http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNuE4hbUDag&feature=PlayList&p=9BFB0F651F592140&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=13

I've also wondered about streetcars on Ventura Blvd. connecting Universal City and Warner Center

- A Sunset Blvd. Streetcar connecting downtown, Silver Lake, Hollywood, and the Strip,

- a Santa Monica Blvd. streetcar utilizing the unused ROW in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood on the way to points east and north,

- A streetcar connecting the upcoming rail terminals in Santa Monica or West L.A. and Venice Beach might be popular.

There are probably lots of places they might work for short distances that will never see grade separated HRT or LRT.

I also heard one woman state outside a Westside/Central Sector Governance Council meeting that perhaps a Marina Del Rey DASH is an option to connect the Marina to Fox Hills Mall more effectively than the hourly, unreliable 108 bus.

Certainly the politics of DASH is suspect in some instances. DASH includes some excellent neighborhood circulators along with routes tha are a waste of money that should have long since been eliminated. Plus of course even now despite no money for expansion several council members are touting dubious new routes as "priorities". BTW, note that the DASH routes always list whose council district they run through. Not many other transit timetables do that..

I wish it's mantra was, "How do we expand the DASH and Commuter Express Systems".

This all falls back to Brayj's lament that LADOT has a monomaniacal fixation on vehicle throughput.

The mentality of LADOT is to use DASH and Commuter Express as transit expressly to reduce car trips so the whole network moves faster.

DASH was originally the Downtown Area Short Hop. It's a very good concept. DASH was designed with one purpose in mind: Traffic engineers did not want all those downtown workers driving their cars around at lunchtime and then hunting for parking spaces. If it ran a bus, say every 5 minutes, people would make trips that were faster than walking and less burdensome than having to drive.

Commuter Express came into being as the then-RTD was eliminating rush hour express buses due to low ridership. LADOT was able to salvage several routes that would have otherwise been canceled.

The problems?

In the case of DASH, you had 15 council members crying "Me too!" They didn't know or care that DASH was a purpose-built system. They just wanted those in their own district, but had no clue over where they should run. The LADOT planners fudged: They would pack buses by ... duplicating local RTD/Metro routes to justify their existence and/or plan the routes around shopping errands done during the day.

In the case of Commuter Express, have you ever noticed that buses only go one way during rush hour and not the other? There's one notable exception, and it was because Metro paid LADOT to run a line as part of the BRU consent decree pilot project lines. There are only three other Commuter Express lines that provide bidirectional service.

At least Santa Clarita has the right idea. Its commuter express buses run both ways, but the reverse commute routes aligned to major ridership-generating areas.

I don't really care what organization filmed the advertisement, I care about the result of the advertisement. I'm pretty sure the LADOT takes full credit for the ad, as the NYC DOT takes credit for their series. A quick search of the Internet finds then bike coordinator Ken Hustings accepting an Emmy for the advertisement and the words Operation Trafixx are nowhere to be found.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcbyrw9PNA

That was the point,, right?

so much for the "laws of physics"

I've had LADOT staff lie, to my face, about facts, law, and policy all in service of removing a crosswalk to maintain car speeds and volumes on an urban streets in a commercial area.

Their ad exposes their id.