BY BUSINESS JOURNAL STAFFWith the western end of the Metro Orange Line across the street from the San Fernando Valley Business Journal’s offices in Woodland Hills, the editorial staff of the newspaper followed the construction progress closely. Like everyone else, each of the paper’s four editorial staff members has suffered through horrendous traffic and cringed with every increase in gas prices. So they were anxious to try out the new line when it opened. None of the staff members had been regular mass transit users. The purpose of the exercise was to test how the new line and other public transportation suited so-called “white-collar” workers, a segment of the population that needs to be attracted to mass transit if it truly is to ever take hold in Los Angeles and help unclog the crowded streets.
On Halloween, each of the staffers boarded public transportation from their homes, using the new Orange Line if appropriate, and arrived at work at 9:30 a.m. Tbeir experiences are described below in first person accounts.
Jason Schaff, editor
I’m the perfect candidate for riding the Orange Line. A resident of North Hollywood, I live just off Lankershim Boulevard five blocks from the Chandler subway station which is the eastern end of the new busway.
Clean and neat, I thought, when I heard what route the bus would take, dropping me off across the street from my office. No reason why I shouldn’t take it – at least a few days a week. As for the other days, as part of my job I go to many meetings and community events and the turnaround is tight some days. This makes getting around by Valley mass transit seem impractical to me on those occasions.
But last Monday, an unusually hot day for the last day of October, I put on my usual work garb (slacks, pressed shirt, tie and sport coat) and left my condo at 8:18 a.m. to walk what I thought was a short distance to the Orange Line. Well, those five blocks to the bus stop are l-o-n-g blocks, or at least it seemed. I tend to stuff too much in my briefcase so I was weighed down. I kept shifting the briefcase from hand to hand as I walked – and eventually perspired in my sport coat under the sun. So much for being fresh for work. Also, why did I feel so self conscious walking down the sidewalk in a suit coat carrying a briefcase? Probably because no one does that in L.A.
Mass transit is supposed to make your life easier, I thought as I walked. I also thought that New Yorkers must sweat more in their humidity than I’m sweating as they walk to the subway. What a lightweight I am, I thought.
It took 20 long minutes for me to walk those five long blocks, believe it or not. That’s half the time it takes for me to usually drive my car to work – and I hadn’t even gotten on the bus yet – a bus that was supposed to take 40 minutes to get to Woodland Hills from North Hollywood. So my commute would go to 40 minutes (on an average day) to always at least an hour if I took the Orange Line. But I could read and relax.
I bought a ticket and got on the westbound 8:43 a.m. bus that was waiting at the station. I was the only one on board! Yes, it was rather late in the commuting hours but the only one on board on opening day of the line? Five more people got on shortly after I did and the bus took off – at 8:46 a.m. The highest number of people on my bus that morning was a dozen.
Within five minutes we were at Valley College. That’s great. That’s usually about a 15 minute drive in my car from my place during rush hour.
The Orange Line was a quiet ride and gave me quite a view of the belly of the Valley. Being on a dedicated busway was great because it gave me the sense that I was actually getting somewhere without being stuck in traffic.
I started to relax – until some idiot driver ran a red light at Reseda Boulevard and we almost hit him. That was the bus driver’s third close call in two days, he said.
