The Bus Bench

You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!

A few minutes of observation of the Los Angeles MTA rail stations reveals a fair amount of disturbing disclosures. The ticket machines are all but invisible. There are no token clerks. There are no ticket booths. There are no turnstiles. But there are sheriffs.

The sheriffs allow folk to enter the "ticket only" area unchallenged. The infrequency of the trains prompts no urgency; therefore, checking for tickets prior to boarding is easily possible. Absence of fare can be quickly rectified. And in the occasional instance that a train is approaching—the noise is considerable—then the subterranean revenue collectors should let folk pass.

Instead, the MTA has instituted a policy of duplicity: let straphangers enter, but nail them when they exit. Unlike the MTA, the newbies of Los Angeles subways and light rail are not always looking to get a free ride. (As mentioned above, the token machines are somewhat hidden; too, not all trains require fare, as witnessed by the NY Metro's singular Staten Island line.) Transit Coalition founder Bart Reed argues this succinctly in a recent edition of City Beat: "There’s a canard that goes around by some of the supervisors. Most of the riders of the Metro bus and Metro rail system have monthly passes or they buy day passes. When you get on the train, there’s nobody to show your pass to, so you keep it in your pocket. Then there’s these other people who aren’t regular riders, who get this perception that nobody paid, because they’re looking at the minorities who ride the trains and the buses … and they don’t see anybody showing passes."

The MTA attempts to collect $250.00 from those caught attempting fare evasion. Worse is that the MTA recently instituted the Day Pass which, unlike the transfer that was only good for two hours after its issuance, can easily be purchased and later presented as proof of fare should one have to report to court and tell the judge that the sheriffs refused to give one enough time to retrieve said day pass. How stupid can the board members of the MTA—chief among them Pam O'Connor, Roger Snoble and Tony V—be, to allow such a loophole in their loopy transit system?

In way one cuts it, the Los Angeles Metro system stinks, and the only people not getting screwed are those in the upper echelons of the MTA who on one hand advocate public transit but on the other hand nearly never set foot on the wretched behemoths they advertise should be "loved."

-BusTard

Dead Escalator Report 17: 03 February 2008

Not three days ago, this escalator was working. (It is the first top-most video, via the link.) Then the MTA crews came in (to make a dog-and-pony show during an OSHA engineer's general inspection) and now, it is dead.

Thanks, MTA. We can only hope your mechanics are a little less stupid when working on your private motor vehicles while you drive to work to conceive campaigns telling the denizens of Los Angeles to get out of their cars and go metro.

 

Metro to E. 1st Street residents: Get some excercise, you fat lazy fucks!

OK, so perhaps the verbiage is a bit harsh. But the pain is all the same. The people who do not ride the bus but claim to manage it, the people who take your money but offer shoddy services, and the people who threaten you with eight years of jail for tagging buses that are literally falling apart, have created yet another travesty.

The First Street bridge closure has forced the 30, 31 and 330 lines to head south along Alameda to E. 4th Street, where it turns east all the way to Cummings east of the 5 Freeway. According to the MTA's notice and map, the last stop is at Alameda and E. 1st. No other alternate stops are offered over the nearly two-mile trek, which is tantamount to the MTA refusing service to those straphangers who usta disembark along E. 1st between the L.A. River and Boyle.

I have filmed the 30 and 31 going along E. 4th and they do not stop between Alameda and Boyle. One wonders if the hilly trek back to the current purgatory along E. 1st is a distance that Pam O'Connor, Roger Snoble, Tony V and/or any other MTA board members have the ability to walk.

* editor's note, E 1st Street is closed for the Gold Line construction.

Brazilian Nites via the MTA 60 from downtown LA. Hell. 2/3

My fiancé and I made several miscalculations in regards to our calculations for our trip to the Brazilian Carnaval Nites at the Queen Mary.

1. Listening to blogs that they said this was an event to go to. Those of you who recommended this have you have ever gone to the Brazilian Carnaval at the Queen Mary?

Not the one in Brazil, but the one in Long Beach. Yeah didn’t think so.

This event completely sucked. Forty dollars for what? Forty dollars for nothing that’s what. It was like a family gathering (the unfun kind, because your aunt in a g-string is not fun) in a conference room (that’s what the boiler room of the Queen Mary looks like, a conference room), yeah the dancing was fun, but it wasn’t 40 dollars fun. Also watered down seven dollar drinks and over priced crappy food, not so fun.

Forty dollars included just walking in the door. Oh and some fucking beads. 

This festival got sponsorship from the LA Weekly and some other big name companies and media; I don’t know what that money went to, because it sure as hell didn’t go into the production.

2. We also assumed the Blue Line was the best route, no. It was not. It seemed to take freakin’ days to get down there, owing to the train stopping at all of the traffic lights. What the hell is that? It’s public transport; it should have the right of way.

If you’re going to have the train stop for the lights, why spend all of that money on it?

Why not just have a bus? The blue line has been running since 1990, no plans on making that work better, oh yeah of course not. You’re a little too busy working on the Gold Line right now. That’s taking up a lot of you time, right MTA.

Fuckers…

We also sat in the wrong car initially. A person who smelled like they were dying under their mountain of clothes was fragrancing the car with a pleasant aroma…fabulous.

That’s not the MTA’s fault that was Reagan’s fault.

3. After five days, (no only four days I'm exaggerating) we finally got to Long Beach where they have a shuttle that takes you to the Queen Mary. It’s free. Great!!!! Oh not so great, it was supposed to run every 12-20 minutes, did that happen? Hell no, because that would be competence and that would be very unLA and as we all know it’s Long Beach’s dream to actually be LA instead of the stupid dorky cousin of LA, which is what Long Beach is currently.

So 45 minutes later, yes 45 minutes later and after having to hear a full conversation between very loud American, but is actually French-Canadian (she moved to the US as a ten year old after spending the ages of 5-10 in Quebec) woman who went to five thousand colleges and spent summers in Sweden, Japan, Venus, Mars and her blond guy companion from Spain who is here on business and left his jacket in his hotel room AND his cell phone who has been to Sweden, Japan, Germany, France Venus, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune and speaks five languages and three dialects of martian, but feels as if his time in Germany really messed up his Swedish, because the two languages are so close.

You know what people, if there is 20 square feet of space, why bother to use all of that space at a bus stop? Why not stand six inches behind people and talk very loudly about your personal business, because we all want to hear it.

Yeah you two super well traveled brainiacs, you’re so fucking interesting.

Yeah so anyways after that, we get to the Brazilian Carnaval where as I stated earlier a bunch of people who already knew each other danced the Samba and probably laughed in their head about the idiots who came down to watch them have fun.

“So is where is the other part,” fiancé.
“I think this is the other part,” me.
“What, like this is it?” fiancé.
“Yeah, dude this is like it,” me.
“We should have went to Little Joy,” fiancé.
“Shut-up,” me.

But you know the thing that was weird. The cops were out in force. There were police cars waiting behind valet and staring people down as they left the Carnaval. There were police cars stopping people as we waited for the shuttle. There were police cars everywhere, but the public transportation was horrible.

So what’s the deal here? They make public transport so horrible you don’t want to even take it and then they seem to over police the people who drive to parties and bars, because there is virtually no other way to get there.

What the FUCK!!!!

The fact that anyone wants to party at all in Long Beach should make the cops back off. I’m going to bet business tax dollars pay for many of those pretty cop cars, so they are kind of biting the hand that feeds them. Long Beach is not fun. Not LA fun. Sorry Long Beach people, I know Long Beach people love their little almost LA, but not quite cool enough, sort of the OC, but not enough money stuck in the 1990s town, but that city does not rock at all. And the police presence with the lack of public transit is outrageous.

Anyways owing to the fact that the rails stop running at 12am and we got out of the “party” at 1:30am we got to experience the MTA 60.

In NY when you catch the train at night at 1:30am, you experience this:

In LA when you ride the train at 1:30 am, you step on to a bus where everyone is homeless. This isn’t me exaggerating. This is actually who rides the bus at 2 in the morning in LA. Everyone has a rolling bag of their stuff and they ride from the beginning of the line in Long Beach to the end of the line in downtown and that journey takes one and thirty minutes.

The reason it takes so long is because it goes through Long Beach, then it curves and hits all of the southeast cities of Cudahy, Vernon, Huntington Park, and then it goes through Watts and some other places that I couldn’t see because it started raining and I couldn’t read the signs.

On the way some people who aren’t homeless get on. Drunk guy. Drunk guy that even though I’m with a guy, he zeroes in to talk to me. The guy I’m with has to get up and let the guy know that he will kick his ass, but drunk is still trying to talk to me, he doesn’t seem threatened by anything. He seems like he thinks he’s at the bar and he wants my phone number, but then he sits down and passes out in his seat.

The driver saw all of this, but you know, what can he do? And unlike the rails where the Sheriff is there to protect, oh I mean collect your fare; there is no security on the bus.

None at all.

I’m thinking if you have budget for security, that possibly you might use some of that on the 2:30am bus where people crawl around on the floor to find their crack pipes, but hey, maybe I’m fucking crazy.

Yeah, so that was my crazy Brazilian Carnaval Night, pretty fucking crazy, huh?

by Browne Molyneux