The Bus Bench

New Sign About No Bus

For some reason, a bus stop that has never existed has a sign stating that the bus stop has moved. Note the dates, the street sign behind it and that the bus stop has always existed on the other side of the light. (Those familiar with the 180/181 will know that the line comes along Prospect Ave. from Hollywood Blvd., which is to the left in this photo, before turning left to go up Vermont Ave.) The sidewalk was recently replaced (this is directly beside Macho Tacos), which makes the wrong-placed sign all the more absurd.

-BusTard

Bus Bench Service Alerts. Sept 24. Red Line to 3am is getting closer.

Story comparing bike and car production in the Economist.
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We’re a step closer to normal subway service, for the Red Line for a little while.
Blogdowntown/ Sept 23

Congress meets a compromise, but the President hasn’t signed the bill on rail safety yet.
LA Times/ Sept 24

NY Subways now have Google Transit, we sort of have it with Metrolink, but not with Metro.
NY Times/ Sept 23

The Amber Alert signs could soon be available for ads.
LA Times/ Sept 24

Lawsuit against Metrolink contractor filed by employees.
Mercury/ Sept 19

Compiled and edited by Browne Molyneux

Rita L Robinson we have some concerns. LADOT’s unreliability problem.

“Today I took the Commuter Express instead of Metro to work. That meant I had to wake up nearly 2 hours earlier, but the 549 goes straight from my residence at Sepulveda/Ventura to my office at Pass/Alameda. It seemed all worthwhile when I got on board and discovered the plushy seats, air-conditioned comfort and quiet clientele.

Then the Commuter Express failed to show up in the evening. There I was, sitting at the stop marked 549 Encino. I stood there for 45 minutes, a period of time that, according to the schedule, two different buses were supposed to arrive, and eventually just gave up and walked over to the Metro 96 stop down the street. That bus, of course, showed up - and on time, I might add.

What gives? Is there someone I can complain to about this? It sucks to be stranded! Is this what you meant by "outside of downtown LA it's extremely unreliable" in your post?” Nancy, public transit rider and The Bus Bench reader.

Lady Robinson, General Manager and goddess of city parking and special event street closures public transit riders have a bit of a problem with your service. Yes you run a clean busline, but it’s only clean on the surface.

The LADOT is the supermodel and star footplayer of transit. On the surface it’s a superior specimen until you try to talk to it.

LADOT in it's human form  the supermodel (Giselle Bundchen) and the star football player (Tom Brady)

Yesterday was historic. The anniversary of "I Have a Dream" and Obama's nomination, but....

There are plenty of posts on Obama and acknowledgment of the King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but I have a dream too. Here it is:

Entitled-I Have a Public Transit Dream  aka Wake me up from this public transit nightmare!!!!

(MORE AFTER THE TRANSFER)

We don’t care if your feet hurt, my bike is worth more than you. Montgomery, oops Hollywood.

You know the whole idea of removing seats on the trains to make room for cyclists sort of bothers me.

Why does it bother me, because there are too many people who work as domestics, too many people who are handicapped and too many people who are elderly on the train.

These are people who took the train even when gas was low, because they couldn’t afford to drive (or couldn’t see well enough to drive.)

Cyclists are more and more beginning to strike me as selfish assholes. Also the idea that they tend  to try to paint themselves as "oppressed minorities" makes me want to give them figurative slaps across the face. Read this interesting exchange between me and cyclists from Midnight Ridazz on LA's Eastside.

I’m trying to be real open-minded in regards to this, but often I don’t take my bike on the train and it’s not because of METRO, but because I think it’s rude.

It’s rude to have your bike in the face of some other person riding the train if you don’t have to simply because you don’t want to lock up your bike and you don’t want to wake up a little bit earlier or leave a bit later.

If you have to ride your bike after you get off the train leave earlier. Not having a car means you have to compromise, shocking I know.

Why do cyclists’ rights seem to trump public transit riders’ rights. I think it is because cyclists tend to be a little richer, a little less vaginaey and a little less foreign.

METRO and the city should add more bike lanes.
METRO should add more bike parking.

METRO should not take away the rush hour ban on bikes. Taking away seats from people who don’t get to just ride the train from Hollywood to Downtown, but have to ride the bus from East LA or South LA for one hour, then take the train from downtown LA to Hollywood and then take the bus from Hollywood to the Westside because they work in security or childcare or in the janitorial industries just doesn’t seem fair to me.

It smacks of classicism.

Gas goes up and every wish that the middle class wants gets granted. It takes working class people 15 years to get things done it takes middle class people five minutes, which wouldn’t be a problem, but if you care about the world outside of yourself you have to think about other people.

I don’t have kids, I don’t have a blue-collar job, but still I think about the people who are in these situations. How do you get past 25 and have such a narrow view of life, maybe money makes everyone around you disappear.

The environmental movement needs to remember that all people are people. And that people outside the upper middle-income circle of people should be taken into account while brainstorming cool ideas.

I think a person who has spent all day working as a domestic deserves a seat more than guy with a bike, but maybe I’ve gone to sleep and we’re actually living in 1950s Alabama, but instead of everyone having handkerchiefs, everyone has tattoos.

by Browne

You don’t want to sell me no stinkin’ badges. Fu*k you MTA.

Melrose is one of my favorite destinations. I love the section of LA that I have christened in my own head Little El Salvador, I know some people want to change it back to East Hollywood or even the Bicycle District, but East Hollywood is no longer.

East Hollywood left when Latinos and Asian immigrants moved in and the hipsters grandparents moved to the San Fernando Valley and Santa Monica.

I say to the residents that moved in and made that area work. Tell the hipsters they can’t have your neighborhood back, just because it’s cool now. YOU made it cool. Finders keepers, losers weepers, that’s the scavenger’s law of neighborhoods. Haven’t those skinny jeanned vegans destroyed enough perfectly fine neighborhoods?

Tell them to go to Watts. That will be much more fun to watch. At least for me.

I like Central American food or rather the pastries in the bakeries around Melrose from Los Angeles City College to a bit past Western. I also like hats. Melrose is home to one of the two best hat stores in Los Angeles (the other one is on a lonely stretch of road in Burbank, on the wrong side, yeah, there is a wrong side to Burbank, Baron Hats on a barren street…) in general I like wasting time, and the MTA likes wasting my time.

I have two choices when going back into downtown, the 14 and the 10. After I take either of those I can either walk home or I can take an other agency’s bus, since I like wearing high heels I prefer the other agency’s bus option.

Many people like the utilitarian look when on the bus; these people usually hate the bus and their lives. I love my life and while I don’t love public transport, I feel me dressing up and looking great makes it fun for everyone else.

I like giving.

Now on several occasions I’ve taken the 14 and the 10 and put in money and asked for a transfer. The driver would then tell me, “There are no transfers.”

“So you just stole my money MTA agent,” me being not happy.

“Look, I don’t have any transfers. They didn’t give me any. Here’s 50 cent,” said the snotty bus driver, who practically throws me two quarters.

But he did throw me two quarters.

And that’s not the point, not so secret MTA agent.

If you go to trip planner it tells you how much you need to get on the bus, transfer and all. If Metro’s trip planner tells me that it will cost $1.55 to get on the MTA and then another agency bus, that’s what I should have to pay. A transfer not being available just raises the price of my bus ride not just from $1.25 to $1.55 the cost of the transfer; it raises my bus ride from $1.25 to $2.15, of course that’s a small amount, but it is an amount.

Multiply that times the amount of kids that you might have. If you don’t think it’s that big of a deal send me 90 cents. If I had to go to Melrose to work everyday that would cost me 18 dollars per month. 18 extra dollars which if I were making minimum wage would be a big deal.

If the MTA doesn’t think it’s a big deal then they should mail everyone who takes the 14 and the 10 and any other bus lines that they forget to give their drivers transfers, 18 dollars a month.

If the MTA just wants to inadvertently raise my fare, then why can’t I pay less money when I’m just going half way? Oh, if I did that, it would be called fare evasion. They would fine me 250 dollars plus community service.

I think the MTA owes me 250 dollars and some community service.

What if I were poor? What if I had just the amount? What if Amex didn’t give cash advances? What if I were in some neighborhood that didn’t have ATMs? What if it were midnight? What if I were a grandma? What if I were disabled and walking across the street to get change at 8pm in the rain was really hard and when I finally get there the asshole clerk tells me that he doesn’t break change for loser bus riders? What if that happened?!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyways I called Metro about it once and talked to Greg the supervisor who said he’d send me a token.

This was a month ago, so I guess it’s not happening.

The other day I take a trip from Melrose to downtown and again the driver tells me there are no transfers (I’ve now learned to ask first and put money in later, irritated driver and fellow passengers be damned.) And I asked him, “What’s the deal?”

He was an older Chicano guy, he peered over his sunglasses and he spoke to me as one person of color to another person of color in a ‘girrlll, I know you know,’ but I’m going to tell you straight up, “Metro wants you to buy a day pass, that’s why. They are greedy. Notice the night fare and peak hour fares are also gone.”

So the drivers on Metro while there is the infrequent asshole, because hey working with working class people, when you yourself is working class can be a bit much. You know working class people never have any money, there are lots of homeless people who get on the bus and they are kind of stinky and gross and weird. In general being a bus driver is a scary hard job. It’s like working at the post office or at the airport when a flight has been delayed for ten hours, but you don’t have bullet proof glass and you can’t take a break for ten minutes while you are allegedly searching for a package. In addition now owing to the whole greeney thing you got a bunch middle class schmucks, such as myself giving you shit and asking why is the MTA fucking them all the time.

More often than not though the MTA drivers are a great resource in regards to the bullshit that is going on with the busses.

So changes on METRO that the MTA’s Roger Snoble and Pam O’Connor have forgotten to let you know on a widespread basis.
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• Metro passes are not valid on ANY Dash as of January 1st. Not just the ones in downtown or around the Wilshire district. They are not valid on any of them. Thanks for the heads up on that MTA. I got to read that info on piece of punk rock photo copy paper on the Los Feliz Dash.

You fuckers.

• The nighttime reduced fare (which I have used) is gone. I discovered that by watching someone not being able to afford to get on the goddamn bus on Sunset one night around the Viper Room after a Mick Farren reading.
• The senior and disabled reduce fare for non-peak hours, gone. Saw a driver tell an obviously crazy (disabled) toothless (old) woman that they didn’t do that anymore. On the 14 eastbound.

So the play nice benefits that the MTA added when they hiked the bus passes from three bucks to five bucks were silently taken away.

What a bunch of duplicitous assholes.

Sell me your stinkin’ badges you damn carbones at the MTA.

By Browne

Lost pet collection...

. . . but it the day after the Day of The Dead, so what do you expect?

To honour the lost of Los Feliz, Silver lake and the surrounding area, I had the Busbenchers surrender their favourite "Lost. . . " flyers lest they were to have spent today posting their own "Lost: left limb and two toes" flyers. (There is nothing like a bottle of scotch in one hand and a machete in the other, to illustrate the advantage of two well-connected hands!)

Have a gander at our best bits of the collection collected over the last 15 months.

The well-known, first in a series of three:

One wonders about this bird. . .

. . . and why there is no photo for the cat, the flyer of which were found on the other side of the post:

There is the muppet-dog whose mug is done via a colour inkjet even as his naughty bits are no longer so colourful:

Only a Cat lover could love this bastard:

What in any hell could be in this case, that curries so much cause for alarm? (Seeing as it is eLAy, perhaps it is the soul of some lost Tarrantino fan whose own neck bears a strange Band-Aid?)

And just in case one is looking to be economical in the pursuit of photography work, there is this poor lost pup whose truancy might well pave they way for a new puppy:

But back to the drawing board. We are sure this is a schoolteacher, owing to the bottom right-hand date:

There is that which will be sent up the river:

and the same possible loss, albeit in spanish:

The simply lost:

and the largest of all (with a scale provided by my own bigfoot big-assed foot, which means the poster is nearly three feet in height), is this odd bit, which was no doubt done by a teacher: it were mounted on Foamcore, made ready by a strap from a biycllce helmet, and found in droves throughout the area immediately south of Los Feliz between Vermont and Hillhurst: