What do you all think about this article?
I will agree the A line isn’t exactly amazing, but I also don’t completely agree with some assertions and experiences from the author. The author mentions how long it takes to get to the extremes of the A line, but the A line isn’t exactly meant to travel across vast distances quickly, its meant to provide connections along its routes. I do agree it would be nice to go from Pasadena to long beach very quickly, (in the same way with the E line being able to get to santa monica from East LA quicker), but we’d need to develop an additional tracks to allow faster service and/or priority to the line. Those can be done later. It feels like for a lot of LA’s history, creating train lines is important because of how hard it is to do, and how much harder it will be in the future.
I don’t quite agree with the author’s bad experiences on the A line. Yeah there are definitely bad times where the train smells horrible, or weird alarm things happen, but it is extremely rare in my experience and hasn’t dissuaded me from using it.
What makes a stadium a more real destination than a neighborhood that people would commute to and from?
40,000 people at once.
i feel you’re missing one half of the equation here. So we got 40k people that want to go to dodgers stadium. Where are these 40k people going to come from? The forum? LAX? The rose bowl? No most of these people are going to come from home, and if you don’t have the train by a neighborhood, its more discouraging to take the train than just driving.
Part of the issue is that LA doesn’t build dense housing as well. The neighborhoods that trainstations stop at should be very dense so you can remove the need to drive places, but LA/US zoning is very bad. Thankfully SB 70 (name may be incorrect) will help with this issue.
But what about all the other days and other hours? Maybe run a special express for big events, but most of the time people just gotta get places. And they gotta be able to stop close or they will take the car.
LR isn’t meant for that wont handke it and would be a fucked up mess, you need heavy rail to move those numbers.
LR is like a dedicated bus line, mostly for moving locals three or 4 stops along.