants or office buildings and such. I see this happening at the Aviation station where people would take advantage of the free parking lot there and they don’t even use the Green Line and just go to the nearby office buildings along Imperial Hwy.
Unless that’s enforced (how?) there’s no way to enforce it because it’s a defacto honor system, that anyone can park at these lots without showing any type of proof that they actually used the system. And no, “proof of payment” defacto honor system is not going to work, be realistic that you can’t have transit cops writing parking citations all the time either across 25,000 parking spaces across LA County.
What Metro needs to do is
Install parking barriers
http://www.issi247.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/gateaccess.jpg
and/or one of those “do not backup severe tire damage” spikes
http://www.elliott.org/wp-content/uploads/std.jpg
At all their stations and make sure everyone pays. You can’t be let into the parking lot without the intent of paying, you can’t sneak in from the exit (severe tire damage), and you can’t be let out of the parking lot without paying. That’s how pretty much every parking lot these days work today. It’s pretty much like the tap-in/tap-out concept really and surely there’s no reason why we can’t have parking fees being done with TAP cards either.
You can’t get more proof than that; unless you have a TAP card and pay with a TAP card, you can’t park at a Metro station.
I was trying to figure out why there is no LAX station listed, but I assume that would be the name of the 96th Street station when the peoplemover is added.
Hi James;
That station will certainly be along the Crenshaw/LAX Line but it is considered separate from the actual project and, thus, its official name will be adopted at a later date.
Steve Hymon
Editor, The Source
The parking fee is a joke if you read the attachments. There’s no real big changes going on.
Attachment B – Metro Parking Ordinances
http://metro.legistar.com/gateway.aspx?M=F&ID=da017ffc-38b9-40af-886d-b1dcb2853df7.docx
Attachment B – Metro Parking Fee Resolution
http://metro.legistar.com/gateway.aspx?M=F&ID=50624a06-0f16-44bc-be67-8c08f5c31f23.docx
The vast majority of stations still free parking, they’re free on weekends, and they’re free after 11AM. How is this any different from today? Just charge them 100% of the time like LAX does. It’s so stupid that free parking lots can’t be jacked up to at least a buck per day or something. Why give away something for free when they can be making a $1 per each parking space?
They can do it by making parking fees to be paid with TAP cards too: you TAP in when you enter the parking lot, you TAP out when you exit the parking lot, and the parking fee is automatically deducted from your TAP card based on how long you parked there. The first 10 minutes should be free in case someone goes into the parking lot and finds no parking and needs to get out so they don’t get charged.
They should also make the parking fees payable if one has a Metro ExpressLanes transponder, so that a car with a transponder can go in and out and have the parking fee automatically deducted from their FasTrak account.
The significance is that the ordinance gives Metro the actual legal authority to impose fees (and penalties for not paying them) and provides a framework for those fees to be adjusted. Fees may or may not come to pass, but for those who advocate for them, this is a step in that direction.
Steve Hymon
Editor, The Source
While it’s a nice sentiment for veterans, the Veterans Supportive Housing referred to in the Board motion is almost a half mile away from the Westchester station. “Veterans” should refer to the honoring of veterans, much like a Memorial Stadium or Veterans Park, not an actual indication of facilities serving them adjacent to the station.