On this Memorial Day, take some time to remember the fallen in the First and Second Oil War. Ponder the sacrifices they made to keep America's gas tanks full.
I would also suggest taking the bus to your barbecue today, but RTA cancelled all service- so bike or walk if you can, and at least carpool if you can't.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Service Cuts- Banning/Beaumont Edition
Pass Transit quietly approved service cuts to their already meagre offerings in Banning and Beaumont. Route 3 will no longer offer Saturday service, and the span of service has been reduced for routes 3 and 4 on weekdays. Route 3 will now operate between 6am and 6pm, and Route 4 will operate between 6:45am and 6:30pm.
Also, a reminder- for the first time in recent memory, RTA buses WILL NOT OPERATE on Memorial Day, Monday 31 May.
Also, a reminder- for the first time in recent memory, RTA buses WILL NOT OPERATE on Memorial Day, Monday 31 May.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Cheaper Airport Bus
A few weeks ago, I posted a how-to on getting to the various airports in the Los Angeles metro area. Surprisingly, it's been one of my more popular posts. I'd like to add a few methods for getting to LAX for the cash-conscious, after learning that the swanky FlyAway service is a spendy $7.
There are two bus lines and a network of rail that link LAX to Union Station. They're going to be less comfortable, more crowded and slower, but also significantly cheaper.
If you're a bus snob and you insist on going by train, you can ride the Red Line to 7th/Metro, the Blue Line to Imperial-Wilmington/Rosa Parks, and the Green Line to Aviation/LAX, where a free shuttle bus (the G shuttle) will take you to the airport. Total cost $3.75, due to increase to $4.50 when fares go up July 1st.
If you don't mind buses, you've got two choices. The #439 Express bus leaves from Dock 1 at the Patsouras Transit Plaza at the back of Union Station, leaving every 45 minutes on weekdays and hourly on weekends, from 4am on weekdays and 6am on weekends through 9pm. It'll take 50 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic, and cost you $1.85, due to increase to $2.20 on July 1. It'll drop you at the LAX City Bus Centre, which is connected to the airport by the free C shuttle bus. (UPDATE: Commenter cph notes that the 439 is slated for cancellation 12/2010.)
The second choice is the #42 local bus, which leaves from Chavez & Vignes (about a block north of the Patsouras Transit Plaza) at least half-hourly from 5 am through midnight. (After 8pm, riders must use route #40 at Chavez & Vignes, and transfer to 42 at Broadway/7th.) It'll take around 70-80 minutes, depending on traffic and time of day, and cost you a lovely $1.25, due to increase to $1.50 on July 1. Like it's express cousin, it'll drop you at the LAX City Bus Centre, where you can connect to the plane via the C shuttle bus.
Late at night, Metro's Owl service does provide service from Chavez & Vignes to LAX, via lines 70 and 40, with a short walk between Grand and Broadway on 7th Street. It'll cost you $3.75, due to increase to $4.50 on July 1, take approximately 90 minutes, and drop you at the LAX City Bus Centre. However, I should mention that this means walking about downtown Los Angeles in the middle of the night. Flyaway runs hourly, 24 hours a day, and this blogger recommends you spend the extra few dollars for the safe ride to the airport. Of course, Metrolink doesn't run that late, so Inland residents probably won't need to worry about it.
There are two bus lines and a network of rail that link LAX to Union Station. They're going to be less comfortable, more crowded and slower, but also significantly cheaper.
If you're a bus snob and you insist on going by train, you can ride the Red Line to 7th/Metro, the Blue Line to Imperial-Wilmington/Rosa Parks, and the Green Line to Aviation/LAX, where a free shuttle bus (the G shuttle) will take you to the airport. Total cost $3.75, due to increase to $4.50 when fares go up July 1st.
If you don't mind buses, you've got two choices. The #439 Express bus leaves from Dock 1 at the Patsouras Transit Plaza at the back of Union Station, leaving every 45 minutes on weekdays and hourly on weekends, from 4am on weekdays and 6am on weekends through 9pm. It'll take 50 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic, and cost you $1.85, due to increase to $2.20 on July 1. It'll drop you at the LAX City Bus Centre, which is connected to the airport by the free C shuttle bus. (UPDATE: Commenter cph notes that the 439 is slated for cancellation 12/2010.)
The second choice is the #42 local bus, which leaves from Chavez & Vignes (about a block north of the Patsouras Transit Plaza) at least half-hourly from 5 am through midnight. (After 8pm, riders must use route #40 at Chavez & Vignes, and transfer to 42 at Broadway/7th.) It'll take around 70-80 minutes, depending on traffic and time of day, and cost you a lovely $1.25, due to increase to $1.50 on July 1. Like it's express cousin, it'll drop you at the LAX City Bus Centre, where you can connect to the plane via the C shuttle bus.
Late at night, Metro's Owl service does provide service from Chavez & Vignes to LAX, via lines 70 and 40, with a short walk between Grand and Broadway on 7th Street. It'll cost you $3.75, due to increase to $4.50 on July 1, take approximately 90 minutes, and drop you at the LAX City Bus Centre. However, I should mention that this means walking about downtown Los Angeles in the middle of the night. Flyaway runs hourly, 24 hours a day, and this blogger recommends you spend the extra few dollars for the safe ride to the airport. Of course, Metrolink doesn't run that late, so Inland residents probably won't need to worry about it.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Write Your Senators
Tell Senator Boxer and Senator Feinstein to support the Public Transit Preservation Act, introduced several days ago by Senator Dodd of Connecticut. It would provide nearly $2bn in emergency operating assistance through September for transit agencies across the nation, distributed through "existing formulas" which tells me pretty much everyone will get a cut. Write in right away.
You can e-mail your senators at the following links:
Sen. Boxer
Sen. Feinstein
You can call your senators at the following numbers:
Senator Boxer, 951-684-4849
Senator Feinstein, 619-231-9712
You can write to your senators at the following addresses:
Sen. Barbara Boxer
3403 10th St. #704
Riverside, CA 92501
Sen. Diane Feinstein
750 B Street, Suite 1030
San Diego, CA 92101
Tell them how important public transit is in your life, and how crucial it is that we get the funding we need to keep the buses rolling.
You can e-mail your senators at the following links:
Sen. Boxer
Sen. Feinstein
You can call your senators at the following numbers:
Senator Boxer, 951-684-4849
Senator Feinstein, 619-231-9712
You can write to your senators at the following addresses:
Sen. Barbara Boxer
3403 10th St. #704
Riverside, CA 92501
Sen. Diane Feinstein
750 B Street, Suite 1030
San Diego, CA 92101
Tell them how important public transit is in your life, and how crucial it is that we get the funding we need to keep the buses rolling.
New Agency on Google Transit
In a move that I never thought I'd see, the one bus stop in my old home town is now on Google Transit. Victor Valley Transit Authority is now available on Google Transit, including all county routes! Also, Mountain Area Regional Transit Authority, which provides service in Crestline, Arrowhead and Big Bear, and both Barstow and Needles Transit are available as well. The only San Bernardino County agency remaining unavailable on Google Transit is the Morongo Basin Transit Authority, which provides service in Twentynine Palms and surrounding areas.
One of the chronic problems with rural transit is its infrequent nature, and the rather poor availability of information on routes and schedules. With any luck, this sort of schedule accessibility will help customers in transit-poor regions accomplish their daily travels car-free.
There's an important caveat to the VVTA data on Google Transit: VVTA runs a significant number of deviated routes, which operate by reservation. Information on other possible destinations off of deviated routes is not available on Google Transit. For example, there is only one scheduled run to Wrightwood daily. However, every single trip on the 21 will call there by advanced reservation, and Google Transit is unable to plan these trips. (If you're a Tri-Community resident and you need to utilize this service, call 877-545-8000 for reservations.) All in all, though, this is a significant improvement to informing riders about a system that, even today, has no system map or transfer information in their brochures.
One of the chronic problems with rural transit is its infrequent nature, and the rather poor availability of information on routes and schedules. With any luck, this sort of schedule accessibility will help customers in transit-poor regions accomplish their daily travels car-free.
There's an important caveat to the VVTA data on Google Transit: VVTA runs a significant number of deviated routes, which operate by reservation. Information on other possible destinations off of deviated routes is not available on Google Transit. For example, there is only one scheduled run to Wrightwood daily. However, every single trip on the 21 will call there by advanced reservation, and Google Transit is unable to plan these trips. (If you're a Tri-Community resident and you need to utilize this service, call 877-545-8000 for reservations.) All in all, though, this is a significant improvement to informing riders about a system that, even today, has no system map or transfer information in their brochures.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
By the way...
If you like what I do and want me to stick around, please consider clicking on the ads here around the web site. I do run ads for a reason, and the difference between what I get paid for an ad impression and what I get paid for an ad click is four orders of magnitude. That's 10^4 or 1,000 times greater. If something looks interesting, please click. I dream of moving this blog on to its own dedicated server, with its own domain- I'm thinking ridinginriverside.org, but we'll see- and I won't do that until the thing pays for itself.
Also, if you plan on signing up for ZipCar, which you really should if you live anywhere near UCR (it's awesome not only to keep you from owning a car, but to keep you from owning a second car, or to just have in case your car breaks down), please consider clicking the little ZipCar graphic in the right-hand sidebar. If you sign up through me, you get $25 of free driving, and so do I.
I should mention that, at this point, RiR has been around for 18 months and slightly over 300 posts.
Also, if you plan on signing up for ZipCar, which you really should if you live anywhere near UCR (it's awesome not only to keep you from owning a car, but to keep you from owning a second car, or to just have in case your car breaks down), please consider clicking the little ZipCar graphic in the right-hand sidebar. If you sign up through me, you get $25 of free driving, and so do I.
I should mention that, at this point, RiR has been around for 18 months and slightly over 300 posts.
Transit's Still Greener Than Driving
The sentiment that transit, especially bus transit, isn't really all that green seems to be popping up quite a bit in the livable streets blogosphere lately. The argument goes something like this: On a passenger-mile-per-gallon basis, buses are really only more efficient than cars when they're well-loaded, and since transit systems (especially bus systems) often run rather empty outside of rush hours, they should be dismantled and the energy put into them re-directed into making more environmentally friendly cars.
Now, I haven't done the fuel efficiency calculations on my own. The promulgators of this myth may indeed be right- I'm not certain, and I wouldn't bet on it (especially considering that there are so many inefficient SUV's and pickups being driven around alone), but I can't speak from a place of expertise here. However, they're wrong in a larger sense, and this is because of three different points.
First, as I've mentioned before, cars aren't only an environmental disaster because of their tailpipe emissions and energy consumption. They enable a pattern of development and a lifestyle with disastrous social and environmental implications, and they will continue doing so even if they were to all be solar-powered tomorrow. Not to mention the waste of space in manufacturing and parking. Every bus in Riverside parks in one small building on 3rd Street. Think how big a building you'd need to park every car in Riverside.
Second, one of the most frequent reasons I hear for people not using transit for their work trip is schedule flexibility. Sure, 95% of the time they only need to travel just before 9 and just after 5, but that 5% of the time they absolutely NEED to be able to get home- it's a sick family member, or a very important meeting, or simply a half-day furlough where they'd rather not stick around at the office all evening. Those mostly-empty buses running around the city all day are a key component in filling the mostly-full buses during commuter hours, in the same way that the last bus of the night may be empty, but it's critical in putting passengers on the next-to-last bus. Distributing the environmental benefits of a system across all of its bus trips, rather than on a per-trip basis, would provide a more realistic picture of the environmental benefits of transit. If you accept that trains are more efficient, you have to think about the cost of the feeder buses that got the passengers there as well.
Lastly, in most suburban bus systems (which are most vulnerable to this sort of critique), public transit is not usually run for environmental benefits, but as a social service. There will always be a class of people who cannot drive, either through poverty, age, disability, or judicial sanction. The buses will run anyway, regardless of their efficiency, because they serve a different social purpose. (I'm willing to bet that RTA's services in outlying areas like Hemet and Canyon Lake are probably inefficient compared to small, fuel-efficient automobiles.) Since the buses are running anyway, it's much more environmentally friendly to ride them, rather than add a new vehicle trip to the environment and traffic system. Even if the bus itself is rather inefficient on a passenger-miles-per-gallon basis, your individual share of that trip is significantly better than what your footprint would be if you drove for that trip. This critique about efficiency is only an issue when people don't use public transit- if anything, it is an argument to use transit much, much more than we do.
Now, I haven't done the fuel efficiency calculations on my own. The promulgators of this myth may indeed be right- I'm not certain, and I wouldn't bet on it (especially considering that there are so many inefficient SUV's and pickups being driven around alone), but I can't speak from a place of expertise here. However, they're wrong in a larger sense, and this is because of three different points.
First, as I've mentioned before, cars aren't only an environmental disaster because of their tailpipe emissions and energy consumption. They enable a pattern of development and a lifestyle with disastrous social and environmental implications, and they will continue doing so even if they were to all be solar-powered tomorrow. Not to mention the waste of space in manufacturing and parking. Every bus in Riverside parks in one small building on 3rd Street. Think how big a building you'd need to park every car in Riverside.
Second, one of the most frequent reasons I hear for people not using transit for their work trip is schedule flexibility. Sure, 95% of the time they only need to travel just before 9 and just after 5, but that 5% of the time they absolutely NEED to be able to get home- it's a sick family member, or a very important meeting, or simply a half-day furlough where they'd rather not stick around at the office all evening. Those mostly-empty buses running around the city all day are a key component in filling the mostly-full buses during commuter hours, in the same way that the last bus of the night may be empty, but it's critical in putting passengers on the next-to-last bus. Distributing the environmental benefits of a system across all of its bus trips, rather than on a per-trip basis, would provide a more realistic picture of the environmental benefits of transit. If you accept that trains are more efficient, you have to think about the cost of the feeder buses that got the passengers there as well.
Lastly, in most suburban bus systems (which are most vulnerable to this sort of critique), public transit is not usually run for environmental benefits, but as a social service. There will always be a class of people who cannot drive, either through poverty, age, disability, or judicial sanction. The buses will run anyway, regardless of their efficiency, because they serve a different social purpose. (I'm willing to bet that RTA's services in outlying areas like Hemet and Canyon Lake are probably inefficient compared to small, fuel-efficient automobiles.) Since the buses are running anyway, it's much more environmentally friendly to ride them, rather than add a new vehicle trip to the environment and traffic system. Even if the bus itself is rather inefficient on a passenger-miles-per-gallon basis, your individual share of that trip is significantly better than what your footprint would be if you drove for that trip. This critique about efficiency is only an issue when people don't use public transit- if anything, it is an argument to use transit much, much more than we do.
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