Today’s Headlines

  • Council Approves DTLA Streetcar To Begin Preliminary Engineering (Urbanize)
  • Perp Pleads No Contest To Boyle Hts Hit-and-Run Killing Of 101-Year Old (LAT)
  • Cyclist Killed in Hit-and-Run In Stanton In OC (LAT)
  • Details Of Metro Measure R2 Polling (@Laura_Nelson Twitter)
  • Burbank Bus Expands Airport to NoHo Red Line Service (Burbank Leader)
  • Metro’s First Last Mile Plan (CA Planning & Dev Report)
  • Tourist Tax Helps Pay For Anaheim ARTIC Station Expenses (Mass Transit)
  • Mark Valianatos Looks At History of Big Data in L.A. (Boom)

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Get State Headlines At Streetsblog CA

  • Darren

    Re: Metro’s first and last mile plan, and the more general topic of facilitating access to stations, here are some questions I have:

    Expo Culver City: Would it truly have been prohibitively expensive to tack on a pedestrian bridge connecting the station to the northwest corner of Venice/Robertson? A large share of station users (and future Expo bike path users) make this trip, but in the present configuration must navigate the disastrous Venice/Robertson intersection. Why weren’t they given a bridge to make it a simple, safe, and signal-free means of access to the station?

    Basically every Red Line stop: bearing in mind technical difficulties, was Metro truly unable to have station entrances on multiple corners? As an example many BART stations along Market street in San Francisco have entrances on both sides of Market street. This enables more convenient station access and is safer for pedestrians. Metro is doing this at 7th Street and eventually at North Hollywood, but how come it wasn’t done from the get go? Why wasn’t it done at Wilshire/Vermont, where a new development on the southeast corner provided an opportunity to integrate the development directly with the station?

  • MaxUtil

    I’m not familiar with those stops, but I am with most of the Gold Line stations which pretty uniformly seem designed to make it difficult to simply walk into the station: access only from one side, through a narrow, meandering pathway, no bike racks, etc.

    Also from the the Planning & Dev. Report: “Among the most novel of the strategy’s ideas, “mobility centers” would be a cross between a convenience store and a bus stop. They would give transit riders safe, comfortable places to wait and the chance to sip a coffee or browse a newspaper.”

    That this is considered “novel” says a lot about Metro. This is pretty much standard practice on most urban transit systems where appropriate. Typically, they are also now talking about this AFTER finishing design and/or construction for a large number of rail stations that could easily have had a small retail component built into them. Metro wants locals to go out and find money or create partnerships to set up basic retail when it could have built it into station design and collected a steady revenue stream from the tenant while offering a safer, more attractive transit stop. Well done all around…