The Bus Bench: Let’s Review Every Transit Stop in L.A. County

By Damien Newton
Feb 26, 2010

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From the Bus Bench’s transit map at google maps.

By now you may have already read about the Bus Bench’s effort to write a review of every transit stop in Los Angeles. In addition to coverage at The Bus Bench, which has been publishing for four years, it has also earned praise from LA Loyalist, Curbed and The Source.

But if not, here’s the scoop. Bus Bench publisher, and regular Streetsblog commenter and sometimes contributor, Browne Molyneux decided she would use google maps to review every transit stop in Los Angeles to review whether or not the stop is safe, clean, whether it has a bench or shelter, whether it’s located near things worth walking to, and even if it’s a good place to watch the sun set. After taking on this herculean task for awhile, she opened the project up for anyone to write a review.

Curbed estimates that there are over 17,000 transit stops in L.A. County, so we’re talking about a long haul to analyze all of them. In fact, if the map adds 10 reviews a day it would be almost five years before the entire county received a review.

Not that we shouldn’t try. Thus far, most of the reviews are in the Downtown and branching out to the areas adjacent to it. Because I wanted to play along before I wrote a review, I emailed Molyneux at browne@shametrainla.com and within minutes I was ready to go. Before I started writing, I checked out who my other contributors were. There were some familiar names: Damien G, DGabbard, Spokker and Ramon Martinez.

Now here’s the sad reality. After a series of mishaps with late buses; I opted out of the bus system. It might take me a couple of minutes more, on average, to bike Downtown from my current dwelling; but at least it was a predictable trip. That being said, there are a handful of bus stops that I’m familiar enough with to write a review. Thus, I took the time to write a review for the Metro and DASH stop at Beverly and Garland. Normally, I would say, "to read the review, click on after the jump." But this time, why not head over to the Bus Bench’s transit stop map instead.