COVID-19 update, Monday, May 18

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Dept. of What the What?: Another sign we’re living in the Upside Down — it was raining/sprinkling most of the morning and it was almost entirely green on traffic map when I grabbed the screenshot at 12:12 p.m. today. This is what happens when significant percentage of commuters stay in their PJs. FWIW, my own experience is that weekday traffic tends to be light with heavier traffic now on weekends. And you?

Dept. of Improvement: The popular Transit app today becomes Metro’s official app. Instead of building an app ourselves, we’ve decided to partner with a company that already had a popular app and we think this will be a major upgrade for riders. More at this Source post.

Dept. of Recovery: Metro has a four-phase plan to restore bus and rail service as more of our region hopefully can open safely in the coming weeks and months. See this Source post.

Dept. of Policy: Need something to read besides the news? The agendas for the Metro Board of Directors’ committee meetings this Wednesday and Thursday are posted and perusing agency staff reports will almost certainly wake you up. Agendas with links to staff reports are here. The meetings will be virtual again this month with no ‘in-person’ meetings due to safer at home orders and physical distancing.

Dept. of Union Station: 

One followed with a good eye remembered Lady Gage’s “Love Game” has the LA Metro standing in for the New York Subway.

Dept. of Zoom Backgrounds: a regular reader of this space suggested posting some Metro-oriented backgrounds for Zoom meetings. Here goes:

•Dept. of Purple Line Extension: United States District Judge George Wu ruled on Monday in favor of Metro and the Federal Transit Administration in a federal lawsuit brought by the Beverly Hills Unified School District that challenged the legal sufficiency of the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) for the Purple Line Extension, Section 2. In short, the suit challenged whether the SEIS had sufficiently examined the impacts of staging construction at properties along Century Park East, adjacent to Beverly Hills High School. The court ruled that Metro and the FTA did sufficiently evaluate those impacts after they reasonably determined that staging construction adjacent to the station portal at 1950 Avenue of the Stars was infeasible due to the property owner’s development plans.

•Dept. of Public Spaces: The city of Pasadena (I’m a resident, btw) last week reopened the walking/running path around the Rose Bowl from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and took the extra move of closing the streets next to the 3.1-mile path to give walkers, runners and cyclists more physical distancing room. All but one parking lot is closed and visitors are limited to 90-minutes of parking to ensure it doesn’t get too crowded.

I took the dog for a walk around on Friday and it was…pretty awesome. This isn’t an area that gets a lot of car traffic anyway outside of Rose Bowl events. Having the space was great. Be interesting to see how long it continues. More info in the city of Pasadena news release.

In the news…

•The Washington Post has an article headlined “Transit workers are paying a heavy price during the pandemic” that is well worth reading. Much of the article is devoted to the New York MTA, which has seen about 120 workers die of COVID-19.

•The number of people infected by each person with the Coronavirus has fallen from more than 3 to 1, reports the LAT. That’s good and the decline correlates with safer-at-home orders in our region. But the number needs to fall further and the one person being infected by each person with the virus is the reason that L.A. County’s number of cases has not fallen.

Here are the latest numbers that fit the pattern with Mondays usually having lower numbers:

 

Categories: Transportation Headlines

1 reply ›

  1. I love that you’re using Transit App as your go-to. Its real-time arrival information is awesome and the maps are great if you don’t know the route well. It even has reasonable function without mobile data – way back when travel was a thing I was able to use it to navigate the buses and metro in Paris.

    My only question: if you don’t pay them, and I don’t pay them, how do they make money? (If you aren’t the customer, you’re the product …. )