Right across the street from North Hollywood Subway Station, is the termination of the Metro Orange Line. It runs along an old rail right of way, through the lower third of the Valley. Bringing people from the outer areas over to North Hollywood. I have never ridden it, but as I sat there watching it, there were bus loads of people disembarking and running for the subway, so it seems to be doing it's job of getting people out of their cars and onto Mass Transit.
I am truly impressed at how inexpensive it is to take Mass Transit here in the City of Los Angeles. My Rail Pass used to cost me over $200 a month. I am currently paying $124 a month and these people may be around $65 a month. Nice...
A good thing to know for me, is that I see in one of the photos, an Enterprise Rent a Car location. You just never know when it might come in handy. :-)
You are writing about things in Los Angeles that I have so little knowledge of... and I am grateful to learn all this from afar.
ReplyDeleteWhile the Metro was open while I lived there, it was not yet in full swing.
I wish I could have taken it to work when I lived in Los Feliz and worked on the West side!
They are actually thinking that they might finish the subway someday and bring it to the sea, at Santa Monica. One of Henry Waxman's major mistakes, was blocking it's approval and stopping it at Wilshire and Western.
ReplyDeleteWil/Western is in the middle of nowhere, LA wise.
Glad to improve your knowledge of the many transportation options that people in this City have. :-)
The Orange Line leads to my street, Balboa Blvd. It's a great way to get east and west in the valley. Prop R funds will now extend it north from Canoga Park to the Chatsworth Metrolink station.
ReplyDeleteThe downsides of the Orange Line are, in my opinion, three:
1. The busses can get kinda crowded. Had they done light rail, they could couple on a second car and move many more folks with a single driver. As it is, every 65 people require a bus and driver.
2. The trip from the Orange Line across the street and down to the Red Line subway is a long one on foot for the disabled, senior, or other slow moving folks. What's worse, Metro's web site will construct trips that do not have enough walking time to make the connection, leading to improperly set expectations of arrival time.
3. It'd have been nice if the buses could have gone underground, underneath Lankershim, and connected across a platform to the red line.
The political fault for this line not being light rail seems to rest with former state legislator Alan Robbins (20th district) who authored legislation to block any rail other than deep bore subway. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Orange_Line_(LACMTA) (including footnote 3).
At this point, the cost of adding crossing gates would drive the cost of light rail through the roof, so the buses are probably here to stay.
In researching for this comment, I happened upon an article stating that Metro is promising a subway from Van Nuys to Westwood (UCLA) by 2038. I could use that now :)
Yes, there have been more stops put on public transportation here in LA, then almost anywhere else...or so it seems. I remember when the opened the Red Line Subway the anti-subway people got upset because they rerouted the busses to both Union Station and to the North Hollywood Station. The anti-subway types felt that it would "artificially" inflate the ridership of the subway.
ReplyDeleteHELLO!, that is what the subway was for, to get people to where they needed to go as fast as they could get them there. Trust me, the subway gets you there...FAST!
I know nothing about a subway from Van Nuys to Westwood. Gonna have to check that out.
Ah, public transit. It stinks here, and there's a great deal of resistance to doing anything to improve it that might cost some money. We built the first light-rail line in the Twin Cities a few years back, and immediately ridership shattered their goals **for 2010**. You'd think that would make it easier to build the next line in the system, the Central Corridor linking downtown St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis. Nope. It's taking years to get it off the ground. If we're lucky, construction will start late next year and finish by 2014. I don't expect we'll be that lucky.
ReplyDeleteGrrr. It takes me 2 buses, about a mile of walking, and nearly an hour of time to get from my home in St. Paul to my job in Minneapolis. It takes me 20 minutes to drive it on city streets, and costs me about as much for my parking contract at the U of MN as it would for a transit pass.
A big part of the problem is the "hub and spoke" design of our transit system here. In a metro area like ours, where we have two large (comparatively) cities with two separate downtowns, going from one city to the other is for the most part only possible by going downtown in your city, going to downtown in the other city, and then to wherever you need to go in that city.
My SU has worked for the transit company for 33 years, and has been a transit activist for the last 20 of those, as our transit system has been decimated by the auto/road lobby. I didn't drive until I moved out of state in my mid-twenties, because I didn't need to; it was very convenient to take the bus everywhere I wanted to go. Not anymore... I always adore going to cities where transit actually *works*. Washington DC is a good example, and god knows it's not someplace I'd want to have to drive!
Piglet: You make me feel better about our convoluted system here in LA. Yours sounds much worse.
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