Rapid Transit and passing lanes

[edsg25]

I have a question about how both the heavy rail Red Line and the light rail systems used on the other lines functions.

LA is spending great sums of money in a most admirable attempt to create a wide spread rapid transit system. It seems like the city is doing all it can to allow for speedy connections between locations in a far flung city.

However, it would seem to me that when this system is fully developed, it will need to have something very common in NYC rapid transit: that would be express trains. These will be needed to get people across vast distances without excessive stops; without it, there is little practicality.

So here's the question: Does either the Red Line subway or the grade level and above grade level of the light rail lines provide passing lanes that would allow for an express train to skip 5 or more stations at considerable speed? And, if not, does that compromise the system's effectiveness for long-distance commuter trips?

[klamedia]

Great point! Much argument about that. In NYC stations are spaced out to about 1/2 mile between each. In LA, it is always about 1 mile between each, give or take. Due to the stations being further apart the need for express, not uneccessary, is minimalized. And no one talks about this, but because of that configuration, LA trains often can reach speeds higher than NYC trains. Of course not all lines in NYC even have express service. The 1/9 after 96th St heading north is a gruelling expedition if you happen to live in Inwood. I would like to see the talked about 13 mile Red line out to Santa Monica have some sort of express or skip stop service.

And thanx! Yes, LA has done alot in the way of building rail transit in the last 16 years. Subway tunneling bans, sinkholes, mismanagement, public apathy, very limited federal dollars and to still come up with 73 miles of rail is quite remarkable. No other American city has added that much rail in such a short amount of time.

[klamedia]

Great point! Much argument about that. In NYC stations are spaced out to about 1/2 mile between each. In LA, it is always about 1 mile between each, give or take. Due to the stations being further apart the need for express, not uneccessary, is minimalized. And no one talks about this, but because of that configuration, LA trains often can reach speeds higher than NYC trains. Of course not all lines in NYC even have express service. The 1/9 after 96th St heading north is a gruelling expedition if you happen to live in Inwood. I would like to see the talked about 13 mile Red line out to Santa Monica have some sort of express or skip stop service.

And thanx! Yes, LA has done alot in the way of building rail transit in the last 16 years. Subway tunneling bans, sinkholes, mismanagement, public apathy, very limited federal dollars and to still come up with 73 miles of rail is quite remarkable.

[edsg25]

thanks, Klamedia. I do understand the spacing of stations increases speed. I guess there is one thing I don't get: won't an express still end up being stuck behind a local train no matter what....unless it did the unthinkable, by pass using the oncoming traffic track?

In essence, there could be no express with the current system, right?

[klamedia]

The Blue Line could very well be our first legitimate* express stop/local stop train. The Blue Line is quadruple tracked mostly the entire length of its run from downtown to the city of Long Beach 20 some odd miles to the south.

*The Gold Line as of Feb 13th has started do the unthinkable during rush.

[karlarrec1]

I've always thought the Red Line was double-tracked, at least the core downtown stations through Wilshire/Vermont.

[CarsonCaliBrotha]

Originally Posted by klamedia

The Blue Line could very well be our first legitimate* express stop/local stop train. The Blue Line is quadruple tracked mostly the entire length of its run from downtown to the city of Long Beach 20 some odd miles to the south.

*The Gold Line as of Feb 13th has started do the unthinkable during rush.

Not all of it is. For instance, at the Del Amo station near me, theres the Blue Line, then a single railroad track thats hardly used but I've seen a train go down it. And the railroad is at grade and the stations elevated.

[klamedia]

I think it will be only a matter of time before the Blue goes express. Once TOD's start to be built in Wilmington and Artesia.

[redspork02]

In Land of Freeways, Mass Transit Makes Nary a Dent
New York Times

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: February 24, 2006
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 23 — It was an inglorious start: Cars, as if making a point, kept crashing into the new slate gray, bullet-shaped express buses that planners hope maybe, just maybe, will help nudge people out of their cars and onto mass transit.

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Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Express buses run along the new Orange Line route, a dedicated "busway" through the middle of the San Fernando Valley in Southern California.
Now, after several months running and lots of time for drivers and riders to get used to them, the Orange Line Metro Liner express buses chug along relatively accident-free on a dedicated "busway" through the middle of the San Fernando Valley. But while the buses have exceeded early expectations for the number of riders, they hardly seem destined to put much of a dent in this city's chronic congestion.

"There goes the brand new empty bus," friends often joke to one rider, Sheila Wenz, a transplanted New Yorker who commutes on a bus that is typically only one-quarter full.

To ask Angelenos to surrender their cars may seem a bit like asking New Yorkers to give up walking, but most everybody agrees the goal is growing ever more urgent as the city and its suburbs keep adding people — and cars — with less space on the roads for them.

It may come as a surprise that the Los Angeles area has one of the most extensive public transit systems in the country, with 73 miles of subway and light rail, 500 miles of commuter train lines and 2,670 buses covering 18,500 stops. The problem is that people live and work in pockets spread over an area larger than Rhode Island, and that going long distances on mass transit can mean long waits and frequent transfers that send public-transit newcomers rushing back to their cars.

A bunch of light rail, subway, commuter rail lines and now express buses added in the last 15 years has yielded mixed results, leaving officials scratching their heads over what more to do.

None seems to be scratching harder than the mayor, Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who has rolled out a number of proposals in recent weeks.

Last week, Mr. Villaraigosa, a Democrat who took office last July and is also chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a regional transit agency, flew in a traffic helicopter over the glittering predawn snarl to press his main point.

"Everyone has to get out of their cars every once in a while," he said, sitting in the clattering copter during a KABC-TV traffic report.

Clearly, though, the mayor is not banking too much on that.

In an interview, Mr. Villaraigosa, who campaigned on a promise to end gridlock, said he would soon roll out an aggressive plan to tow parked cars blocking major arteries. He also said engineers were studying the possibility of more bus express lanes on some of the city's widest streets.

The mayor has added traffic officers at 38 choked intersections. He has sped up plans to synchronize traffic lights at all of the city's 4,300 intersections. And he promises to double the number of left-turn signals in four years.

The mayor's biggest proposal by far, however, may be the toughest to make happen, a bid to extend the city's Red Line subway nearly 13 miles from downtown to the sea.

Political opposition and concerns about igniting underground methane have blocked the idea in the past, but new tunneling technologies and the support of a pivotal congressman have given it new life. The extension would cost nearly $5 billion and take some 20 years, but Mr. Villaraigosa said he was determined to jump-start the project to bring relief to the city's Westside, one of the most heavily congested areas.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has also seized on the congestion issue with a $222 billion proposal to repair the state's infrastructure, including adding toll roads and widening freeways. Here, in the most congested part of the state, and the governor's home, not everybody agrees that big mass transit investments will speed commutes.

One recent night, Richard Close, president of the politically active Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, warmly greeted Mayor Villaraigosa at a meeting of the group, listened to the mayor's standard exhortation to take public transit and then hours later in an interview declared his devotion to his car.

Sure, Mr. Close shares the frustration of most residents who "can't plan your day because you don't know if going to one area will take a half hour or an hour and 15 minutes," he said.

But, he added, "A large percentage of Los Angeles can't use public transit because we are so decentralized. Mass transit is part of the puzzle, but freeways and streets are the main method of transit, has been and probably always will be."

Transportation analysts by and large are not optimistic that the various mass transit proposals will bring anything more than isolated relief. Too often, the experts said, Los Angeles has bowed to political considerations rather than pursuing what works best for the money.

Unpopular but proven solutions like "congestion pricing"— assessing tolls for freeway use at the busiest times to make car travel more expensive — and pre-empting traffic signals for buses do not have the cachet, or provide the perks for the powerful construction industry and trade unions, that come with rail construction and freeway alterations, the analysts said.

"It often comes down to what is politically attractive," said Brian Taylor, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. "And that is often, 'Let's spend more on transit.' It is less invasive than adding highways, and you don't get the objection from environmentalists."

Nearly 7 percent of commuters in Los Angeles County — and closer to 5 percent if surrounding counties are included — use public transit to get to work, a number that stayed flat from 1990 to 2000, according to the census, despite the investment of some $8 billion in new transit lines. (In the New York metropolitan area, 25 percent of residents take public transit to work.)

On the relative bright side, the 93 hours a year commuters in Los Angeles and Orange Counties spent stuck in traffic represent a decline of 20 hours from 10 years before, but still ranks by far as the longest in the nation and comes with an asterisk: In the rapidly growing nearby Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, the time stuck in traffic increased nearly 8 percent in that period to 55 hours, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.

Even so, officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority predict that the increasing numbers of riders on rail lines since 2000 indicate public transit is making inroads. Still, they acknowledge, getting people out of their cars is a hard sell.

A recent morning on the Orange Line express buses, designed to resemble commuter trains, showed the buses brimming with riders for about half the route, though they were mostly not people who had left cars at home.

There were college students, cooks and janitors, all of whom said they could not afford a car, as well as retirees headed for social outings in and around downtown, requiring at least one transfer to the Red Line subway and then a bus.

"I think this is great, but I still use my car for most of my trips," said one retiree, Jean Lavellies, headed for an escalator to catch a connecting subway. "Oh, yes, we've got a ways to go."

[klamedia]

More LA bashing from the East. When will it end. LA is actually up with the national average of mass transit useage for commuting to work and is set to pass it. This is as if the LA Times were to write an article on the sad state of pest control in New York City.

[klamedia]

And another thing, I've always read that LA had the least amount of freeways for its size in its metro area. Further, they never take into account all of the other civic transit lines e.g. Santa Monica, Culver City that also help transport tens of thousands of more people. And lastly in the span of 15 years and a city just unfortunately getting around to understanding the relationship between transit orientated development and transit ridership, you'd think they'd cut the city some slack, it's not going to be a quick process. And lastly, lastly, ridership has been up since 2003 every year. This report is from 1990-2000????? But, then again, it's the New York Times. Sounds like Jayson Blair is back in the editing room again.

Please don't send the LA forum tacky below-the-belt articles like this one from this disgraced paper again.

[Yakumoto]

The notion that mass transit is meant to "clear up traffic" is part of what is making it such a hard sell. Every big city has bad traffic...chicago and new york...you just don't hear about it, because people in those cities have the option not to drive.

Hey Los Angeles, instead of building a goddam supermarket in the middle of each neighborhood, how about a neighborhood market on every few blocks instead? People in other cities don't take the bus to go to the market...
Residential density on its own isn't the solution...

How about allowing a little more mixed use and dense retail, maybe even *GASP*, off major streets?

Perhaps requiring 2 and a half parking spots for new apartments, even in the densest of neighborhoods, maybe that has something to do with the traffic?

Hey LA county? How about not building office buildings in goddam Santa Clarita, when there are plenty of empty lots downtown? If everyone knows that de-centralization is a problem, WHY AREN'T THEY TRYING TO FIX IT?

Hey, homeowners near LAX, how about letting the airport get upgraded, and that people mover get built? Yeah, it may bother you...but there are 3 million other people in the city, and they need it to be built...better yet, how about not giving (wealthy) homeowners so much goddam power?

[redspork02]

Originally Posted by klamedia

..................

Please don't send the LA forum tacky below-the-belt articles like this one from this disgraced paper again.

Sorry, k.... just read it and thought you all would like to see it too?

[svs]

In spite of its subways, driving in NYC is still horrible, parking is a disaster, and the Long island Expressway is as much of a parking lot as the 405 if not worse. How about the times writing an article about how rapid transit is not a solution for New York's traffic problem? It would make as much sense. A more useful article might be how public transportation in LA provides a viable alternative to driving.

[Yakumoto]

Originally Posted by svs

In spite of its subways, driving in NYC is still horrible, parking is a disaster, and the Long island Expressway is as much of a parking lot as the 405 if not worse. How about the times writing an article about how rapid transit is not a solution for New York's traffic problem? It would make as much sense. A more useful article might be how public transportation in LA provides a viable alternative to driving.

The whole reason why NYC isn't know for bad traffic, is that people don't NEED to drive...the problem is that if LA want's to become more pedestrian friendly, it make come at the expense of making the city less auto friendly. And "if LA has a car culture now it will always have a car culture, so lets not try and change it"

[klamedia]

Sorry "reds". Didn't mean to come off quite personally. But like "Yaku", I mean LA has its issues, we all admit that. Their needs to be changes. I happen to believe the change is imminent.
Great point "svs" and "Yaku". Mass transit won't cure congestion. Look at all of the big cities in the world. Great mass transit but still traffic congestion.