For a while I’ve wondered how MetroRiderLA — a blog reporting on all things public transit-related from a rider’s perspective — got started. It’s posted everything from a video of Villaraigosa taking the subway to taking the bus at 2 am. How’d these people come together, and what’s their motivation?

To find out, I agreed to try out the Silver Streak with Chris, aka Wad, one of the MetroRiderLA writers, who wanted to try out this new service while we talked. The Silver Streak basically serves the San Gabriel Valley. It’s basically taking over and speeding up the former Foothill Transit 480 route, which is going local. Attractively, Silver Streak also runs every 15 mins and has wifi.

During the ride, I found out that MetroRiderLA was started by Fred Camino. Tyke Johnson and Chris, regular contributors, came on board later on. What motivated Chris? He says that since he was involved with SoCaTa for about a decade (Update: Now Chris says it was only for 3 years), he has a lot of transit knowledge he’d like to put to use:

I have this information that I’d like to share…. and people have to understand why things work the way the work. It’s not always ‘gimme gimme gimme what I want,’ because transit agencies have so many other needs and regulations that they need to uphold…. Really, you have to understand why things happen, and if you can grasp that, you can make a lot of changes that are more practical, and still very helpful to a lot of people.

So is Chris car free? No — though he has a better reason than pretty much every environmentalist I know who still own a car. He works in Long Beach, gets off work at 1 am sometimes when there’s literally no public transit back to LA, and can’t afford to leave his rent-controlled apartment or change jobs. He bought his car during the 2000 transit strike, which ended the day after he signed the papers.

During the ride I learned a lot about transit in the San Gabriel Valley. Apparantly, the El Monte busway, which the Silver Streak traverses, is the most successful busway and carpool lane in the country, carrying about 40,000 people a day.

I also learned a lot about the Metro system — though what I really need is like a spreadsheet breakdown of what money comes in how, and what money can be spent how. Basically, the public transit system in LA’s underfunded — and the funding it gets is heavily restricted, partitioned off to rail, local transit (not Metro) systems, etc. etc. And it’s tough to get people to vote to give the Metro more money.

Since Chris has a much broader grasp of the public transit system in LA than I do, I asked a lot of questions about how the system could be improved. Chris talked for a while about cancelling the unpopular lines and moving more buses to the popular ones. Aside from that, the suggestions were rather nebulous, in the vein of “it’s all up to the people.” Hmmm…. Perhaps a bumpy bus ride is not the best place to pose complicated, big picture questions about the Los Angeles transit system on the fly.

Chris says he takes the bus on his weekends for fun, just to see where it takes him. In fact, he wanted to take Silver Streak all the way to the end of the line — a 1.5-hour ride — then wait to take the MetroLink — which only runs once an hour — back. I pointed out that would be like 5 hours on transit with no destination — a whole workday for me (I had to take the Big Blue Bus 10 to downtown and back too). His response: “Do you have things to do?” Um — I’d like to do things other than ride the bus all day without reason, so yes….

Perhaps this is the kind of dedication it takes to be a serious transit advocate, or a writer for MetroRiderLA? In contrast, I just take the bus to get where I need to go. I managed to get us off in Pomona and onto a Westbound Silver Streak back so I could blog more comfortably at home. Yay!

And here, I found out that Silver Streak now has its own blog, sort of, which is about “Blogging the new Foothill Transit bus.” Pretty cool, considering that this is just day 2 of Silver Streak’s existence. Apparently I’ve met the author of this new blog: “She’s a nice woman that I met in passing once, and decidely much less snarky than I am.” Hello there.

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