MTA Gold Line Extension

I can see the benefit of the Gold Line extension just for the J-town stop. That area is finally starting to improve, there’s quite a bit of housing development going on there over the past five years, so there’s quite a bit of population right there (and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA is still there). So it makes sense to pick them up. BUT, the rest of the extension doesn’t really seem be worth the cost. And I’m not discounting what East LA possibly has to offer, but just from everything I’ve seen since it opened, the community it was meant to help doesn’t ride it. So they’ve spent some hundreds of millions of dollars to extend the line to reach 13,000 people a week. Perhaps people are just stubborn about it. Perhaps they had bad information when researching the benefits of this extension, or as I heard the Hispanics talking about on the train, there are quite a few well-to-do Hispanics on the board who felt guilty for not helping out East LA, so they pushed for this.

Most people riding seemed to be doing the same thing I was doing, checking out the new stations and where the train goes. Of course it’s on a holiday weekend, but the numbers riding this extension are so small it seems that tourism has to be a majority of the traffic on the line. For weeks now I’ve been seeing posters asking people to ride Metro to the Mariachi Plaza station. Of all the stations I saw on the line, it was indeed a sight to see, once. If you don’t feel like riding through some of the most impoverished and roughest neighborhoods in town, scroll down.

It has that new station lack of smell.

I do enjoy how clean the new stations are. They’ve not been tagged up. They don’t have gum and feces on the floors. Look at the concrete next to the rails, it’s still curing. This place doesn’t even smell of piss, and everything isn’t etched up with gang tagging. It’s beautiful. And as you’ll see below, it looks a little SciFi.

I was one of two people who exited the train at this stop.

A very colorful awning as you surface.

After you surface, as is the case with the other stations, even though most of them are above ground, you start to notice that you aren’t in the best of neighborhoods.

This is the first thing you see after you surface.

I took a few photos, then turned around and went back into the station. The other rider who exited decided to come over and talk to me about riding the Metro to check out the new stations. I think he did this because a gang walked in as we were re-entering the station, and it probably made him nervous. He seemed a bit shaky just trying to talk to me. From listening to various conversations on the trains, and from looking out the window at the above ground stops, it seems that most people are riding the train for tourism, plus another reason. That reason is tacos. They want tacos from East LA. Personally, I prefer to just walk to Tacos Delta, but hey.

Ridership needs to increase on this line, or else I could see them having a difficult time getting funding to create the lines to the beach that much of the city would end up benefiting from.