the fun of transit

Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 07:17PM

By Eric Richardson

Yesterday the MTA opened Gold Line, a 13.7 mile light-rail line from Downtown LA to Pasadena. As someone who makes the commute from downtown-ish (USC) to Pasadena-ish (JPL... sort of La Canada), I've been excited about this for a while. I hate driving my commute every day. The pursuit of less traffic has even pushed me to get on the road by 6:20 every morning, in hopes of making my drive in less than a half hour. Now the day is here where I finally have an alternative, and that of course brings up the logistics. Ok, so there's a rail line, now what? Click the title to read more...

Mapquest tells me that I live 2.36 miles away from the closest Red Line station, Wilshire & Vermont. It's a straight shot up Vermont from my apartment, but there are a good number of lights to slow things up.

On the other end of the trip I have about a 5 mile ride from the Memorial Park Station to JPL. This one's more wide open most of the time, so I expect both bike legs to run around 20 - 25 minutes. So total, let's say I'm looking at 45 minutes of bike time.

Now, you're probably looking at that, and looking back at my current 30 minute commute (on a very good day, 45 average on the way back, an hour if I'm unlucky), and thinking that this new plan doesn't really add up. If you're looking at it solely from a time perspective, you're right, there's no way that it does. 45 minutes on a bike + 30 or so minutes on trains is going to be longer than my current drive 99% of the time.

But that's only if you look at all time spent on both as charged solely as commute time. Let me explain...

When I spend 40 minutes in the car (or 1:20 round trip), that time is time that is 100% commute time. I'm sitting in a car, maybe making phone calls, but that's about it for multitasking activities. When I spend an hour and fifteen minutes on my bike/train route, most of that time is multitasked. The bike time is built-in daily exercise, something I'm very excited about. The train time offers time to read, time to sit without worrying about traffic, and time to just unwind. Though commute time goes up, the time I spend devoted to commuting goes way down.

One decision I haven't yet completely made is what time to make my trips. The MTA is cool with bikes on trains, but they prohibit them from 6:30 - 8:30am, and 4:30 - 6:30pm. So that means that I either start my day really early, or work a little late. I'm still weighing the benefits of the two, though I'm probably leaning toward the later time.

One thing I'm not excited about? Wilshire / Vermont is home to the 2nd longest escalator in the world, and you aren't allowed to take bikes on the escalators. So it's either the elevator or the stairs for me on the way back (the lower level is westbound only).