The Bus Bench

High Speed Rail

"A California multicity project, including a 220-mph Los Angeles-San Francisco electrified train service, was awarded $2.25 billion." Obama’s Money Trains by John D. Boyd | Feb 8, 2010-The Journal of Commerce Magazine

The Seattle they didn't show you in Singles. Metro Joe by the Blue Scholars

Thanks to Gwen Cadogen out in Seattle for informing The Bus Bench of this gem.

North East Road Trip, Prologue

Ah, it's good to be back in the sunny and smoggy environs of my hometown.  Over the next week or so I'm going to be posting just a few entries about my recent North East Road Trip (New York, Philly, Hartford, Boston, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont), with the focus, of course, on the roads, buses, and trains I relied on during my trip.  I rushed through most of these places, but I spent a decent chunk of time as a tourist on Philly's SEPTA system and Boston's MBTA, and those two will get the bulk of the attention.  You'll have to forgive some of the pictures I took, as the combination of my embarrassed girlfriend, a rushed schedule, and general prohibitions against station photography led to a lot of blurry, off-angle work.

Here's a short first entry to get us started, this time centered on John F. Kennedy Airport's AirTrain.

The REAL Reason for Exorbitant Oil Prices

Don Pardo tells us why oil prices are so damned high. In 1976.

-BusTard

Heavy Metal Walk Sign

Are the odd little glitches in modern technology indicative of an emergent AI?

For those thinking this is an altered photo, please see the video after the jump.

Staycation, indeed! Pam's Canned Answers Fail To Hold Back Reality

Last week, Metro staged yet another little chat with Pam from Santa Monica. The topic of the latest ever-stale virtual fireside chat was about using Metro to have a vacation without really going anywhere, hence a "staycation."

Apparently, The Sidewalk Is Too Narrow

I am not sure what prompted this wheelchair-bound denizen of Skid Row to take to the road, but I hafta state it was amusing to watch her jet along Spring Street ahead of the DASH as well as Metro buses while private motor vehicles zoomed by.

-BusTard

 

 

L.A. Unplugged

It is everywhere, but like a snake it is nowhere: copper. Most folk in Los Angeles drive, and to you I state: look at the berm of the bridge the next time you are on a Freeway. The iron grates that allow DWP to enter the circuit have most likely been breached, and there is a damn good chance that the cut copper wires are sticking out from the respective cement hole. Moreover, in some places the wire is jutting out in fashion that suggests that the perpetrator merely leaned over the cement divider and cut the wire as far down as possible after quickly tearing off one side of the plate.

 

Any engineer can divulge the immense municipal cost of such widespread theft. It is within feet—in many instance, INCHES—to thousands of Angelinos daily, yet the Los Angeles City Council is whinging about deficits and all manor of crap that is obvious. I could make a living documenting the daily copper transgressions—I walk most everywhere, and I walk A LOT, what with my one-metre, New York-driven stride, and one of my guns is a camera. 

The following video—shot but a few feet from the government building on Los Angeles and 5th Street—exhibits evidence that government officials have apparently visited this site (unless there is a band of transit vandals with spare rolls of yellow "caution" tape) yet done nothing more than mitigate potential liability. I cannot state that, despite the dramatic loss obvious from Freeway street lighting copper theft, nearly as much has been done.

-BusTard

Freeway Fire: 101 South on Monday, 24 March 2008

All those cars on the Freeways at rush hour are certainly frustrating in the late Springtime heat, especially when your car suddenly erupts in flames. Slightly more frustrating is watching the LAFD firetrucks go north past you and get stopped by all the vehicular traffic in front of them, on the Freeway off-ramp, on the E. 4th Street bridge, on the 101 S. on-ramp and then the 101 south itself. The CHP were on hand but doing little to mitigate the problem. (There is another part to this story, and depending on the court case set for 21 April 2008, I will show the videos that exhibit a lack of concern on behalf of at least two CHP officers who figuratively fiddled while a car on the freeway burned not a hundred meters away. There might even be a newsworthy mini-scandal or two that folk might easily divine upon watching the video that clearly shows the two officers' faces as well as picks up the strange dialogue they offer to the camera.)

I could be self-righteous about how Los Angeles needs a comprehensive transit plan yet has not had one for some 20 years. I could kvetch about the lousy performances of CEO Roger Snoble, the noble rooster-cum-mayor Tony V and everyone else who could do something about the outrageous traffic congestion and lack of a public transit plan. But I will not. Just watch the video and pray that the next vehicle to burn, burn, burn, is not yours.

 

 

-BusTard

Easter Egg Hunt for New Transit Ways

Last Wednesday, Pam from Santa Monica wasted our hump-day lunchtimes with pleas to give unpaid ideas about transit funding (while those wasting the money in the first place were content to sit back and plan for more ways to waste public monies, eh, Roger Snoble?) even as she granted we little people naught but canned answers and ludicrous excuses. Thanks, Pam; feel free to stay in Santa Monica next time, seeing as you have too little time to offer Metro between your SM city council agenda and the occasional month in Australia.

Anyhow, this weekend I were invited to pop over and help hunt Easter Eggs. being a person of considerable impatience, I elected to accept the invitation as well as introduce a scheme to just get through with it. (I found out that the kids—and especially their parents!—did not shar emy appreciation for using a backhoe to find easter Eggs.) Along the way, I realised that, just as it will be an emergency thoroughfare for military ground forces should a county-wide crisis occur that renders inoperable the infrastructure, the L.A. River is a viable alternative to the Freeways as well as where the trains do not run and the buses no longer run.

 

(Cheers to Browne for being on-hand with the little cam!)

Gold Line extension on E. 1st Street

Great swaths of unimaginably sandy swaths stretching over three or more states; former cities with acres upon acres of empty buildings formerly bursting with bustle; and vast tracts of iron rail laid through industrial wastelands. Such waste-scapes are where I am most comfortable. The few who wander through such territories are one of three types: those who have nowhere else to go, the deliberate wanderer and those who are employed to watch the first two types. I have been all three, but the one who seeks solitude is what I prefer and tend to do these days. As such, I can often be found toiling through town on the wrong side of the tracks.

 
The two shots at left are of the tunnel beneath the 101 on the west side of the Freeway; the two to the right are on the west side of the L.A. River right in front of Bordello's.

These two shots are of a truck equipped for road and rail travel. The second shot is a bit blown out in the highlights owing to my impatient attempt to eliminate the shadows obscuring the rail-wheels axle, which are encircled by red.

Today I decided that I wanted to have a peek at the wrong side that is itself being bisected by a perpendicular set of tracks that will be the Gold Line extension through East Los Angeles. I also took to doing some research about the area’s forthcoming developments, and while I will not divulge the overall, eye-opening aspect that will be revealed before 2010 is upon us, I will state that the working class latino demographic is going to not be there much longer.

These photos are along E. 1st Street, east of the L.A. River and running up to the 101 Freeway.

-BusTard

Bee Movie.

I have not BEEn keeping up with animated movies of late, but I got a wild hair up my ass Saturday night and decided to pop over to the cinema. I wanted to see “American Gangster,” but for some strange reason the final curtain was at 8 p.m. But “Bee Movie” was showing at 9:40, so I settled for that. It was a great choice.
(There was one other person in the house, and I think he was asleep. I believe he laughed once at an incongruent time. He remained in his seat, unmoving, until the end credits. I am pretty sure he was not dead.)

Anyhow, here’s the lowdown: “bees” are jews, people are WASPs, Italian Vogue is mentioned twice in such a fashion as to brazenly invoke the catholic church’s complicity in the Holocaust, John Goodman as the prosecutor is Clarence Darrow’s evil twin, the military-industrial complex is represented by Honex (as in Honeywell) and Chris Rock’s mosquito, which has about four minutes, is nothing less than brilliant with his bit.

Also of note was the protagonist bee’s father. While explaining how he was chosen to fulfill his position at Honex, he described how as a stirrer he went in there and took hold of that stick with both hands and just started twisting it for all he was worth. It was a great metaphor for how the typical job is a masturbatory experience about which many folk speak highly even as they get little satisfaction from doing it by themselves.

The fluidity and nuance of the animation was superb. No mo-cap creepiness, either.

-BusTard

Kiss and Make Up.

It has been six-and-a-half years since the Angels Flight collision that, with the snap of a cable, bad brakes and a fatal touch of irony, Survivor Leon Praport’s life was ended violently.

It was round noon, and I was at the Market on Hill beneath 3rd. I was having at a heavy piece of pizza, scowling at the sawdust laid down for equal parts nostalgia and vomitorium, when the “THRUMP” from without washed through the feasting area. I was slower than usual to respond to the noise despite not finishing the thick slab of cheese and cheap bread, but I did manage to capture some decent wide shots of the collision of the two cars on Angels Flight.

I was unaware that there was a small, elderly man crushed between the two funicular vehicles; there were also a few folk injured, among them the wife of the deceased.

The dead man, Leon Praport, was a Survivor replete with the numbers on his forearm. Despite having survived the cattle car carnage of the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, Mr. Praport had died on the shortest railway in the world, on a car called “Sinai” no less. (The other is named Olivet.)

The months that followed were terse with finger-pointing between the California Public Utilities Commission and Angels Flight owners. Before the end of the year, L.A. Downtown News was running an ad announcing the re-opening of Angels Flight for late 2001. Toward the end of 2001, the ad copy changed to Spring of 2002; by early 2002 it was some later date. I imagine the ad stopped running shortly thereafter.

The occasional bit of filler in neighbourhood newspapers was all that was granted the still-stark strips of iron that uselessly connect Bunker Hill and the lowlands. But the cars are being prepped for what may well be a return to duty. The rail yards beneath the 4th Street bridge are the current home of the uncrunched and freshly painted cars, as-yet-connected parts and a possibly fresh coil of bloodless cable.

The Olivet and the Sinai in the yards on the L.A. River under 4th Street.

Could this be the coil of cable that killed Leon Praport, an adder ready to strike another victim?

In the meantime, be sure to keep an eye out for the Muerta PSA titled “The Fatal Irony of Angels Flight,” which are available exclusively to the occasional straphanger who happens to find them on public transit throughout Los Angeles.

-BusTard

"Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life..."

OK, so maybe the Diane Cordero was not drunk; just replace it with "selfish."

On Friday, 21 Sept 2007, Diane just could not wait the four minutes for the Gold Line to pass, so she ignored the flashing lights, plowed through the lowered crossing gate and slammed into the conductor's cabin. Once the train came to rest, she started screaming for someone to help her dumb ass so she would not be burned alive. Despite her insistent idiocy, someone answered her call, cut the lumpen sod out of her SUV, and dragged her broken carcass out of harm's way. Then the SUV exploded. See the carnage here.

Diane, had that been me with the chance to save your stupid ass, I would have seen to saving you but not until some skin grafting was assured for afterward so you could feel the pain of the driver and other passengers you injured as well as everything you fucked up. (I mean no offence to rescuers Eric Ramirez and Francisco Cornejo, mind you; but if I were you two I would wave off the offer for "anything," let alone Diane's promise that you are a part of their family.) It is hard enough to get the MTA to maintain a decent bus and train system for those of us who have no motor vehicle without fuckwits ramming their new motor vehicles into the exiting infrastructure.

A week later, Diane's fat ass was in a wheelchair, whining about how her life was saved and thanking the man who saved her. None of the victims of her idiocy appeared to be on hand to enjoy the festivities, nor were their names mentioned. Amid all the tears of joy for thanking the man who saved the schmuck from paying for her mistake in a way that would have served her well, there was not one word of apology for the people's lives she screwed up for nothing more than being selfish and stupid. Not one. And yet she goes on for quite some time about god and how she was praying, and how she is thankful that only her hair caught on fire. Well, lemme tell you something, Diane, since what little bit of brainpower you had before you collided with the Gold Line train appears to have been smacked out of your fat head: your hair catching fire may well have been your god's way of telling you, "Hey, stupid, ya shoulda waited for the train to pass."

I have no sympathy for such idiocy, and am angered that the local news would cover the event in such a way as to be a further insult to those whose lives were put on hold for no more than this cow's selfishness. Who will pay for the ceremony in which so many city personnel and vehicles are employed? Who will pay for the emergency services required to respond to one person's unmitigated selfishness that drove her to collide with a train? And why must we have to hear Diane Cordero hog the mike and the camera when it is the heroes who should have the spotlight?

Moreover, husband Rudy vows to purchase another vehicle of the same make and model. Why not ride the fucking train and the buses instead of wrecking them?!

-BusTard

Time for Transit Zines!

Like taking the J through Cypress Hills or the A to the Rockaways, even ShameTrain needs to  take a break from the bellowing about the dour state of the Los Angeles MTA. And as I am a great fan of zines (and have been since the 1980s), I am gonna do a little review of one of my favourite zines: Watch The Closing Doors. (After all, I am the only one qualified to take on such a little task among these drunken bums.)
This great little rag is written and edited by Fred Argoff, a conductor (he can be found in the fifth car) on the N (which usta run past my place in Brooklyn) and two other lines. He knows what he is talking about, and what he talks about has prompted him to publish 40 editions. (He also does a zine titled Brooklyn!, which is presently at #57.)

While WTCD tends toward covering the trains in New York with respect to history, facts, photos and stories (Fred always has great anecdotes about what he observes while working), there has of late been a fair amount of photos of trains (past and present) from readers around the world. There may be books out there that cover trains in specialized fashions, but I have yet to find the fast and easy manner that is found in each anticipated issue of Watch The Closing Doors.

I implore fans of public transit as well as any New Yorkers (if you think you know the subway system there, you still don’t know the half of it unless you have a subscription) to drop Fred a dove (that’s a $20 bill for those of you not involved in slinging on the streets) for four issues each of WTCD and Brooklyn!, or at least $10 for four issues of WTCD.Tell 'im Randall sent ya!

The address is:

Fred Argoff
Penthouse L
1170 Ocean Pkwy.
Brooklyn NY 11230-4060

If someone in Los Angeles gets the bright idea to do something similar—that is, a paper zine on the trains here—please do let us here at ShameTrain know. We would love to have less whinging and more wonderment at what is presently a dismal, over-priced and only occasionally working system of four trains in the second largest city in the United States.