Thursday, June 25, 2009

Parking Insanity

Riverside's current parking boondoggle is the Fox Theatre, as I reported on last week. However, the parking disease is endemic throughout SoCal. The Torrance Daily Breeze ran a story on Monday about the $126.5 million purchase of a parking lot at LAX. The cash-strapped City of Los Angeles, who owns LAX (as well as Van Nuys, Palmdale and Ontario airports), will be blowing $126.5 million of taxpayer money... on a plot of tarmac...

Note, by the way, that the Metro Green Line currently grazes LAX, and one has to take a shuttle bus to the terminal. So we can blow an obscene amount of money on a parking lot, but we can't make the trains go to the planes. Great.

2 comments:

Richard Bush said...

The new parking structure at Corona North Main cost $25 million for 1065 spaces. $23,474 per space. Just a portion of that would of gone a long way towards improving Corona's transit options. RTA barely serves the city and the Cruiser hasn't been expanded since it's inception. I'm frustrated every time I see all the routes criss-crossing MoVal, a city comparable in size. I really enjoy your blog. Always nice to know your not the only transit geek in the IE.....LOL

Allie Cat said...

$25m... that's a mile of streetcar. That's probably all it'd take to get the Magnolia BRT up and running. And we put it into a large concrete box to hold smaller, steel boxes.

Just FIY, though, MoVal got totally hosed in the last round of service cuts. And it seems to me that there's a bit of a discrepancy between the transit demand in MoVal and the transit demand in Corona... There are socioeconomic factors at work that are probably hampering Corona's transit system more than funding is.

Perhaps you can tell me, though, as a Coronite, why exactly does Corona have a separate bus system, with a completely different (and incompatible) fare structure? Seems to me RTA would be happy for the money that Corona Cruiser's getting right now, and the system would probably end up better coordinated.