The LA Subway-Lets get on track

So yesterday I was browsing through one of my more nerdy messageboards The Transit Coalition Message Board. It's one of my favorite sites I must say. Why? I don't know. I'm weird. But I feel strongly about public transportation, and I feel that Los Angeles, as the City of the Future, is going to have to lead the way for the rest of America. As it has always done. Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and other Old cities have brought their transportation with them from before the automobile. But Los Angeles is a modern city. Like most American cities, raised on cars. Los Angeles has become synonymous with Traffic and Pollution. It is the Poster City for an epidemic that has reached crisis level all across the country. Don't kid yourself. Your city is next. As a wannabe Angelino, I care very much about this situation.

As I was reading different messages, there was a link to an article in the LA Weekly pertaining to the sad state of affairs that is LA Public transportation. This article The Subway Mayor was so perfect, that I had to share it. It chronicles the history of public transit in LA for the last 50 years. The article reads like a well-written story. And this story is utterly fantastically ridiculous. Its like Bringing Up Baby. It is just one absurd screw-up and calamity after another. Political, Social, and Technical. Planning problems, Contractor corruption, NIMBYism (I love that term. Not In My BackYard in case your scoring at home) Plus, racial and social class fighting, a 60 foot wide sinkhole that opened up in Hollywood Blvd. And of course, pockets of Methane Gas hidden under the LA Streets caused by ROTTING DINOSAURS!!! No seriously:

"In March 1985, a worker punched a time clock at a Fairfax-area Ross Dress for Less and ignited a basement full of odorless methane gas. The freak explosion shook the earth and ripped through the building, blowing off most of the roof and throwing burning debris hundreds of feet in the air. Four square blocks of shops on the south edge of the Farmers Market were evacuated.

For the next few days, TV viewers in Los Angeles watched in amazement as fiery cracks in the earth opened near the explosion site. It looked as if the city, poked with hundreds of gaseous, oil well–size holes for a century, was about to be consumed from within."

Disasters and absurdities aside, the time has come to get serious. A friend of mine in LA told me that she filled her car up for 2.87 per gallon the other day for the low grade fuel. People have finally had enough, and I for one am glad to see it.

Los Angeles, the city of the future.

Remember dear readers you heard it first.
-T