Dept. of Dodgers Stadium Express: Within 48 hours I may be able to write — with certainty — that you can Go Metro to the Dodgers playoff opener on Friday, Oct. 6, against either the Cubs, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Brewers or Cardinals. More here about our freebie bus to the ballpark from Union Station and Harbor Gateway.

Things to read whilst transiting 1: Metro Chief Innovation Officer Joshua Schank offers some thoughts on the hyperloop and self-driving cars. Read it here.

Dept. of Pro Football: 

Nieces are on @metrolosangeles for the first time! Hoping @RamsNFL pull off a victory for them. pic.twitter.com/u1gAcWClRK

— Ozzie Romero (@ozzieromero) September 17, 2017

or…

Smart man. This popped in a tweet right after yours. 😳 pic.twitter.com/8O4R0t4bJN

— Beverly White (@BeverlyNBCLA) September 17, 2017

Rough day for the Local 22, but Carson and Los Angeles almost won! More here about how to ride Metro to games at the Coliseum, Rose Bowl or StubHub Center.

Art of Transit: 

If anyone would appreciate two guys killing time & sparring while waiting for the Expo Line, I figured it would be @laura_nelson pic.twitter.com/RpVzLdNZ6v

— Gabe Ramirez (@GabeRamirez) September 18, 2017

Dept. of Fresh Served: Agendas and staff reports for the Metro Board’s September committee hearings are posted. Bon appetit!

LAPD officers ‘overwhelmed’ by homeless problem on Metro (KPCC)

I’m not sure the six-minute segment on the ‘Take Two’ program quite matches the headline. But it’s a good listen, with an LAPD rep talking about what officers are trying to do when it comes to dealing with homeless who use the Metro system.

The gist of it: everyone is expected to follow the Metro Code of Conduct. If not, officers try to gently ask people to leave buses or trains and, if necessary, match them with the appropriate social services. It is not, of course, an easy problem and the Los Angeles area is hardly the only metropolis dealing with homelessness these days — although I suspect the scope of it here may be larger owing to our size and mild year-round weather.

Metro has also convened a Homeless Task Force to think more holistically about issues and connect homeless to health-care and services. More here.

Obviously, the impact of homelessness is not just on transit. I was driving on Silver Lake Boulevard yesterday and noticed that sidewalks on both sides of the street under the 101 were partially blocked by homeless encampments and crash. The economy here may be humming along for some folks, but it’s hardly universal.

It’s worth noting that voters in both the city of Los Angeles and L.A. County last year approved sales tax increases to pay for more housing for the homeless. Your thoughts on the homeless situation in our region?

Related: America is building more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments, Bloomberg reports.

As transit expands in L.A., will walkability follow? (Streetsblog)

Key graph:

L.A. is becoming more compact, but its built environment is still more conducive to driving than to walking and transit. Even as the region’s rail network grows, too many stations remain engulfed by single-family housing and park-and-ride lots, development patterns that make it harder to walk to transit. And the less people walk to transit, the less they ride. To make the most of its investments in trains and buses, the L.A. region has to do a better job aligning land use and transit.

Ultimately, Yonah Freemark gives our region a C+ for land-use planning, a grade that might be generous IMHO. He thinks more single-family neighborhoods need to grow more dense to be more walkable.

Me thinks (as an actual resident of the region and a single family homeowner) that can only do so much and the real chance to add density is on the commercial corridors, which tend to be under-developed and closer to bus and rail lines.

Lyft’s redesigned street concept could fix L.A. traffic (CNN)

Attentive Source readers know the headline chafes like a bike seat made of sandpaper: car traffic rarely gets “fixed” in this world of ours.

Anyway, Lyft takes a stab at reshaping Wilshire Boulevard and says a lot more people could be moved along the street if there was more transit, more bike lanes, more bus lanes (there’s already one at peak hours in the city of L.A.) and more…Lyfts.

Well, okay. No mention is made of the Purple Line Extension, btw, which is extending the subway for nine miles, mostly under Wilshire, to the Miracle Mile, Beverly Hills, Century City and Westwood.

BART randomly hands out free tickets to boost weekend ridership (Chronicle)

Ridership on weekends has dipped 10 percent in the last couple of years (perhaps due to maintenance work scheduled on Saturdays and Sundays), denying the agency fare revenue.

The response: try to get people riding again by handing out about $200,000 in free tickets for use on weekends. Does it work? Officials say they’ll be tracking the use of the tickets.

The suburb of the future, almost here (NYT)

Fun op-ed piece that notes that millennials in the 25- to 29-year old age bracket are still more likely to move from the city to the ‘burbs than the other way around.

Meaning that while Urbanists can rightly say urban centers are being revived, pronouncements on the demise of the ‘burbs are tad premature.

But MIT planner Alan Berger notes that suburbs can certainly be better designed — with more shared car parks, more shared gardens and parks, increased ability to absorb storm water (see: Harvey and Irma), fewer driveways, larger yards and less need to drive everywhere because delivery of goods via drone will be common.

Hey, if a drone can successfully and quickly deliver a few boxes of soup dumplings from Din Tai Fung in Arcadia to the 91106, I’m on board.

Things to listen to whilst transiting: In the past six years, the Foo Fighters have hardly rested on their fannies. Dave Grohl & Co. have released three albums, an EP and an HBO series on their many influences. Their latest record, “Concrete and Gold,” was fine company on the Gold Line this morning. “The Line,” “The Sky is a Neighborhood, “Arrows,” “Run,” “Dirty Water” and “Happy Ever After (Zero Hour)” are my favorite tracks, so far. None are as sublime as “Outside” from the previous LP, but still a lot of good stuff.

Things to read whilst transiting: “Seven days of heroin: this is what an epidemic looks like.” A harrowing look by the Cincinnati Enquirer at the opiates crisis in southwestern Ohio (I’m from Cincy, btw). In the span of a week there were 18 overdose deaths, 180 overdoses, 200 arrests and 15 babies born with heroin-related medical problems. As others on the internet have noted, this is the kind of local journalism our country badly needs and it’s absolutely heartbreaking so many people see no way out.