L.A.’s Subway System: A Look at What’s to Come – and in the Gay Press, no less!

FrontiersLA.com | L.A.’s Subway System: A Look at What’s to Come.

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I was really happy to to see the linked article, from L.A.’s gay paper, Frontiers, about public transportation in Los Angeles and advocating for it (as well as informing its audience of the possibilities).

Writer Patrick Rosenquist begins by focusing on the recent Spike Jonze movie “Her.” (Which, BTW, won the Oscar (Jonze) for best original screenplay this year.)

In the movie, L.A. has a subway that goes everywhere, like in a dream. This will never happen, of course, but it’s about to get a whole lot better. Next year (or early 2016 – there are always delays with light rail here, it seems) the Expo Line extension to Santa Monica will open, and I (and you, of course) will be able to take light rail to that beach for the first time since the 1950s.

The actual subway that’s being built, the Purple Line extension going to the VA in Westwood, under Wilshire Boulevard, is set to open in 2035. I will be 80 that year. If I’m still around, I’ll be waiting on the platform.

Kudos to Frontiers for running this piece, and I loved that the writer is a car-free guy. Articles such as this one will only help get rid of the stigma that still exists in some quarters to taking public transport — though admittedly the trains have a higher profile than the buses.

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Speaking of which, I took the bus out to the beach last Wednesday for a day on the sand and in the surf. Or, more accurately, 3 different buses — from the Valley where I live, it’s an enormous distance and there’s no one bus/train/lightrail that will ever take you there. Mostly, it was painless, though time consuming — and I did have to wait at one stop for about 20 minutes in the blazing sun – no shelter, no trees — and this was in tony Brentwood. Shame! It will be so much easier once the Expo Line is done.

Kudos also to Angelenos for passing Measure R – the sales tax which local funding, meaning we don’t have to rely on the deep bench of backward senators in deep red rural flyover states to fund our public transportation from D.C.

Yet there still is that problem with bus stigma.  “People in L.A. see public transportation as something meant for someone else— ‘it’s not for me.’ Getting people to use buses is more of a marketing question,” says Duran. – (John Duran, WeHo City Councilperson) What he really means is that “white” people don’t see it as an option. But I see the evidence of that changing, every time I get on a bus. And like the writer of the Frontiers piece, I have to hand it to the Millennials – it sure as hell ain’t the Boomers on those buses (for the most part, present company excluded).

As to the “Her” filmmakers wishing Malibu would get a subway stop: well, you can always dream. I’d settle for Palm Springs on Metrolink or a daily Amtrak – and this is not that hard, people. Really. Tracks and station already there!

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