Urban corridor design and development

City Corridor

I rode the LA MetroRail line from downtown to North Hollywood and back. I rode the line on a Saturday morning. The route goes mostly through Hollywood and that area, serving a number of different neighborhoods along the way. The train is a fairly typical subway experience like I've had in many other cities. The car was half full at any given time, which I was expecting since it was an off-peak hour.

I saw a lot of different people along the way. The majority, arguably, were just ordinary people going to and from work, or their daily chores. They clearly came from a wide variety of backgrounds, and some ethnicities were fairly clear to identify while I would say that others were not as clear. People in LA come from all over the world, and I think that there was fairly broad representation of different groups on the subway during my trip. I tried to count the different languages that I heard it was somewhere like seven or eight at least. Sometimes I had no idea if I was hearing a different language at all.

In terms of how people were dressed, I saw a few suits downtown but not that many, probably because it was Saturday. Many people were wearing work uniforms of different types, however, usually for blue collar jobs and occasionally for service jobs. As we moved into Hollywood, I think the people became more casual, and fewer of them appeared to be going to work. More of them were out shopping, with bags, or were simply going from one place to another.

I exited the station in Hollywood and it looked like, well, Hollywood. It was a mixed crowd, numerous vagrants, lots of people on the streets and many more in cars. I saw everything from hipsters to police officers and beggars, which is pretty typical for the area. Back on the subway, I noticed that there was roughly the same demographic on the train. Maybe fewer hipsters and more people from lower socioeconomic classes, however. There were few people of obvious wealth on the subway for much of the ride, with the exception of a couple of people who boarded downtown, perhaps having gone to work for a few hours.

There were constants among the crowd and sometimes there were changes. For example, while there were always Latinos and blacks, there were not always Armenians, Russians or Asians. Those tended to be variable, depending on the neighborhood I was passing through at the time. The number of Caucasians was pretty low for the most part, any many of the ones I saw were not of the wealthy variety, but more like musicians, artists and people with drug problems.

3. The subway covers a number of different neighborhoods. For a large extent, there is continuity among the neighborhoods in the Hollywood area, and above ground they tend to blend in with each other. These are old and characterful neighborhoods, full of characters. Once in a while those characters would be on the subway itself, but they are more evident when you are at street level. The streets are relatively dense with low rise buildings, often with apartments above and shops below.

These neighborhoods were generally mixed in terms of theirs ethnic and socioeconomic character. Occasionally, there are ethnic enclaves around the route. An example would be when the train goes through Koreatown, where the ridership becomes more Asian. Getting out here, it is clear that this is an enclave because of the high density of Korean people, but for the most part these are highly mixed areas with a great diversity of people from around the world and from different parts of the socioeconomic spectrum as well. I found these areas to be almost like a working class ideal for high density urban areas, with so many people mixed together in relative harmony.

4. I also felt like the neighborhoods were generally quite vibrant, with a lot of street life. The transit line goes through a lot of high-density urban areas, and it seems that is why the line was built here.. Looking at the route, it connects downtown with many inner city neighborhoods, but ones that are mixed in income. Thus, there are going to be people traveling from these areas to downtown during the week. The line has fairly high ridership during rush hours, compared with the weekends. That said, there are few areas along the route that are economically depressed or that would not have a good reason for one to get out and walk around. Thus, the line also serves as a means to explore these areas, or to live in one part and shop in others. On the way back downtown, there were more people with shopping bags, presumably because it is later in the day.

The route also serves as a connecting route. From the Red Line, there are connections downtown with other lines, and at North Hollywood there is a further connection to the orange line bus. So the route serves to connect these major hubs. This also gives access to the different neighborhoods in the Hollywood/Wiltshire area to the people who work downtown, or who live in further suburbs to come to the city. I think the city planners felt like building this line here was both a means to get a lot of cars off the road during rush hour, but also to revitalize some areas in Hollywood and connect Koreatown with downtown.

5. From what I know of this route, it is much busier during rush hours than on the weekend. During weekdays, I think it is the most traveled line in the network. So as far as I am aware, the choice to ride on a Saturday had a significant impact on the number of other riders that were on the train.