The first interurban rail line ran from Los Angeles to Pasadena. It opened in 1895.

33 years later, The Pacific Electric Railway was operating over 1000 miles of track and 2700 trains daily.

It was another milestone. It was the opening of the Hollywood Subway. The year was 1928.

Photo from the USC Digital Archive

How dare you. You have no right to be upset that 10 miles of subway were going to take 23 years to build.

After calling Metro out for lack of vision, urgency, and ability to communicate in a timely manner, they have retaliated by… Facebook-inviting me to meetings held at inconvenient times for the average working individual. Oscar Robert sent me two FB invites to meetings of the Metro Board of Directors. Of course. I would love to attend.

The first meeting is Wednesday, January 14 at 1:00pm.
The second is Thursday, January 22 at 9:30am.

Really? C’mon, Metro. Some of us still have jobs. If you genuinely wanted participation from the tax-paying citizens of LA, you would have meetings that are convenient for us to attend. Not ones that you schedule during your own office hours.

I know there are some really good people at Metro that are probably as frustrated as the rest of us by this ongoing cycle of foot-dragging and general stupidity. The question is, when is someone going to be held accountable for this agency’s failures to serve the public that is paying for Measure R?

We want answers, Metro. Not more questions.

The readers of LA Metblogs have voted and overwhelmingly chose to tug their ears in the direction of Sam Zell, the 2008 Grinch of the Year! If you need one, two, or a couple dozen reasons as to why Zell is deserving of this honor, check out LA Observed’s recap Signs of Our (L.A.) Times.

Congratulations, Sam! Ebenezer Scrooge and William Mulholland will be delivering your certificate you personally.

Based on numbers of registered Metblogs readers, the faceless masses of Proposition 8 backers came in 2nd, although unregistered voters placed them in first place (as previously mentioned, these numbers don’t count due to the ability to digitally stuff the ballot box).

Yesterday, I asked Metro a few questions regarding their new timetables for several projects, including the Subway to the Sea. Today, Rick Jager from their Media Relations department answered:

1. Besides funding issues, why is the completion of the Purple Line to Santa Monica expected to take so long?

The next steps before subway construction could start are estimated to take 2 to 3 years. This includes full environmental review, approvals, engineering and design. We then estimate that construction could take about 7 years (1) depending on what the final project ends up being & (2) if all funding is available.

The funding generated by Measure R will come in over a 30 year period and therefore the schedules are based on an allocation of these revenues to many projects over the life of the sales tax. The schedule for the Westside project which identifies completion to Westwood by 2032 is driven more by the availability of funding than the time needed to construct. The actual time needed to construct the Purple Line Extension to Westwood would be considerably less than 23 years.

2. Does the projected completion date of 2032 to Westwood include the Pink Line extension from Hollywood/Highland (Alternative 11)? If not, how would that affect the Westside timetable?

Read the rest of this entry →

Metro has released new timelines for several transit projects that could change the way you commute around Los Angeles. The problem is, there aren’t enough of them. And the ones they do have could take decades to finish.

Expo Line to Santa Monica? Not until 2015.

It could be 2018 before the Green Line reaches LAX.

The Purple Line won’t reach Westwood until 2032.

The Valley won’t be able to catch anything except the 405 to the Westside until 2038.

It is refreshing to see Metro putting everything on the table for us to see. But this sure isn’t going to feed the millions of people coming over for dinner. Shouldn’t someone start cooking a little faster?

Consider: Construction began on The New York City subway in 1900. Less than five years later, 21 miles of tunnels and 58 miles of track were completed.

Downtown blog Angelenic has posted a great list of places in L.A. to count down the final minutes of 2008, with people you may or may not know. Let’s face it, sometimes the latter is better. And since we’re in the throes of a Depression, these parties are all on the cheap, and all conveniently located within stumbling distance of a Metro Rail station. 24 hours of designated driver fun.

Check out Angelenic’s 12 Downtown NYE options under $50 here.

Happy New Year!

Your ATM does it. Your kid’s toys do it. Even Disneyland does it.

Now, Metro joins the club by tweeting in both English and Spanish. That’s very nice of them, unless you don’t want to read the exact same update twice. The tweet pictured above popped up this morning – four minutes after an identical update in English. Nobody likes a repeater. Nobody likes a repeater.

Maybe it’s time for Metro to run separate accounts?

Tal vez es hora de metro para ejecutar cuentas separadas?

Oh, LA Grinches, don’t think we forgot about you! The holiday glow isn’t enough to let us here at Metblogs forget about you nasty, wasty skunks and decide who among you we’d least like to touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.

Vote now! The dishonoree will be announced Tuesday, January 6th.

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Note: While all readers can vote, only votes made by “registered” Metblogs readers will count in the final announcement. This is a small effort to avoid ballot stuffing. Registration is of course free and easy – to ensure your vote is truly counted, log in or register here.

Click to read summaries of the nominees!

In times like these, there are few things that warm the heart like a Twitter exchange about life in Los Angeles:

CurbedSF links to a story in the San Francisco Examiner about the latest rankings in Eventful’s 2nd annual Most Eventful Cities. Los Angeles comes in second behind New York among U.S. cities “according to the number and diversity of local events for residents and visitors.”

The 2008 ‘Most Eventful Cities’ rankings are based on the total number of events listed on Eventful that took place in each U.S. city between December 1, 2007 and November 18, 2008.

While we may have dropped from 1st to 4th in the rankings for Music Lovers, and while that Performing Arts ranking is suspect, L.A. has made some notable accomplishments in 2008:

• We have taken over the #1 spot from San Diego for Pet Lovers

• We bumped New York out of the top spot for Night Crawlers

• We climbed from 4th to 3rd for Singles

• We’re hanging on at #10 for Sports without the NFL

• And we’ve retained our #1 ranking for Bookworms. Apparently, we have the mostest events for people who read good.

To sum up, we rule. Keep it up. Complete Eventful rankings after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry →

LA Tweeps giggled with glee when Antonio Villaraigosa, the Mayor of Los Angeles, started Twittering. Many, including our own Sean Bonner questioned the legitimacy of the account. After all, @villaraigosa‘s updates consisted of nothing more than “thanks for the follow.” What is this, amateur hour?

Anyhoo… I just noticed his last update, from December 12:

Sounds like the baton has been passed to an intern. So, any hope of Tony the Tiger tweeting about hitting the Galleria with some hot side action has gone completely out the window.

What are the chances this is legit? I’m skeptical, but stranger things have happened.

So I had a bit of a short-notice biz conference thing I had to attend Thursday night through Saturday afternoon down Orange County way at the end of this past week. My first thought was, “Well at least it’s a driveable destination.”  But then given my predilection for alternate modes of transportation, as the date of departure drew near the inevitable light bulb went off: maybe it was car-freeable?

Sure enough, some poking around the Metrolink website eventually resulted in the following multi-modal transit plan that I executed last Thursday with a backpack that weighed in at 20 pounds and barely managed to hold everything I would need for the two-day excursion:

1. Bike from Silver Lake to Union Station
2. Take Metrolink’s 2:25 p.m. Orange County Line to the Santa Ana station (arriving approximately 3:30 p.m.)
3. Bike from Santa Ana to the Santa Ana River Bikeway to PCH to the Hyatt Regency on Jamboree in Newport Beach
4. Congratulate myself

Of course being that I’m an idiot and a Metrolink noob and neither Union Station nor Metrolink wastes much time, effort, personnel or adequate signage shepherding its idiot noob passengers, I unwittingly ended up on the Inland Empire train out of Union Station. Finally realizing the mistake as the train was pulling into Pomona about 40 minutes later, I disembarked into the middle of that nowhere and I posted the following on Twitter that pretty much summed my sentiment right up:

“I have never so epically failed at public transpo. I am pretty much inconfuckingsolable.”

Read the rest of this entry →

I’m up at 5am with another of my intermittent early-morning allergy attacks, which has afforded me the extreme pleasure of some spare time in which I can communicate with you, dear reader. I figured while I was waiting for the benadryl, xyzal and vitamin-B-complex (which actually helps the most) cocktail to kick in and make my sinuses stop feeling like they’re about to peel themselves off my skull, I might as well transmit a bit of vital information.

Today will surely be a busy day for many people beginning their holiday preparations. Therefore it is with great joy then that I inform you of today’s Santacon, quite possibly our city’s biggest to date, and a spirited event GUARANTEED to get you in the mood for the holidays to be over already. I know nothing of its location or appointed rounds (as the Red Tide does often span the city) because the event is shrouded in secrecy, but for those who’d like to follow along in spirit, I highly suggest you look to…no, not the skies! to Twitter!…where I have it on good authority that many well-known LA twitfolks will be broadcasting their experiences. You can also check my photostream on flickr, where I will be posting horrendously lousy cameraphone photos all day long.

Ho ho ho!

Pic by The Opus from flickr under a creative commons license.

Oh, and to those elves who’ve been fomenting discontent and grumbling about a strike, GIVE IT UP! You strike  EVERY YEAR!!! And you know what happens EVERY YEAR?! Santa smacks you DOWN, bitches! You know why?! Because you’re FOUR FEET TALL!!! Ohhhhhhh DAAAAM! Boo yah!!!

It’s true, hard to believe but true. Five years ago today we launched this site, which lead to the creation of the entire metblogs network. Here’s Jason’s first post on the site ever and my followup announcement. It seems like forever ago, a whole different world back then and yet still kind of the same on so many levels. We hope you’ve enjoyed the last 5 years, it’s certainly something that changed our lives.