My lovely new bride and I are off on our honeymoon this morning. We trundle our luggage down to Sunset and Coronado (in Silverlake) to take the Metro bus to Union Station, where we’ll catch the fabulous Flyaway – still a bargain, despite the recent fare increase to seven bucks – to LAX.
The trip ignites one of my oldest rants/evidentiary diatribes concerning the baffling dunder-ninniehood of our city’s transit apparatchiks.
Sunset Boulevard (aka Cesar Chavez Avenue, east of Broadway) is arguably LA’s most important thoroughfare. It is certainly among the longest, snaking from the Pacific through the West Side, crossing the Sepulveda Pass, sweeping by UCLA, through Bel-Air, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Hollywood proper before it reaches my neck of the woods and angles downtown, crossing the Los Angeles River, and – renamed – stretches deep into East LA. That’s over 35 miles, and just after the rechristening point, it skirts the north side of Union Station, transit hub for Amtrak, the Gold and Red light rail, and Metrolink commuter trains – along with the airport bus.
But despite Sunset’s importance, and despite the fact that it actually constitues one edge of the station complex, you can’t get there from here! There is no bus running along this boulevard that stops anywere within a one-third mile walk of the station. Instead, riders have to detour several blocks south and east, catch another bus – paying another full fare, if they don’t have a monthly pass – that then doubles back to the station. Waste of time, money, fuel.
Running a bus the full length of a city’s most important street – with a stop at that city’s most important mass transit center – would seem a no-brainer.
If only our DOT geniuses cared to think about unsexy buses, instead of cars. If only the had the huevos to get out of that gleaming new headquarters – which happens to be situated right alongside that very boulevard and above that very station – and think about the comfort of their customers, instead of their own.
I know, ugly, mean, rant. In any case, my new bride calmed me down, we’re off to Hawaii – my first real vacation ever – and back in seven days.
In the spirit of both constructiveness and aloha, I promise a splendid pineapple of friendship to the first person at Metro who cab credibly explain this.
Metro Ninnies: Sunset Interupted
Read and Buy Some Books
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recommends it.
Listen to my interview on NPR's Fresh Air.
My own op-ed in the New York Times.
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